Strangers Next Door?: Indonesia and Australia in the Asian Century 9781509918164, 9781509918195, 9781509918188

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STRANGERS NEXT DOOR? There are no two neighbouring countries anywhere in the world that are more ­different than Indonesia and Australia. They differ hugely in religion, language, ­culture, history, geography, race, economics, worldview and population (­ Indonesia, 270 million, Australia less than 10 per cent of that). In fact, Indonesia and Australia have almost nothing in common other than the accident of geographic proximity. This makes their relationship turbulent, volatile and often unpredictable. Strangers Next Door? brings together insiders and leading observers to c­ ritically assess the state of Australia–Indonesia relations and their future prospects, offering insights into why the relationship is so important for Australia, why it is so often in crisis, and what this means for the future. This book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the Indo-Pacific region, Southeast Asia, Australia and Indonesia, and each country’s politics, economy and foreign policy. It contains chapters that will interest specialists but are written in a style accessible to a general audience. The book spans a diverse range of subjects, including political relations and diplomacy, security and defence, the economy and trade, Islam, education, development, the arts, legal cooperation, the media, women, and community ties. Contributors assess the current state of relations in their sphere of expertise, and outline the factors and policies that could shape bilateral ties—and Indonesia’s future—over the coming decades. University of Melbourne scholars Tim Lindsey and Dave McRae, both prominent observers and commentators on Indonesia and its relations with Australia, edited the volume, providing a synthesising overview as well as their own thematic chapters.

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Strangers Next Door? Indonesia and Australia in the Asian Century

Edited by

Tim Lindsey and Dave McRae

OXFORD AND PORTLAND, OREGON 2018

Hart Publishing An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Hart Publishing Ltd Kemp House Chawley Park Cumnor Hill Oxford OX2 9PH UK

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.hartpub.co.uk www.bloomsbury.com Published in North America (US and Canada) by Hart Publishing c/o International Specialized Book Services 920 NE 58th Avenue, Suite 300 Portland, OR 97213-3786 USA www.isbs.com HART PUBLISHING, the Hart/Stag logo, BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Cover image @ Stuart Krugsman 2018 © The editors and contributors severally 2018 The editors and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as Authors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, ­electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. While every care has been taken to ensure the accuracy of this work, no responsibility for loss or damage occasioned to any person acting or refraining from action as a result of any statement in it can be accepted by the authors, editors or publishers. All UK Government legislation and other public sector information used in the work is Crown Copyright ©. All House of Lords and House of Commons information used in the work is Parliamentary Copyright ©. This information is reused under the terms of the Open Government Licence v3.0 (http://www. nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3) except where otherwise stated. All Eur-lex material used in the work is © European Union, http://eur-lex.europa.eu/, 1998–2018. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-50991-816-4 ePDF: 978-1-50991-818-8 ePub: 978-1-50991-817-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Compuscript Ltd, Shannon To find out more about our authors and books visit www.hartpublishing.co.uk. Here you will find extracts, author information, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

PREFACE

Our first thanks should go to the many observers of Australia-Indonesia relations in both countries who contributed so generously to this book. Our aim was to include a wide range of voices and opinions on the bilateral relationship from both sides of the Arafura Sea, including some who have been directly involved in managing it or making decisions that directly affect it. As a consequence, the chapters in this book vary significantly in style, length and point of view, with quite a few disagreeing on important points. Some of the chapters are footnoted scholarly papers, while others are opinion pieces, and there are a few polemics in there too. In any case, we hope the result is a degree of diversity that reflects the richness and complexity and of the challenging relationship between the two countries—and perhaps adds a touch of spice as well. The book also owes much to Helen Pausacker, Deputy Director of the Centre for Indonesian Law, Islam and Society at the University of Melbourne. She did exceptional work on formatting and referencing every chapter, and always with her usual attention to detail and indefatigable enthusiasm. This list of thanks would be incomplete with mentioning the supportive ­institutional base that the University of Melbourne has provided over the life of this project. We have been fortunate to have two deans with a strong commitment to the study of Indonesia in Professor Carolyn Evans in the Melbourne Law School and Professor Mark Considine in the Faculty of Arts, a commitment mirrored at the Asia Institute by the school’s director Professor Pookong Kee and in the central university by Professor Simon Evans, Pro Vice Chancellor (International). The dedicated staff of the Centre for Indonesian Law, Islam and Society— in particular, Kathryn Taylor, Ade Suharto and Tim Mann—have also contributed greatly to the very conducive environment for the study of Indonesia at ­Melbourne. So too have our many dedicated professional and academic colleagues at the Asia Institute and in the Faculty of Arts more broadly, several of whom feature as authors in this volume. Finally, we are grateful to Bill Asquith, our editor at Hart, for his strong support for this book, and to Sturt Krygsman and The Australian for their generosity in allowing us to use his image of two countries, worlds apart, on the cover. Tim Lindsey and Dave McRae Melbourne, August 2017

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CONTENTS

Preface�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������v Notes on Contributors����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� xi

1. Strangers Next Door?����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������1 Tim Lindsey and Dave McRae 2. A Rising Regional Neighbour of Increasing Importance������������������������������11 Richard Woolcott 3. Perceptions and the Capacity to Persuade�����������������������������������������������������19 John McCarthy 4. President Joko Widodo’s Foreign Policy: Implications for Indonesia-Australia Relations�������������������������������������������������������������������������31 Evi Fitriani 5. Ignorant and Ill-disposed?: Opinion Polling and Attitudes to the other between Australia and Indonesia�����������������������������������������������55 Dave McRae and Diane Zhang 6. Through a Glass, Darkly: Bali, Bad News and Australia-Indonesia Relations����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������81 Tim Lindsey 7. Prospects for the Australia-Indonesia Defence Relationship����������������������107 Peter Jennings 8. Big Fears about Small Boats: How Asylum Seekers Keep Upsetting the Indonesia-Australia Relationship�����������������������������������������������������������125 Antje Missbach 9. Islam in Australia-Indonesia Relations: Fear, Stereotypes and Opportunity�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������149 Greg Fealy 10. Indonesia, Australia and ASEAN������������������������������������������������������������������169 Catherine Renshaw

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11. On the Periphery: Human Rights, Australia and Indonesia�����������������������193 Ken Setiawan 12. A Common Enemy: Police Cooperation between Australia and Indonesia������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������211 Michael McKenzie 13. Successful Justice Sector Collaboration: A Prerequisite for a Healthy Australia-Indonesia Relationship�����������������������������������������������������������������235 Denny Indrayana 14. Papua as a Multilateral Issue for Indonesia and Australia��������������������������259 Richard Chauvel 15. Indonesia and Australia: Ties that Rarely Bind��������������������������������������������287 Endy M Bayuni 16. Our Man in Indonesia����������������������������������������������������������������������������������305 Michael Bachelard 17. Beyond Cultural Diplomacy: The Artistic Nuance in Australia-Indonesia Relations���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������323 Joseph Mitchell and Lydia Teychenné 18. Inside Indonesia: Taking on Australia’s Disinterest, Ignorance and Isolationism��������������������������������������������������������������������������345 Jemma Purdey 19. Friendship, Partnership, Action: Women and the Bilateral Relationship������369 Virginia Hooker 20. Language, Learning, and Living Together: Education as a Bilateral Barometer������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������409 David T Hill 21. Enhancing the Bond: Narratives of Indonesian Academics from Two Continents������������������������������������������������������������������������������������433 Muhammad Najib Azca, Atin Prabandari and Priyambudi Sulistiyanto 22. The Unexamined Gift: Australia’s Aid Relationship with Indonesia����������443 Robin Davies 23. Economic Policy in the Australia-Indonesia Relationship: Unbound Potential, Everlasting Anticlimax������������������������������������������������������������������471 Matthew Busch 24. A Business Perspective����������������������������������������������������������������������������������499 Debnath Guharoy

