JUST SCAN THE HEADLINE TO GET YOUR BIAS FIX

 

Distorting the news         

 

Damn the Chinese - who do think they are, shoving Aussies around? Their latest arrogance after banning our barley and booze is President Xi Jinping demanding we search for a missing boat. 

 

Here’s proof again that we must spend more bucks on bangs, and snuggle closer to the US to protect our sovereign shores.

 

Just one quibble, minor but critical: The Chinese didn’t ‘demand’ anything. They asked for our humanitarian help in finding a fishing boat lost in the Central Indian Ocean.

 

The search involved several other nations, though tragically when the capsized Lu Peng–Yuan YU  was found by the Indian Navy all 39 crew (17 Chinese, 17 Indonesians and five Filipinos) were either dead or missing.

 

Under international agreements nations run search and rescue operations in their regions. The Chinese ship went down in Australia’s zone, though 5,000 km west of Perth.

 

News Ltd papers ran this headline on 18 May: ‘China’s President demanding Australia’s help to find missing boat.’ 

 

The first par then read: ‘The Chinese ambassador to Australia has issued a demand on behalf of his nation’s leader, calling for help in the search for a missing fishing vessel.’

 

‘Issued a demand’ then morphs into Ambassador Xiao Qian telling the media that ‘a number of countries were being asked to assist … President Xi has made very important instructions … to co-ordinate with our friendly countries … for a possible immediate search and rescue.’

 

The Ambassador remains respectful, calling, asking and wishing but never demanding. No other media used the word. The ABC said Mr Xiao ‘requested’ help. 

 

Your correspondent thought this strange and complained to News Corp, the Australian Press Council and the Independent Media Council as the story was also published in Perth Now. This is part of the Seven West Media Group and not a member of the APC.

 

Readers’ Editor Laura Newell speedily replied: ‘The content was not written, nor altered by a member of our staff, which makes it difficult for us to judge whether the “request” for aid was a demand or not. 

 

‘Regardless, we have removed this content, which we hope you will consider a satisfactory outcome in this matter.’ 

 

Offer accepted with a rider: ‘Even though the story came from a third party, I presume your subs read before posting.

 

‘In this case, the language used doesn't reflect the facts in the copy, suggesting an intention to provoke and further damage Oz-China relations.

 

’That may have been the political agenda of News Corp. It shouldn't infect the West unless that's also your paper's policy. I hope not.’

 

The story was taken down in WA but has since been reinstated. It remains on News mastheads around the country. The APC has yet to respond. Likewise News Corp.

 

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 First published in Australians for War Powers Reform, 12 June 2023: https://warpowersreform.org.au/china-panic-distorting-the-news/

KILLING 'EM SOFTLY

Be a man, consume till it kills. It will        

 

                                               

 

The World Health Organisation’s No Tobacco Day last month had Australia announcing tough new ways to get smokers to quit. Next door the fag makers were doing the opposite.

 

Health Minister Mark Butler wants warnings on the smokes  and even more gruesome images on the packets.  Around 12 per cent of Australian adults smoke; the government’s goal is five per cent or less by 2030.

 

In the nation next door 67 per cent of adult males smoke and the industry is doing its best to ramp that number.  Health workers object but they’re as powerless as Australia’s anti-mining protesters.

 

Indonesia’s  Big Baccy matches the US National Rifle Association for arrogance, its up-you outdoor hoardings shouting in English: NEVER QUIT.

 

The ads are devilishly clever, double entendres on special. They show sweating men in gyms punching bags, tackling extreme sports and Nat Geo adventures. Such costly pastimes are beyond most Indonesians but the substitutes are just a kiosk away.

 

For under $2 anyone can buy a packet of smokes, available almost everywhere, whatever the addict’s age, though supposedly illegal for under 18s. Can’t afford a full box and desperate for a drag? Roadside stalls sell singles.

 

Indonesia is one of the dirty eight, the  countries  not in the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. That puts a wide gulf between the Republic and the 180 states which ban or limit ads for smoking.