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25. Young and Connected: How Youth Programs and Organisations Build Links between Australia and Indonesia����������������������������������������������511 Rachelle Cole and Arjuna Dibley

Terminology������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������533 Glossary, Acronyms and Abbreviations�������������������������������������������������������������������535 Index�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������541

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Muhammad Najib Azca is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology and currently the director of Youth Studies Centre (YouSure) at Gadjah Mada University. He was also recently appointed Head of the Centre for Security and Peace Studies (CSPS) at the same university. Michael Bachelard began his career as a journalist in 1990 at The Canberra Times. He covered local and Federal politics before moving to Melbourne. He worked at The Melbourne Times, then The Australian where, over a number of years, he was industrial relations writer, business editor and deputy Melbourne editor. He moved to The Age investigative unit in 2006, then to The Sunday Age. In 2012, he was appointed Indonesia correspondent, and lived in Jakarta for three years. Since 2015, he has been the editor of The Age investigative unit, and since 2017 has also been the foreign editor of Fairfax Media. He has written two books, most recently about the religious group the Exclusive Brethren, and has won a number of awards including several Walkley awards. Endy Bayuni  returned to become the editor-in-chief of The Jakarta Post in ­January 2016, a position he had previously held between 2004 and 2010. A 34-year ­veteran in journalism, he had stints as the Indonesian correspondent for Reuters and Agence France-Presse (AFP) in the early years of his career. He is a regular commentator on Indonesia’s foreign policy, including its relations with Australia. He is a recipient of various fellowship programs, including as Senior Fellow at the East West Centre office in Washington in 2011 and Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2003–2004. Matthew Busch is a PhD Candidate at Melbourne Law School and a Research ­Fellow at the Lowy Institute. He writes and speaks regularly on the political economy of Southeast Asia. His PhD research focuses on the Indonesian state and its traditions of economic intervention. Based in Indonesia for seven years, he worked as an analyst focused on policy and regulatory issues. He has worked with two entities discussed in his chapter, AIPEG and the Victorian government.  Richard Chauvel is an honorary fellow at the Asia Institute, the University of ­Melbourne. Prior to joining the Asia Institute, he taught at the Universities of Indonesia and Sydney as well as Victoria University. His research has focused on political and social change in eastern Indonesia, particularly in Maluku and Papua, together with Australia-Indonesia relations. His publications include a study of the revolt of the Republic of the South Moluccas, Nationalist, Soldiers and S­ eparatists: The Ambonese Islands from Colonialism to Revolt, 1880–1950, two volumes of essays

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on Papua, The Land of Papua and the Indonesia State, together with two policy papers for the East-West Center Washington: The Papua Conflict: Jakarta’s Perceptions and Policies (with Ikrar Nusa Bhakti) and Constructing Papuan Nationalism: History, Ethnicity and Adaption. He was a member of the Australia Awards Joint Selection Committee for Indonesia from 2007 to 2013 and again in 2016.  Rachelle Cole is Fulbright scholar and a recent graduate of Stanford University, where she studied education policy and leadership. Over the last decade she has worked to strengthen ties between young people in Australia and Asia including as an educator, a consultant and a researcher. She is a co-founder of the ­Australia Indonesia Youth Association and has published articles on Asia literacy and the Australia-Indonesia relationship in leading publications in Australia and Indonesia. Robin Davies is the Associate Director of the Development Policy Centre, a think tank on aid and development hosted by the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. He is concurrently an Honorary Professor of that University. Robin worked at the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID), both in Australia and overseas, for almost twenty years. Robin managed AusAID’s devolved country program in Indonesia from 2003 to 2006. In that capacity, he oversaw the first stage in a substantial scaling-up and strategic reorientation of Australia’s aid to Indonesia, which for a time became the l­argest recipient of Australian aid. He led the Australian government’s humanitarian response to the impacts of the December 2004 earthquake and tsunami in Aceh and North Sumatra. Arjuna Dibley is a General Sir John Monash Scholar and a graduate student at Stanford University. He has spent several years working between Australia and Indonesia, including as a lawyer at an international law firm, a consultant for the Australian government and other public and private sector organisations, and as co-founder and President of the Australia Indonesia Youth Association. Arjuna’s writing has been published in academic journals and popular press on ­Australia-Indonesia relations, foreign aid and climate change. Greg Fealy is Associate Professor of Indonesian Politics and head of the Department of Political and Social Change at the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. He has published extensively on Islamic politics, religious culture and radicalism. He has also been a visiting professor at the Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC and an analyst for the Australian government’s Office of National Assessments. Evi Fitriani is a senior lecturer in the the International Relations Department of the  Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, at the University of Indonesia, where she was head of the department from 2012–2016. She is currently Head of the Miriam Budiardjo Resource Centre at the University of Indonesia, and co-founder of the University’s Masters Program in European Studies, as well as its ASEAN

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Studies Center. She is also the Indonesian Country Coordinator for the Network of East Asian Think-Tanks (NEAT). Evi completed her doctorate at the Australian National University in 2011 after being trained in Indonesia, the UK, and the US, as well as Japan, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Hungary. She has obtained more than 13 international awards. Evi’s publications include Southeast Asians and the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM): State’s interests and institution’s longevity (ISEAS Singapore 2014) and she is the author of eight book chapters. Her latest publications are ‘Regionalism and Global Powers’ (ISEAS, 2017) and ‘The Trump Presidency and Indonesia’ (Contemporary Southeast Asia, April 2017). Debnath Guharoy is immediate past national president of the Australia Indonesia Business Council. His career has been in marketing services, spanning the Asia Pacific region. As an adman, he worked in both local CEO and regional roles at JWT, where he was the youngest international vice-president in the world’s oldest ad agency. After five years as a successful ad agency partner, he turned to market research and consulting with Roy Morgan Research, taking the company to Asia. Indonesia has been a second home for Debnath since 1988. He has now turned tech entrepreneur with start-up UpClose. David T Hill is Emeritus Professor of Southeast Asian Studies in the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University, and Director of the Australian Consortium for ‘In-Country’ Indonesian Studies (ACICIS), hosted by the University of Western Australia. His research on contemporary Indonesia covers media, politics, culture, biography, language and literature. He authored a 2012 national report into the state of Indonesian language teaching in Australian universities (www.murdoch. edu.au/ALTC-Fellowship/). In 2015, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia ‘for significant service to international relations, as an advocate of Australia-Indonesia cross-cultural understanding, and as an educator’. Virginia Hooker FAHA is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University and Visiting Fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change, College of Asia and the Pacific. She serves on the boards of international journals and is International Editor, Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures (Brill). Between 2002 and 2010 she was a member of the Board of the Australia-Indonesia Institute, DFAT. Her publications include Writing a New Society: Social Change through the Novel in Malay (Leiden, Allen & Unwin/University of Hawaii Press/KITLV, 2000); A Short History of Malaysia: Linking East and West (Allen & Unwin, 2003); Voices of Islam in Southeast Asia (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2006, with Greg Fealy); and, most recently, ‘When Laws Are Not Enough: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Intra-Religious Pluralism in Contemporary Indonesia’, in Pluralism, Transnationalism and Culture in Asian Law: A Book in Honour of MB Hooker, (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2017, 151–77, edited by Gary F Bell). Denny Indrayana is Associate Director of the Centre for Indonesian Law, Islam and Society at the University of Melbourne, where he is also a visiting professor, and Professor of Law at Gadjah Mada University. He is an internationally-recognised

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anticorruption campaigner who has played a leading role in law reform efforts in Indonesia. Before being sworn in as Vice Minister of Law and Human Rights, Denny was Special Advisor for Legal Affairs, Human Rights and Anticorruption to President Yudhoyono, Chair of the Centre for the Study of Anti-Corruption at Gadjah Mada University, and Director of the Indonesian Court Monitoring NGO. Denny has a PhD from the Melbourne Law School and won the prestigious ­Australian Alumni Award in 2009. He has written hundreds of articles and books. Peter Jennings is executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), a position he has held since 2012. He has worked at senior levels in the ­Australian Public Service on defence and national security. Career highlights include: Deputy Secretary for Strategy in the Defence Department (2009–12); Chief of Staff to the Minister for Defence (1996–98); and Senior Adviser for Strategic Policy to the Prime Minister (2002–03). Peter led the External Expert Panel appointed by Government in early 2014 to advise Ministers and the Defence Department on the Defence White Paper, released in February 2016. Peter is a member of the Australia-Germany Advisory Group, appointed by the Prime ­Minister and German Chancellor in 2015 to develop closer bilateral relations. He is also a member of the Advisory Group on Australia-Africa Relations advising the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and previously held a number Senior Executive Service positions in Defence including: First Assistant Secretary International Policy Division; First Assistant Secretary Coordination and Public Affairs; and Secretary of the Defence Audit and Risk Committee. Tim Lindsey is Malcolm Smith Professor of Asian Law, Redmond Barry ­Distinguished Professor and Director of the Centre for Indonesian Law, Islam and Society at the Melbourne Law School. He completed his PhD thesis on Indonesia and was an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow from 2006 to 2011. Tim is a member of the Victorian Bar and was long-serving Chair of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s Australia-Indonesia Institute until 2016. His many publications include Indonesia: Law and Society (Federation Press, 2008); Islam, Law and the State in Southeast Asia (three volumes, IB Tauris, 2012); The ­Indonesian Constitution: A Contextual Analysis (Hart, 2012, with Simon Butt); Drugs Law and Practice in Southeast Asia (Hart, 2016, with Pip Nicholson); and Religion, Law and Intolerance in Indonesia (Routledge, 2016, with Helen ­Pausacker). He is a founder and an executive editor of The Australian Journal of Asian Law. John McCarthy was Australian Ambassador to Indonesia from 1997 to 2000 during the Asian Financial Crisis, the transition to democracy and the East Timor Crisis. Born in the US, he was educated in the UK with an MA and LLB from Cambridge University. After working as a barrister in London and for the New York law firm of Shearman and Sterling, he returned to Australia in 1968 and joined the Department of Foreign Affairs. Prior to Jakarta, McCarthy was Ambassador to Vietnam, Mexico, Thailand and the US. On departure from Indonesia, he served as Ambassador to Japan and High Commissioner to India. In the Department

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of Foreign Affairs Home Office, he headed the Legal Division, the Public Affairs Division and was a Deputy Secretary. Since leaving government service in 2009, he has had number of roles with universities and the private sector. Current roles include Senior Adviser to Mitsubishi Materials Corporation and chair of the Advisory Board to the Griffith Asia Institute. McCarthy is an Officer of the Order of Australia (1999) and has an honorary doctorate from Murdoch University. Michael McKenzie is currently Counsellor (Legal) at the Australian Embassy in Jakarta. He is also a visitor at the School of Regulation and Global Governance, Australian National University. He was previously a Sir Roland Wilson F ­ oundation Scholar, completing a PhD on the criminal justice relationship between ­Australia and Indonesia. The views expressed in his chapter are personal and do not ­necessarily reflect the views of the Australian government. Dave McRae is a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne’s Asia Institute in the Faculty of Arts. His current research interests include contemporary ­Indonesian politics, Indonesian foreign policy, Australia-Indonesia relations and regional security issues. He is the author of A Few Poorly Organized Men: I­nterreligious ­Violence in Poso, Indonesia (2013) and translator of Solahudin’s The Roots of ­Terrorism in Indonesia (2013). He writes and comments frequently in both ­English and Indonesian in the Australian, Indonesian and other international media. He is a co-founder and editorial board member of the Indonesia At Melbourne blog, and founder and co-host of the Talking Indonesia podcast. He is also an Associate at the Centre for Indonesian Law, Islam and Society. From 2011 until January 2014 he was Research Fellow in the East Asia Program at the Lowy Institute, covering ­Indonesia and Southeast Asia. As Lead Researcher for the World Bank’s Conflict and Development Team in Indonesia between 2008 and 2010 he led a research program on interventions to prevent conflict and address its impacts. Prior to this, he worked for the Jakarta office of the International Crisis Group between 2004 and 2006, researching and writing reports on most of Indonesia’s major conflict areas. Antje Missbach is a senior research fellow at Monash University in Melbourne. She studied Southeast Asian Studies and Anthropology at the Humboldt University in Berlin and obtained a PhD from the Australian National University in Canberra for a thesis about the long-distance politics of the Acehnese diaspora. Her current research interests focus on issues related to irregular migration, refugee protection and politics of mobility in Indonesia and the wider Southeast Asian region. Among her latest books are Troubled Transit: Asylum Seekers Stuck in Indonesia (Singapore, ISEAS, 2015); Linking People: Connections and Encounters between Australians and Indonesians (edited with Jemma Purdey, Regiospectra, 2015); and Separatist Conflict in Indonesia: The Long-distance Politics of the Acehnese Diaspora (Routledge, 2011). Joseph Mitchell has been Artistic Director of Adelaide Festival Centre’s OzAsia Festival since 2014. During this time, he has introduced a bold, ­contemporary-focused arts program featuring outstanding theatre, dance, music,

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visual arts, film and literature from across Asia to Australian audiences. Previously, Joseph was Executive Producer at Brisbane Festival (2011–13) and Resident Director/Youth and Education Manager at Queensland Theatre Company (2006–11). He completed his Graduate Diploma in Dramatic Direction at Victorian College of the Arts (2004) and Bachelors Degree in Communications (Journalism) at Newcastle University (2001). Atin Prabandari is a lecturer in the Department of International Relations and was Manager of the Global Engagement Office (GEO) at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, both at Gadjah Mada University.  Jemma Purdey’s research interests include biography, human rights and reconciliation in Indonesia, and Australia’s relationship with Indonesia. She has ­written widely on Indonesian politics and contemporary history and about Australia’s relationship with Indonesia. She is author of Anti-Chinese Violence in Indonesia, 1996-1999 (ASAA SEA Publications Series, Singapore University Press, 2006). Her biography, From Vienna to Yogyakarta: The Life of Herb Feith (UNSW Press, 2011), is also published in Indonesia as Dari Yogyakarta ke Vienna: ­Kehidupan Herb Feith (KPG Publishing, 2014). Jemma is also editor of Knowing Indonesia: Intersections of Self, Discipline and Nation (Monash University Publishing, 2012) and co-editor with Antje Missbach of Linking People: Connections and Encounters between Australians and Indonesians (Berlin, Regiospectra, 2015). She is Chair of the board that publishes the magazine Inside Indonesia, and a member of the board of the Herb Feith Foundation and its working committee. Ken Setiawan is a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asia Institute, The ­University of Melbourne. She is also an Affiliate Researcher at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights (ISHR), Columbia University. Ken holds a Master of Arts and PhD in Law from Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her research interests include transitional justice, human rights sociology and historical justice. She has published in various journals including Global Change, Peace and S­ ecurity and the Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia. She is author of Promoting Human Rights: National Human Rights Commissions in ­Indonesia and Malaysia (Leiden University Press, 2013). Priyambudi Sulistyanto is a Senior Lecturer in the School of History and ­International Relations at Flinders University. He is also Academic Director of the Jembatan Initiative at Flinders. Lydia Teychenné is an Australian performing arts producer and manager with a portfolio of local, national and international contemporary multi-art projects. Lydia has produced complex international collaborations between Australia, Europe and Asia for interdisciplinary arts organisation Not Yet It’s Difficult (2009–12), Twine Projects (2013–14) and Dancenorth (2015). She was Manager of International Partnerships at OzAsia Festival (2015) and has worked with the major arts festivals and organisations in Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney.