 

East Java is tobacco heartland centred on Malang where this column is being keyboarded. It’s also an education city supporting 15 tertiary institutions. The Universities of Malang State and Brawijaya (around 90,000 enrolments together) plus high schools spill their impressionable youth onto a major road leading to the CBD.

 

At the first traffic lights they rev throttles before a monster billboard.  It shows a fella playing an arcade game admired by a coy girl:  ‘Perfect combo - win the Queen’. Learn the lesson lads:  Score with smoking - it’s cool.

 

It’s illegal to show the product so foreigners wouldn’t get the hints till they spot a tiny pic at the bottom of an oldie with a tracheotomy.  This is a hole through the throat and into the windpipe so the sad sick man can breathe a little longer.

 

The compulsory warning has no impact. In Australia the messages are going to be updated and on the cigarettes because users have become desensitised.

 

More than two thirds of Indonesian men smoke according to health campaigners. The good news is that only three per cent of adult women are users, largely because the habit is culturally linked to prostitution. 

 

Muslim scholars who damn booze everywhere have only  declared smoking and vaping haram (forbidden) in public. Something more confronting than irony is needed.

 

According to UNICEF tobacco is Indonesia’s second biggest risk to health: ‘There are 600,000 premature deaths annually due to exposure to cigarette smoke, 28 per cent of which are children.’ Getting this horror to register with authorities is as tough as persuading US Republicans to back national gun control.

 

Indonesia is projected to lead the world in wheezer percentages by 2030. At the moment it ranks behind China and Russia. While some nations think well-being more important than company profits, Indonesian firms plan to boost output. 

 

That means building a replacement market as the druggies cough their way to graveyards. So the kids need to lose their innocence to La Nico Tine, the greatest seductress since Cleopatra. 

 

Apart from larger genitalia, pimply boys want fun minus accountability, loyal mate, big-bust girlfriends and full wallets. Few are so lucky in a nation where almost a third are seriously poor. So the ‘new generation’ inhales to find ‘satisfaction’ and ‘get ahead’. 

 

The pictures show slim and suave models doing macho things impossible for those with emphysema.

 

For up-market customers, there’s The Diplomat, its message straight to the universal searching for self: ‘I chose, I live.’ The wording is enhanced by curly calligraphy. It uses English to suggest sophistication though few are fluent.  

 

The current price war has pack contents changing to suit all lung diseases. A dozen starting at Rp 12,000 ($1.20) up to Rp 30,000 ($3) for twenty. 

 

The average monthly wage in Jakarta is around $ 870, but half or less in the provinces. Fags are the third biggest household expense after ‘prepared foods’ and ‘cereals’, mainly rice.

 

The wraps are colourful, not plain as in Singapore and Australia. The four hoarse men of the apocalypse of addiction, Cuba, Indonesia, Honduras and the Dominican Republic challenged the West’s concern for consumers in the World Trade Organisation. In 2018 their efforts to keep attracting and killing got stubbed out.

 

Tax on tobacco in Indonesia is around half the base price; the WHO wants it to be at least a third as this is ‘the single most effective and cost-effective measure for reducing tobacco use.’

 

The tobacco industry reportedly employs about six million Indonesians. The government, fearful of the corporates throwing thousands of young women out of factories and incomes wilting for leaf farmers, treads nervously when an election is nigh. The next will be in February 2024.

 

The major traders in toxins are Hanjaya Mandala Sampoerna (owned by the US company Philip Morris), Gudang Garam and the Djarum Group. To decontaminate their image as mass poisoners they run ‘foundations’, though always retaining brand names.  

 

Sampoerna even has a ‘university’ as part of its ‘corporate social responsibility’ programmes. Satire? Sadly, no.  Prominent in the mainstream media is Djarum promoting sustainability. Its logo is a green tree in a brown hand. It should be a rotting lung in a surgeon’s glove.

 

The brand is owned by Indonesia’s two richest men, Robert and Michael Hartono who started the ‘foundation’ in 1986. Forbes magazine estimates the brothers’ net worth at US $42 billion.