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Lydia has toured with Chunky Move, Australian Ballet and Dancers Company and worked with many independent choreographers. She completed a Master of Diplomacy and Trade at Monash University (2017) and a Bachelor of Dramatic Arts at Victorian College of the Arts (2001). Catherine Renshaw is Associate Professor and Deputy Head of the Thomas More Law School at Australian Catholic University. Catherine’s research focuses on human rights and democratisation in the Asia Pacific region. Her articles are published in journals such as the Michigan Journal of International Law and Human Rights Quarterly. Catherine is also a Senior Research Fellow at the University of New South Wales, where she contributes to the Australia Myanmar Constitutional Democracy Project, which focuses on the rule of law and constitutionalism in Myanmar. In 2016, Catherine received the Women’s Fellowship Award for Research at Western Sydney University. Richard Woolcott is a former Australian Ambassador to Indonesia, a former Ambassador to the United Nations, a former head of Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and still a regular visitor to Indonesia. Diane Zhang is an economist with over fifteen years of experience working in Indonesia, Australia and China. Starting her career at the Australian federal government, she then spent eight years working in Indonesia and China. Between 2004 and 2010, she worked as a public policy specialist for the World Bank and consulted for a variety of foreign governments on public financial management. After Indonesia, she spent two years working in China advising the private sector and sub-national governments on urban planning and land development. She returned back to Australia in 2013 and has since worked on key reform ­programs and assisted state governments to develop stronger evidence-based ­policies. She has written pieces for the mainstream media and academic blogs highlighting the insights quantitative analysis can bring to bear on Indonesian political issues, and has authored policy papers on a variety of public policy and governance issues in Indonesia.

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1 Strangers Next Door? TIM LINDSEY AND DAVE McRAE

Australia and Indonesia’s immediate neighbourhood is changing fundamentally and both countries know it. Indonesian President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) came to office in 2014 imploring his fellow citizens to ‘work, work, and work’ to seize an historic opportunity for Indonesia to become a major nation on the world stage. Australia also understands that it will need to transform itself to face the Asian century. That much is clear from the cluster of strategic plans Australia has produced over the past decade: three defence white papers since 2009; the Asian Century white paper in 2013; and, most recently, a foreign policy white paper and a thorough-going intelligence review in 2017. That Australia-Indonesia ties will change because both countries believe regional transformation is imminent is beyond doubt—the real question is how they will change For Indonesia, recognition of what its leaders see as its ‘rising’ status must be central to the recalibration of bilateral relations. Former president Susilo ­Bambang Yudhoyono expressed this point when he rightly called for an update of the ‘­preposterous mental caricature[s]’ that dominate each country’s perception of the other in his historic speech to a joint sitting of Australia’s federal parliament in 2010 (Yudhoyono 2010). Yudhoyono himself saw the two countries as ‘equal stakeholders in a shared future’—arguably an oblique reference to what is often seen in Indonesia as past imbalances in bilateral ties that have advantaged Australia. President Jokowi has been more forthright, asserting on the campaign trail that Australia must not be allowed to ‘belittle’ Indonesia. Once in office, he instructed his diplomats that all bilateral relationships—that with Australia included—must benefit Indonesia economically, as Evi Fitriani explains in her chapter in this book. This focus on benefit for Indonesia as the key criteria for Indonesia’s international relations fits neatly with the views of senior and influential Indonesians speaking at bilateral dialogues and conferences dealing with the Australia-Indonesia relationship. They often say, ‘You need us more than we need you’, or, as Indonesia rises, ‘You now need to show us why you matter’. Australia too hopes to profit from its ties with Indonesia, as its close neighbour grows in economic clout. Outside government, a sense of Indonesia rising to become an economic giant often spurs anxiety in Australia about opportunity foregone or even fears of future marginalisation. Various analysts have, for e­ xample,

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Tim Lindsey and Dave McRae

judged Australia guilty of ‘a spectacular failure to capitalise on Indonesia’s remarkably smooth democratic transition’ (Hanson 2012), or as having ‘egregiously … misspent’ (White 2013) unprecedented chances to build a new relationship under Yudhoyono, to cite just two examples. The language of officials is more restrained but also anticipates that Australia will require new strategies to manage ties with Indonesia in the future, as Indonesia transforms. Australia ‘may need to become more selective in what we push and what we ask for’, the then Department of Foreign Affairs (DFAT) secretary Dennis Richardson wrote in 2012. A wealthier and more confident neighbour, he suggested, makes it ‘increasingly difficult for Australia to gain the attention of Indonesian decision makers to the extent that we think our interests might warrant’ (DFAT 2012: 6)—or, it might be argued, to the extent Australia has often been able to achieve in the past few decades. In these sentiments, the possibility is clear that Australia and Indonesia may largely go their separate ways, and thereby resemble strangers living next door to each other as the Asian Century rolls on. Certainly, if bilateral ties are left to their numerous sceptics and opponents—who may even form a majority in each country—this will be the outcome. As Dave McRae and Diane Zhang set out in their chapter on public opinion polling of Australian attitudes to Indonesia, polls consistently reveal enduring ill-disposed attitudes and mistrust of Indonesia, and sometimes even hostility. Survey data demonstrate that a significant portion of Australians missed Indonesia’s democratic transition altogether and wrongly believe it is still an authoritarian regime run by the military or even that lawmaking in Indonesia is based on Islamic codes. Indeed, Greg Fealy argues in his chapter that Islam in Indonesia has been consistently exaggerated or overlooked (either way, misunderstood) by governments and the public in Australia. Education has not been effective in countering these stereotypes. In fact, Indonesian studies—like much Asia-related curriculum content other than ­ ­Mandarin—is in decline at primary and secondary levels. The Bali bombings of 2002 and 2005 made it difficult for Australian schools to offer pupils studying Indonesian in-country immersion experiences for many years afterwards, and the knock-on effects are still felt. Moreover, as McRae and Zhang also show, the ­Indonesian diaspora is much smaller than other communities—roughly a ninth the size of the Chinese in Australia—rendering it less able to generate more ­positive perceptions of the archipelago. For all its energy and ability (described evocatively by Virginia Hooker in her chapter on women in the bilateral relationship), the Indonesian community in Australia is simply not large enough to be an effective counter to wider popular misunderstandings of their country of origin about their country of adoption, or vice versa. The same is true for the various enthusiastic youth organisations that consciously set out to bridge the difference between Australia and Indonesia that Rachelle Cole and Arjuna Dibley describe in their chapter. These groups do excellent work but their impact will always be greatly constrained by scale. It also does not help that Australian ignorance of its ‘Near North’ is reciprocated. Indonesians usually look north too, and that means they rarely look back

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at Australia—and when they do, it is often with suspicion. As Yudhoyono noted in his speech, ‘preposterous mental caricatures’ are not unique to this side of the Arafura Sea. He said that some Indonesians ‘still suffer from “Australiaphobia” and believe in the notion of the old “white Australia”, that harbours ill-intention towards Indonesia’. This is true despite the fact that Australia has for decades hosted between 13,000 and 20,000 Indonesian students every year, making this country the foremost destination for Indonesians studying abroad. In fact, most Australians have considerable difficulty in accepting that their country’s reputation in Indonesia is often poor. Like many Indonesians discussing Australia, Yudhoyono specifically mentioned the White Australia policy, which only formally ended in the 1970s. This policy is still within the memory of ­living Indonesians, many of them senior government figures. If he were less polite, ­Yudhoyono might also have mentioned that although white women may have voted for most of the federation, indigenous people had to wait until 1962 to be enfranchised, a point often made by Indonesians criticising Australia. As this suggests, Indonesian attitudes to Australia are still influenced in subtle ways by remnants of hostility to colonialism. The powerful rhetoric of nationalism, unsurprisingly, embraces a deep suspicion of Western colonial ambitions. ­Indonesia’s bloody revolution against the Dutch (1945–49) is still a fundamental part of school curricula and national imagery. The generation of soldiers who fought in 1945 (which included Soeharto) have only recently left the political stage, replaced by veterans of East Timor, which seceded from Indonesia with ­Australian support. Ingrained distrust of whites as inherently neo-colonial persists, and Australia, for all its growing diversity, is firmly ‘white’ in Indonesian eyes. Many Indonesians find these ideas hard to resist, which is why most erroneously (but genuinely) believe Australia wants an independent Papua as a client state, and why many are routinely suspicious of Australia’s motives in its dealings with ­Indonesia. Such suspicions resonate with a broader preference of Indonesian officials, identified by Richard Chauvel in his chapter, to fail to recognise the agency of Papuan activists in gaining international attention for their cause, instead attributing support for independence to foreign meddling—often by ­Australians. In fact, most Indonesians are mostly indifferent to Australia but suspicion of ­Australian ambitions to control eastern Indonesia (where Christians form a much larger minority than in western Indonesia) is a common default position, including in government departments. So, for example, Imron Cotan, then Indonesian ­Ambassador to Australia, told an Australian journalist in 2004 that ‘while helping his country’s Foreign Affairs Ministry assess applicants for diplomatic positions ‘it emerged that 95 per cent of the 6000 aspirants held ‘anti-Australian views’ (Daley 2004). It is this broad-based popular indifference, dislike or dormant prejudice that is sometimes provoked into resentment or hostility when incited by small cliques in Indonesia for various political purposes. These provocateurs have in the past included groups within the legislature, the military (most recently, its then chief, ­General Gatot Nurmantyo), a few newspapers, and small but vocal groups of