 

The company makes the wildly popular kretek, a mix of tobacco with clove oil and buds which crackle when smoked.

 

The ad gurus have refined ways to bypass prohibitions. Commercials can’t be shown on TV before 9.30 pm when the littlies are supposed to be abed. But this law doesn’t apply to outdoor screens which start up at 6 am -  in time for the school rush.

 

For the health lobby 31 May was an important day to help stop smokers suiciding, which the Australian government delivered. To Indonesia’s tobacco industry and its slaves it was a reminder that this is  no time to quit killing.

 

##

  First published in Pearls & Irritations 6 June 2023:  https://johnmenadue.com/be-a-man-consume-till-it-kills-it-will/

GIVE, TAKE & SOLVE - OR SHOOT, KILL & WORSEN?

 Compromise worked in Aceh - why not Papua?     

       

 

There are parallels between Indonesia’s Aceh where an Ozzie surfer faced a flogging, and Papua where a Kiwi pilot is facing death. Both provinces have fought brutal guerrilla wars for independence. One has been settled through foreign peacekeepers. The other still rages as outsiders fear intervention.

 

There were ten stories in a Google Alert media feed last week for ‘Indonesia-Australia’.

 

One covered illegal fishing in the Indo-Pacific claiming economic losses of more than US $6 billion a year - important indeed.

 

Another was an update on the plight of NZ pilot Philip Mehrtens, held hostage since February by the Tentara Pembebasan Nasional Papua Barat (TPNPB West Papua National Liberation Army). 

 

This is the armed wing of the  Organisasi Papua Merdeka, (OPM Free Papua Organisation) that’s been pushing its cause since the 1970s.

 

A major story by any measure. The Indonesian military’s inability to find and safely secure the Kiwi has the potential to cause serious diplomatic rifts and great harm to all parties.

 

There have been unverified reports of bombs dropped from helicopters on jungle camps where the pilot may have been held with uninvolved civilians.

 

The other eight stories were about Queenslander Bodhi Mani Risby-Jones who’d been arrested in April for allegedly going on a nude drunken rampage and bashing a local in Indonesian Aceh.

 

Had the 23-year-old surfer been a fool in his home country the yarn would have been a yawn. Such stupidities are commonplace.

 

But because he chose to be a slob in the strictly Muslim province of Aceh and facing  up to five years jail plus a public flogging, his plight opened the issue of cultural differences and tourist arrogance.  Small news, but legitimate.

 

He’s now reportedly done a $25,000 deal to buy his way out of charges and pay restitution to his victim. This shows a flexible social and legal system displaying tolerance - which is how Christians are supposed to behave.

 

All noteworthy, easy to grasp. But more important than the threatened execution of an innocent victim of circumstances caught in a complex dispute that needs detailed explanations to understand?

 

Mehrtens landed a commercial company’s plane as part of his job flying people and goods into isolated airstrips when he was grabbed by armed men desperate to get Jakarta to pay attention to their grievances.

 

Ironically, Aceh where Risby-Jones got himself into strife, had also fought for independence and won. Like West Papua, it’s resource-rich so essential for the central government’s economy.

 

A vicious on-off war between the Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, (GAM - Free Aceh Movement) and the Indonesian military started in 1976 and reportedly took up to 30,000 lives across the following three decades.

 

It only ended when the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami killed 160,000  and  former general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was elected president and  revived peace talks. Other countries became involved, including the European Union and Finland where the Helsinki Agreement was signed.

 

Both sides bent. GAM leaders abandoned their demands for independence, settling for ‘self-government’ within the Indonesian state, while soldiers were withdrawn. The bombings have stopped but at the cost of personal freedoms and angering human rights advocates.

 

Freed from Jakarta's control, the province passed strict Shariah laws. These include public floggings for homosexual acts, drinking booze and being close to an opposite sex person who’s not a relative. Morality Police patrols prowl shady spots, alert to any signs of affection.

 

Australian academic and former journalist Damien Kingsbury was also instrumental in getting GAM and Jakarta to talk. He was involved with the Papua standoff earlier this year but NZ is now using its own to negotiate.