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conservative Islamists. Despite the commonly-held view that Indonesia is rising, many Indonesia leaders remain insecure about Indonesia’s standing in the world, and sensitive to perceived slights from ‘white’ nations, particularly in relation to the exaggerated notions of ‘national sovereignty’ that are common stock-in-trade for Indonesian politicians. An escalation of nationalist and ‘sovereignty’ rhetoric since 2014 has increased Indonesian insecurity about their place in the world, despite (or perhaps because of) the perception that the country is rising and on track to become a significant power.1 This greatly complicates foreign relations and, in particular, the bilateral relationship. Indonesia does not enjoy easy relations with any of its neighbours and for all the reasons just discussed, Australia is no exception. In fact, it is often observed that there are no two neighbouring countries that are more different than Indonesia and Australia. Race, ethnicity, language, majority religion, economy, geography, demography and history all differ greatly between the two countries; so to do the legal systems of the two countries. Likewise, while both countries are democracies, Indonesia’s system is more like the American model than the Westminster one with which Australians are familiar. In fact, Australia and Indonesia are, in many ways, the international ‘odd couple’. These differences of religion, ethnicity, economic development and historical experience are not fatal to good bilateral relations; they can be bridged and often are. However, they can easily become flashpoints—and often do—and that is a large part of what makes the relationship between the two countries particularly turbulent and often unpredictable. Many of the contributors to Strangers Next Door argue that to alter this dynamic, Australia needs to understand Indonesia better to engage with it more successfully, while also finding new ways to encourage it do the same with Australia. That is not easy. As this book clearly shows, much that can be done has already been attempted, often with some success, but these efforts need to be scaled up dramatically if they are to have real impact in a nation of 270 million. Unfortunately, there are scant resources available for that purpose. In fact, if anything, the book shows that Australian government support for bilateral people-to-people links and public diplomacy has fallen over the last decade, as John McCarthy forcefully argues in his chapter. Likewise, Australian aid has been cut by 40%, as Robin Davies explains in his chapter surveying the bilateral aid relationship, in which he observes that both countries must reflect anew upon this aspect of bilateral ties to ensure ‘Australia’s aid is more valued than tolerated’. Australian business engagement also remains lacklustre, Debnath Guharoy’s chapter claims, with Australian businesses often just ‘not interested’. However, as the contributions to this volume also demonstrate, a focus on ­fragility, disruption and turbulence alone does not accurately capture the overall dynamic of Australia-Indonesia ties. Although there have been significant tensions in the bilateral relationship since Indonesia’s democratisation, with that country recalling its ambassador twice and Australia once, the bilateral relationship has 1 

Aspinall (2016) provides an illuminating review of this phenomenon.

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nonetheless grown incrementally broader and, in a range of respects, warmer over the same period. Freed of the complications that Indonesia’s authoritarian regime created, and with tensions over East Timor now more distant, official cooperation has come to span a broad range of government business. Summitry has likewise expanded to include annual leaders’ meetings, so-called ‘2+2’ defence and foreign ministers meetings, and a regular ‘track two’ Indonesia-Australia dialogue. ­Ministerial visits are also common now, although it is much more often Australian than Indonesian ministers who get on the plane. In any case, cooperation has been close and expanding across government, and in many other sectors as well. As Michael McKenzie sets out in his chapter, police cooperation provides an excellent example of how bilateral ties deepened despite recurrent turbulence. In fact, McKenzie argues, since the late 1990s bilateral police-to-police relations have been relatively independent of national politics, with ties instead deepening based on a shared professional subculture built on ‘fighting a common enemy’. Remarkably, McKenzie’s account has it that this shared subculture has allowed the police relationship to navigate the most serious bilateral rows of the past two decades largely unscathed, with police ties if anything reinforced by each force’s common deployment to East Timor. Another fractious episode, the 2002 Bali bombings, spurred intimate counter-terrorism cooperation. The key setback to police cooperation ultimately did not result from an external political row, McKenzie explains, but from what Indonesian police saw as improper use of information shared with Australian police counterparts. More recently, however, the emergence of the Islamic State in the region sees the two forces again moving to cooperate in pursuit of a common enemy. The arts sector has not been as resilient during periods of turbulent ties: Joseph Mitchell and Lydia Teychenné recount cases of festivals cancelled and artists disinclined to attend. Nevertheless, they overall describe a bilateral arts scene reinvigorated by the freedom to explore contentious contemporary issues that Indonesian artists found after Soeharto’s fall. This is evident in the increasing involvement of Indonesians in some of Australia’s major artistic festivals, reminding ­Australian audiences that modern Indonesian culture is just as rich and vibrant as the ancient artistic traditions more often associated with that country. In part, DFAT’s ­public diplomacy imperatives and the greater resources available in Australia drive increasing arts cooperation, the authors argue, although these resources are nowhere near enough, a view John McCarthy supports in his chapter. Finally, Mitchell and Teychenné stress that a shared recognition that ‘artistic exchange can play a major role in deepening the dialogue and understanding’ between two countries is crucial too, with both still having much to learn from each other. Education is another sector where ties have continued to deepen—at the ­tertiary level, at least. The number of Australian scholarship recipients studying at ­Australian universities has ticked past 18,000 (Purdey cited in Hill, in this volume), with a potential impact that goes well beyond what the numbers suggest. Whatever the resentment of Australia among Indonesia’s foreign policy t­hinkers, this education relationship is among the factors that generates a significant

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reservoir of goodwill. Both chapters on education in this volume highlight the role of Indonesian alumni in broadening and deepening bilateral ties. Writing from an Australian perspective, David Hill notes the ‘extraordinary concentration of knowledge about Australia and Australian society’ resulting from 4 of 34 ­Yudhoyono-era ministers holding Australian degrees, in a government he observes was one the most favourably-disposed Indonesian administrations towards ­Australia. In their chapter, Najib Azca, Atin Prabandari and Priyambudi ­Sulistiyanto similarly highlight the role of influential alumni but focus on their role in facilitating the expansion of collaborative ties between Australian and Indonesian universities. Of particular advantage to such collaboration, various Indonesian alumni have risen to senior ranks in their home institutions. Two of the past six rectors at Indonesia’s prestigious Gadjah Mada University received their PhDs in Australia, for example, with the more recent of these, Professor Pratikno, plucked from his university leadership role to become Minister of the State Secretariat in President Jokowi’s cabinet. The deepening of bilateral ties is also evident in the state of knowledge of ­Indonesia in Australian government, academia and the media, even if the huge challenges facing Indonesian studies as it struggles to survive in Australian schools raise concerns about sustainability. Knowledge of Indonesia in these sectors remains strong, in contrast to the wider community. Hill is correct to observe that Australian politicians do not share analogous in-country study experiences with their Indonesian counterparts. However, Indonesia specialists, alumni of ACICIS,2 AIYEP3 and other student exchange programs, along with diplomats with experience in Jakarta, fill numerous government positions, some senior. They notably include the current Defence department secretary Greg Moriarty, a former ambassador to Indonesia. According to a 2014 census exercise, more than 130 academics at Australian universities are engaged primarily in the study of Indonesia (Ford 2014)—a number unrivalled in any country other than Indonesia, with the openness of Indonesia’s political system now enabling Australia-based academics to research topics once considered too sensitive for foreigners. One sign of Australia’s academic knowledge of Indonesia was the prominence of Australian university blogs such as Election Watch Indonesia and New ­Mandala in coverage of Indonesia’s 2014 elections.4 These elections also showcased the strength of Australia’s media presence in Indonesia, with Australian readers and

2  ACICIS is ‘a cross-university Australian Consortium for In-Country Indonesian Studies (open to all universities, to facilitate the placement of Australian undergraduates into Indonesian universities’ (Hill, this volume). 3  AIYEP is the Australia-Indonesia Youth Exchange Program, established in 1981 and run by the Australia Indonesia Institute in DFAT. This brings Australian and Indonesian students to each other countries for community based programs. ‘Both groups participate in work placements, home stays, cultural performances and visits to local schools and communities’ (Cole and Dibley, in this volume). 4  Both authors were involved with Election Watch Indonesia, run by the University of Melbourne. The blog has since become Indonesia at Melbourne. Both authors are members of its editorial board.

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viewers receiving a depth of coverage of the polls that its news organisations would struggle to provide for most other countries. As Michael Bachelard recounts in his chapter, Jakarta remains a key foreign bureau for serious Australian news organisations, with correspondents driven to provide ever-greater volumes of reportage by the new demands of technology and the news cycle.

Future Prospects It is not hard to identify issues on which Australians and Indonesians often do not see eye to eye. Examples of areas where differences of opinion are common include human rights (as Ken Setiawan shows in her chapter), the status of Papua (­Richard Chauvel) or, as Denny Indrayana and Tim Lindsey argue in their chapters, criminal law, including the death penalty and drugs sentencing. As Antje Missbach shows in her comprehensive chapter, asylum seekers and people smuggling are another common area of disagreement. Nonetheless, as we said at the start of this chapter—and as Richard Woolcott insists in his chapter—the leaders of the two countries do share the view that the Asian century has already begun to transform Indonesia and that this will demand a recalibration of Australia-Indonesia ­relations. Endy Bayuni suggests in his chapter that this is already underway. This raises the question of what are likely to be the issues that will define bilateral ties in the decades ahead, and how will they be managed? For both countries, China’s rise and its apparent drive for regional primacy presents the greatest near-term strategic challenge. For Indonesia, its northern neighbour’s increasing power carries the additional challenge of Chinese ­vessels’ assertiveness in the area of the South China Sea that Indonesia claims as its exclusive economic zone (EEZ). Certainly, this situation could see Australia fade further from calculations, as Indonesian defence planners and diplomats focus north on Southeast Asia, the region that, as Catherine Renshaw shows in her ­chapter, ­Indonesia sees as its ‘sphere of influence’ and would hope to one day dominate. However, in an era where Australian strategic planners no longer perceive Indonesia as a threat, Australia can have a substantial say in how important it becomes in Indonesia’s strategic equation, as Peter Jennings argues in his chapter. He advocates bold steps to produce a closer strategic relationship between the two countries’ defence establishments, such as the gifting of two ANZAC frigates to Indonesia, making Australia’s Cocos islands facility available to Indonesia, and seeking to supply Indonesia with vessels to better patrol its EEZ. Jennings is not convinced that the strong language of Australia’s 2016 White Paper, which places critical importance on ‘strong and productive ties’ with ­Indonesia, will be matched by transformative action. Bureaucracies everywhere, he observes, tend to default to ‘steady-state engagement’. In fact, a gap between political rhetoric and action has been a persistent feature of political discussion of bilateral ties in Australia. Both sides of ­politics

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have long acknowledged that Asia’s growing geo-political and economic significance will force a reshaping our ties with the region, including with I­ ndonesia, the giant of Southeast Asia. Prime Minister Paul Keating famously said in 1994, ‘No country is more important to Australia than Indonesia. If we fail to get this relationship right, and nurture and develop it, the whole web of our foreign relations is incomplete’. While many Australia politicians would not be so sweeping, most would now agree that Indonesia matters more to Australia than it has for many years and should be a priority for Australia in its dealings with the world. As former Prime Minister Tony Abbott put it, Australia needs ‘More Jakarta, less Geneva’. ­Australian politicians understand that Indonesia: straddles our vital principal commercial air and sea lanes to the north; mediates our access to Southeast Asian regional forums and diplomacy; is the key to our northern defence; and controls the vital deep sea naval passages in the Lombok and Makassar Straits. They also know that if China becomes more bellicose in the seas to its south, Indonesia will only become more strategically important to the West. Australian politicians often struggle, however, to turn this understanding into concrete and effective policies, hampered by the fact that it is emotive issues of transnational crime and sovereignty that most often draw Indonesia into ­Australia’s domestic political debate, as Tim Lindsey shows in his chapter on the place of Bali in the bilateral relationship. Thus although each of Australia’s major parties has sought to depict itself as the most capable guardian of ties with I­ndonesia, and indeed almost all governments have stepped in to mend fences when ties have been truly strained (McRae forthcoming), the relationship has always been subject to ongoing domestic politicking (although the most inflammatory rhetoric, it must be noted, has often emanated from outside the government of the day). Much as almost all Keating’s successors have echoed his ‘no more important relationship’ language, the importance of bilateral ties has frequently been trumped by other policy imperatives, usually domestic in nature. As Tony Abbott found, these can render commitment to ‘more Jakarta’ nugatory. In Indonesia, Australia is rarely an important part of the calculations of ­Indonesian policy-makers when they consider how to ensure or expand their country’s regional and global standing. This is all the more true now, because President Joko Widodo (unlike his predecessor) does not regard his country’s relationship with Australia as a special one. This reflects a view among the elite in Indonesia that their country ought rightly be the senior partner in the bilateral relationship and Australia needs to show why it should be given attention, as Evi Fitriani explains in her chapter. Australia is a low-ranked trading and investment partner for Indonesia, and that is unlikely to change soon, given Australia invests far more in each of New Zealand, Luxembourg, Ireland, Papua New Guinea and most other Southeast Asian countries than in Indonesia. In his chapter, Debnath Guharoy argues that this is a result of the persistent popular misunderstandings of Indonesia in Australia described above. He says these have led Australian business to be apathetic or unjustifiably risk-averse

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when presented with business opportunities in Indonesia—they need to do much more, he says. In fact, Guharoy calls for a major shake-up of business attitudes to ­Indonesia so Australia can make the most of its serendipitous geography and not miss out on Indonesia’s predicted boom. Matthew Busch agrees that Australian trade and investment is underdone but says much of the reason for this relates to Indonesian policymakers’ failure to provide an attractive, reliable and predictable environment for business. He argues that most of what can be done by Australian governments and businesses has, in fact, already been attempted. It is now up to Indonesia, Busch suggests, to reform itself if it is to win the foreign investment that economists and policy­makers agree is essential for its ‘rise’. Without that, it will be difficult for Australia to ‘do more’ about business engagement. Whoever is right, there can be little doubt that ­Indonesia’s economic performance and Australia’s responses to it will play a critical part in the future of the bilateral relationship. Finally, Papua will, as mentioned, continue to be a major fault line in the relationship. Ken Setiawan and Richard Chauvel both show in their chapters that Papua has long sat at the intersection of powerful and often conflicting ideas about human rights and national sovereignty in the two countries. Many of the Australian activist groups that Jemma Purdey describes in her chapter that for so long lobbied for democracy in Indonesia and self-determination for East Timor now see Papuan independence as a similar cause. In this sense, Papua has come to replace East Timor as what Ali Alatas famously called Indonesia’s ‘pebble in the shoe’ (Thompson 2006)—at least in the context of its dealings with Australia. It is, in fact, one of the few strategic issues that consistently pulls Indonesian attention southwards, and as Richard Chauvel argues, will continue to do so as activists increase their pro-Papua diplomacy in the Pacific, squarely in Australia’s diplomatic and economic sphere of influence.