 

Kingsbury told the ABC the situation in Papua is at a stalemate with neither Wellington nor Jakarta willing to make concessions. The Indonesian electorate has no truck for separatists so wants a bang-bang fix. NZ urges a softly-slowly approach. 

 

A TPNPB spokesperson told the BBC: ‘The Indonesian government has to be bold and sit with us at a negotiation table and not [deploy] military and police to search for the pilot.’

 

The 2005 Aceh resolution means the Papua fighters have a strong model of what’s possible when other countries intervene. So far it seems none have dared, fearing the wrath of nationalists who believe Western states, and particularly Australia, are trying to ‘Balkanise’  the ‘unitary state’ and plunder its riches.

 

This theory was given energy when Australia supported the 1999 East Timor referendum which led to the province splitting from Indonesia and becoming a separate nation.

 

Should Australia try to act as a go-between in the Papua conflict, we’d be dragged into the upcoming Presidential election campaign with outraged candidates thumping lecterns claiming outside interference. That’s something no one wants but sitting on hands won’t help Mehrtens.

 

In the meantime, Risby-Jones, whose boorish behaviour has confirmed Indonesian prejudices about Oz oafs, is expected to be deported.

 

Mehrtens will only get to tell his tale if the Indonesian government shows the forbearance displayed by the family of Edi Ron.  The Aceh fisherman needed 50 stitches and copped broken bones and an infected foot from his Aussie encounter, but still shook hands.

 

After weeks in a cell the surfer has shown contrition and apologised. Australian ‘proceedings of crime’ laws should prevent him  earning from his ordeal.

 

If the Kiwi pilot does get out alive, he deserves the media attention lavished on the Australian. This might shift international interest from a zonked twit to the issue of Papua’s independence and remind diplomats that if Jakarta could bend in the far west of the archipelago,  why not in the far east?

 

Lest Indonesians forget:  Around 100,000 revolutionaries died during the four-year war against the returning colonial Dutch after Soekarno proclaimed independence in 1975.  The Hollanders only retreated after external pressure from the US and Australia.

 

First published in Pearls & Irritations 30 May 2023: https://johnmenadue.com/compromise-worked-in-aceh-why-not-papua/

ASK - DON'T TELL. AID THAT WORKS

      

DOING LOTS WITH LITTLE ON MAGIC ISLAND            

 

Our Jakarta Embassy is the ’world’s largest Australian diplomatic mission … designed for 500 staff.’ What do they do? If just 14 media releases this year is a guide, one tiny NGO far away seems to be making a better fist of showing we care.

 

Jacob Nulik is a retired Indonesian forage agronomist with a doctorate from Australia. He lives in Kupang, the old Portuguese trading port on the southern tip of Timor. Most days he can see the low-lying island of Semau (117 square km) to the northwest just a 30-minute ferry trip away.

 

‘But even I wouldn’t go there,’ he said. ‘It was called Magic Island and full of spirits. That didn’t bother Colin Barlow. He went straight in.’

 

The Australian scientist’s impressive scramble through Semau’s dense bush and ancient coral ridges to the dry plains inland was not a demo of Okker bravado but intellectual curiosity. 

 

No wailing phantoms, only the sight of Indonesians struggling to survive in a drought-prone hardscrabble landscape, the people so poor their currency was barter. Semau is a sad example of much that’s wrong where corruption thrives and arbitrary administrations run vast countries.

 

Indonesia stretches 5,100 km west-east; Semau is only 830 km from Darwin but more than twice as far from Jakarta. Government support goes down as the klicks from the national capital go up.

 

Dr Barlow, who died last December aged 90, was no casual tourist but the ‘world’s leading authority on smallholder cash crop economies.’ His wife Dr Ria Gondowarsito is an Indonesian sociologist.