Conclusion Certainly, the challenges ahead for Australia-Indonesia ties are considerable at a time of rapid and far-reaching change right across Asia, with Indonesia seemingly poised for dramatic transformation. Policymakers in both Australia and Indonesia may find themselves having to rethink many of the traditional assumptions about how these two very different countries will interact. Their wider communities may even eventually be forced to reconsider the caricatures that have long dominated their perceptions of one another. In that context, this book is an attempt to make a contribution to thinking about how the bilateral relationship between Indonesia and Australia might be better than it is. Principally, it seeks to map the trajectory of the volatile relationship between these two strange neighbours. To do so, it brings insiders and leading observers from both sides of the Arafura Sea together to critically assess the state

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of Australia-Indonesia relations and their future prospects, offering insights into why the relationship is important, why it is so often in crisis, and what might be done to improve relations between the two countries. Strangers Next Door also aims to offer this analysis of the bilateral relationship across a wide spectrum of areas of engagement. While our contributors certainly do not always agree with one another, together they clearly demonstrate the surprising depth and diversity of links between the two countries. While often h ­ idden, this depth and diversity is, in fact, a foundation on which better relations might be constructed, but only if the will and the resources were there to do so—and for now that remains a big ‘if ’ for both countries.

References Aspinall, Edward (2016) ‘The New Nationalism in Indonesia’ 3(1) Asia & the Pacific Policy Studies 72. Daley, Paul (2004) ‘Breach of Trust’ The Bulletin, 14 April (no page). Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (2012) Annual Report 2011–2012. Ford, Michele (2014) ‘A New Generation of Female Indonesianists’, http://­ australiaindonesiacentre.org. Hanson, Fergus (2012) ‘Indonesia: Our Biggest Blind Spot’, The Interpreter, 20 March. McRae, Dave (forthcoming) ‘A Fair Dinkum Partnership? Australia-Indonesia Ties during the Yudhoyono Era’ in Ulla Fiona (ed) Million Friends, Zero Enemies: Indonesia’s Global Role under Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (Singapore, ISEAS). Thompson, Geoff (2006) ‘Former Indonesian Official Speaks Out on East Timor’ ABC Radio, AM, 10 August, . White, Hugh (2013) ‘What Indonesia’s Rise Means for Australia’, The Monthly, June. Yudhoyono, Susilo Bambang (2010) ‘Address by the President of the Republic of Indonesia’, to Joint Sitting of the Australian Parliament, Canberra, 10 March, in Parliamentary Debates: House of Representatives: Official Hansard: 2136–40.

2 A Rising Regional Neighbour of Increasing Importance RICHARD WOOLCOTT

There are probably no two neighbouring countries anywhere in the world as different as Australia and Indonesia.  They have great differences in respect of religion, language, culture, history, geography, race, economics, and population.  Indonesia has a population of some 270 million, while Australia’s population is less than 10% of that. In this short chapter I will, first, underline the fundamental importance to Australia of our relations with Indonesia, now and in the future. Second, I will stress our need for a stable, united, developing Indonesia and, conversely, the dangers that would be posed to Australia by an unstable, disunited and economically weak Indonesia. Third, I will make proposals to strengthen our bilateral relations and our cooperation on regional and global issues of concern to both countries. I will also comment on the prospects for continuing economic growth in Indonesia, democracy, and Indonesia’s growing influence in regional and global affairs since the election in 2014 of President Joko Widodo (widely known as Jokowi). Aptly described as ‘a nation in waiting’ by Adam Schwarz (1999) in his book about Indonesia under Soeharto, Indonesia has since assumed the status of a country of considerable and increasing importance. It is a member of the G20 and the East Asia Summit process, which bring the leaders of the US, China, Japan, India, Russia and South Korea together with the ASEAN countries and Australia. The victory of the Liberal-National Party Coalition, while narrow, offers the re-elected Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, another opportunity to review and strengthen our bilateral relationship. In doing so, it will be important to separate myths and realities in our approach to Indonesia. The way in which we manage our relations with Indonesia is at the core of our policy thrust into the Asia Pacific region. It is, and will remain, a test of our diplomatic maturity as a nation, given the growing influence of Indonesia in the region and, indeed, globally.

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Indonesia in a Changing Asia The rise of Asia, caused by an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the West to the East, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, is likely to continue into the foreseeable future. This seismic shift is driven by the spectacular economic growth of China, in particular, but also by the rise of India and the established economic strengths of Japan and South Korea. To this must now be added the growing potential of Indonesia and Vietnam. This is an historic global turning point to which Australia must respond if we are not to find ourselves left behind. It has become somewhat of a cliché but, like many clichés, it is based on a fact: we are now living in a greatly changed and much more interconnected world. The Asia Pacific is the region where the world’s major power relationships most closely intersect. It is also where the relationship between the US and China will largely be shaped. It is thus the crucible in which the interrelationships on Asia Pacific issues between Indonesia, Australia, the US, China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the other Asian countries will be forged. In this rapidly changing world we need to put outdated Cold War thinking behind us. In this context, Australia needs to decide whether it will cling to policies rooted in the 1950s or engage more actively—not just rhetorically—in Asia’s future. To do the latter we need to develop a far more comprehensive and integrated strategy for the future, and then secure bi-partisan political support for it, along with the more elusive support of the wider public. I have been visiting Indonesia regularly since 1964. I was ambassador to Indonesia from 1975 to 1978. I worked closely with Indonesian representatives when I was ambassador to the United Nations in New York, especially when we were on the Security Council (1985–86), where Ali Alatas was Indonesia’s representative before he became its long-serving Foreign Minister. I was Chairman of the AustraliaIndonesia Institute from 1992 to 1998. I made two visits to Indonesia in 2015 since Jokowi became President of Indonesia. Most recently, I had a private meeting with Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi, as well as discussions with a number of leading Indonesian businessmen about the country’s economic prospects. These experiences have convinced me that Australia needs a fundamental change to our national psyche. We need to focus more on the Asian region than on our traditional alliances and links with the US, the UK and Europe. That has led us into support for protracted and losing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and our involvement in what are essentially the policies of the US and some NATO countries in the very complex and unstable situation in the Middle East, now involving the bombing of Syria. We need a much deeper and sustained, rather than spasmodic, approach to the policies of the rising countries of Asia. There are, in fact, widespread doubts whether Australia should be involved at all in religious conflicts between Islamic groups that involve countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and what appears to be an increasingly unstable

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and fragmented Iraq. Indeed Australia’s contribution is essentially symbolic and based on the former Abbott government’s exaggeration of the threat posed by the so-called Islamic State. Terrorism needs to be dealt with within a country, although cooperation on dealing with terrorism in a broader sense is helpful. Ultimately the complex situation in the Middle East needs to be solved by the Arabs themselves. American-led Western intervention in the Middle East tends to strengthen opposition and to be counter-productive in that it can produce more terrorists than it removes. Our interests and resources should, instead, be focused in the Asia-Pacific region. A key task for the Turnbull government will therefore be to determine a more appropriate and updated balance in our relations with the US and China, the emerging superpower. Another will be to reinforce the government’s rhetoric with action to underpin our role in the Asia Pacific region, with meaningful action and increased funding. Indonesia will be central to this new approach. Unfortunately, we are not doing as well in our regional engagement as the regular rhetoric and diet of ‘spin’ emerging from Ministerial offices would have the public believe. To give just one example, the study of Asian languages, especially bahasa Indonesia, and Asian history and cultures in our schools and universities has substantially diminished in recent years.1 It is regrettable that many Australians still regard Indonesia as a mysterious, chaotic and corrupt country in which the rule of law is very weak. According to the Lowy Institute’s polls many Australians still see Indonesia as a potential threat. This is largely because of historical fears, its size, its proximity, its assumed potential instability and its activities in West Papua. Equally, many Indonesians—rightly or wrongly—see Australians still as part of the ‘Anglosphere’, as uncouth in Indonesian cultural terms, and harbouring undertones of racism and religious intolerance. These suspicions go back of course to the days of the White Australia Policy and statements of right-wing politicians such as the recently re-elected Pauline Hanson. Many Indonesians I have encountered still remain uncertain about the depth and sincerity of our commitment to our Asian and South West Pacific neighbourhood. I have always found on visits that we are on a sort of ‘good behaviour bond’ in the eyes of many.