 

The couple had enough clout and contacts to run scholarly seminars about Semau but wanted change to be real and sustained. Back in Canberra they hustled donations from mates and NGOs like Rotary, mustered volunteers and did the unusual:

 

‘He asked the people and he listened’, explained Deborah Kana Hau (right) co-founder with Barlow of the Nusa Tenggara (Southeast Islands) Association (NTA).   ‘We worked from the bottom up.’

 

So much time goes on slow talk which annoys hustlers, but the decisions tend to stick because they’re owned by the locals. 

 

The NTA says its mission is to reduce poverty which has a knock-on effect. In practical terms, this means having more income can lead to better access to water and sanitation, schools and kindies and health clinics. 

 

What started as a minor project in 1988 now has 26 staff (including two Australians) and 120 volunteers; a third are locals.

 

ANU economics professor Stephen Howes wrote: ‘If the province was a country it would be one of the poorest in the world. Income per person is one-third of the Indonesian average’ currently around $4,600 a year.

 

He calls NTA ‘one of the most effective NGOs in Eastern Indonesia, and perhaps in the developing world.’ All this on tiny sums and big commitments.

 

If only politicians were as generous as individuals.  Australian Government documents show aid measured as a proportion of Gross National Income hovers around 0.2 per cent, The OECD country average is 0.32 per cent. This ranks the Lucky Country 21 out of 29 donors.

 

The heaviest cuts were last decade under Coalition PM Tony Abbott. There’s been some repair. In this year’s budget taxpayers are giving slightly more aid to Indonesia - up from $307.3 million to $326.1 million.

 

This year NTA will get $277,000 (previously $150,000). Twenty per cent of the grant must be raised by the NTA. 

 

Semau’s needs were basic and solutions low-tech. With no reticulation, women spent up to three hours a day lugging water from wells to homes using two 20-litre buckets on a yoke.

 

The symbol of Outback Oz is a windmill and a tank, filled from a bore or runoff from homestead rooves. This idea only reached Semau with the NTA. Now more than 1,000 concrete tanks have been built. The materials are gifted if the locals do the labour. 

 

Another regular whinge was roaming livestock chomping crops and angering neighbours. Walls had been built from lumps of coral, but no barrier to agile goats.

 

So ‘living fences’ of green stakes which took root laced with the Australian standard repellent of barbed wire keep the bovids at bay.

 

The knowledge flow has been hastened by Indonesians studying in Australia. Evert Hosang (right) got a scholarship to the University of Southern Queensland where he researched maize DNA for a doctorate. 

 

On Semau farmers buy hybrid seed every season because insects destroy their granaries. So using the Australian principle of high-rise sealed silos he got an Indonesian factory to make 20 kg drums to store enough home-grown seed for a hectare of ground.

 

But it had to be dry and farmers don’t have moisture meters. So he’s taught them to put a handful of maize in a dry plastic water bottle laid on its side in the sun. When no moisture settles inside the container the corn’s dry enough to store in silos, though with the ‘i’ pronounced as ‘e’.

 

A bonus from foreigners fixing faults is the shaming of local governments to lift their game and care for their own. Since the NTA arrived Semau now has some decent asphalt roads and a network of power lines.

 

Schools are being built but finding well-qualified teachers who’ll work for a pittance and tolerate poor living conditions limits kids’ learning. So does stunting.

 

Jakarta is now getting serious about prevention by distributing supplements. Around 77,000 littlies in the East Nusa Tenggara province (pop 5.4 million across 500 islands) grow slowly and sickly largely because their mums were undernourished when pregnant.

 

The NTA is seeking a replacement for Barlow who used his wallet for his trips and sought no fees. 

 

Howes wrote that in the government’s hands the NTA’s budget ‘wouldn’t pay for a single in-country consultant employed by the Australian aid programme for a year. That’s value for money.’  

 

Locals say Australian government officials rarely visit except for audits, but they see many volunteers.

 

To Nulik (right) and his Indonesian colleagues, Barlow was driven by altruism: ‘He was an ambassador for humanity’. That was his Aussie magic.

First published Michael West Media 28 May 2023:  

https://michaelwest.com.au/indonesia-our-biggest-and-closest-neighbour-needs-our-aid/