Economic Development and Trade This is particularly problematic, given Indonesia is now a growing economic powerhouse. It has, in fact, moved ahead quite strongly in a relatively short time. Under a tightly-controlled political and social system, the Indonesian economy grew rapidly between 1990 and 1996, with an average GDP growth rate of 8%. In 1997, the Asian economic crisis affected the region and damaged the Indonesian

1 

For a detailed account of this decline, see ch 20 in this volume.

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economy as inflation rates sky-rocketed. Since those difficult days, however, Indonesia has taken considerable strides to reform and strengthen many of its economic and political institutions. An Asian Development Bank official who has worked closely on the Indonesian economy for more than a decade once said to me, ‘Economically, Indonesia is a gold mine in a mine field’. I took this to mean that if business and investors could negotiate some of the dangers that undoubtedly exist, very substantial profits can be made. While Indonesia certainly has not matched the economic growth of China and India over the last decade, its middle class is growing rapidly and its domestic economy is also expanding, as has been the case in China and India. A recent Bloomberg view that Indonesia’s economy had stopped emerging is, I believe excessively negative. During President Yudhoyono’s ten years in office, Indonesia moved rapidly ahead. President Jokowi’s mandate at his election in 2014 was to take Indonesia to the next level by sharpening its global competitiveness, creating new jobs and preparing one of the world’s youngest work forces to thrive. Although growth has fallen recently it is still around 5%. Jokowi himself is aware that while, as a nationalist and a man of the people, he will need to make gestures to nationalism, it is an economic necessity to create a favourable investment climate in Indonesia. There are opportunities for Australia to increase both trade with and direct investment in Indonesia. We must, however, move more rapidly than we have so far, especially because other countries, including China and Japan, are already competing for opportunities to invest there.

Security and Diplomatic Relations As former Prime Minister Bob Hawke said in May 1991, Australia should seek security ‘in and with Asia, not against it’. Australia and Indonesia share a common security interest in a stable, peaceful Asian and Pacific region, where growing trade and development can prosper. Advancing the cause of a stable, prosperous, peaceful Asian region in which Australia is fully engaged is a task of enduring importance. Some commentators have suggested that with the recent advances in modern communications, ambassadors and embassies may no longer be necessary. I strongly disagree with this. An effective ambassador backed up by a good embassy can use modern communications to make an instant contribution to developing issues. In my view, the need for culturally sensitive, competent diplomatic representatives on the ground with Indonesian experience at the senior levels has never been greater. It was, for example, a mistake for Indonesia to withdraw its ambassador to Australia over the spying incident in 2013, and for Australia to withdraw our ambassador over the execution of two Australian drug smugglers also in 2015.

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In my experience—reinforced by my presence in Jakarta at the time of Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor—a country most needs an ambassador with access at the highest levels when complex and difficult bilateral issues arise. Until 2015, Australia had never previously withdrawn its ambassador from Indonesia. It did not do so even in the difficult days of President Soekarno’s military konfrontasi of Malaysia, when that country was established in the face of Indonesian opposition, and Australian forces were in combat with Indonesian forces in Sabah and Sarawak, in 1963.

People-to-People Relations We need to develop the habit of undertaking regular and improved consultations on a wide range of policy issues in advance of any major policy decisions we might take that could affect Indonesia. A recent failure to do this, with negative consequences, was the decision—subsequently rescinded—to ban live cattle exports to Indonesia. Another was the handling of the refugee and asylum seekers issue in the region. Yet another was the decision announced during President Obama’s visit to Australia in November 2011 to rotate 2,500 US Marines through Darwin. This type of announcement should be made by our prime minister in our parliament, and not by a visiting allied president. A group from the Australian Institute of International Affairs that toured Indonesia in 2013 said in its report that one of the main impressions members gained was that Indonesia would like to see Australia follow a more independent foreign policy. By that they meant a policy based neither on following US wishes nor fear of China. As former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd once put it, compliance should not equate to alliance in respect of relations with the US and, similarly, in our relations with China, understanding should not equate to agreement. The present debate about China mainly assumes that Australia has no choice but to support American primacy in Asia against a perceived threat of a rising Chinese hegemony. Former Prime Ministers Fraser, Hawke, Keating and Rudd have all argued that this is a simplistic notion that should be challenged. Similar concerns have also been raised by a number of Australian business leaders, academics and commentators. There is, in fact, a danger that adversarial attitudes towards China could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. While China can be expected to resist American ‘hegemony’ over the Asian region, I believe it welcomes a constructive US involvement in Asia. China is not a natural enemy of the US. It is essential that both countries and other major countries in the region, including Indonesia and Australia, develop further the habit of frankly discussing difficulties as they arise within existing cooperative frameworks, such as the G20 and the East Asia Summit. The East Asia Summit is, in fact, becoming a de facto emerging Asia

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Pacific community. This is an important step forward, as no regional problem can now be resolved without the involvement of the US, China, Japan, Russia and Indonesia. In the Asian Century, the Australian government should maintain an unambiguous signal to the Australian public that we welcome the rise of Indonesia and wish to work as closely as possible with it. If mismanaged, failure to accommodate rising powers—whether they be China, India or Indonesia—can lead to instability and frustrate progress towards Asia-Pacific regional cooperation. All countries in our region need continued peace and stability if they are to maintain economic growth and deal peacefully with competition within the region for resources that include food and water.

Conclusion A reality with which Australians—including some of our leaders—may be uncomfortable, but which they need to acknowledge, is that our relationship with Indonesia is more important to us than Indonesia’s relationship with Australia is to Indonesia. Indonesia naturally looks north to other ASEAN countries, China, Japan and India, not south. Australia, of course, also looks north. Our government needs to accept the Indonesian government is opposed to our attitude to asylum seekers and refugees, and our related ‘turn back the boats’ policy. Informed Indonesians I know all see Australia as a large, resource-rich country with a small population, which it is, and regard our policy as both selfish and based on false fears. Another important issue on which our policies may differ is the Islamic State (IS) and terrorism. IS is not a state. It has no air force or navy, but likes to be regarded as a state and is able successfully to exploit the opposition to what it presents as Western intervention. The approach to Turkey and its treatment of Kurdish ‘terrorism’ is another reason why we should focus on our own region of the world. While cooperation between the Indonesian police and the Australian Federal Police is valuable, the former take the view that, essentially, opposition to terrorism needs to be managed within each country. A further important issue about which differences may well arise is climate change. Advancing the cause of a stable, prosperous, peaceful Asian region in which Australia is fully engaged with Indonesia is a task of enduring importance. In this process, our relations with Indonesia are a litmus test. We should try to dispel unfounded fears and ignorance of Indonesia in the Australian community. I would also hope that Indonesia would work to dispel ignorance about Australia amongst the wider Indonesian community. Both countries should continue to weave and widen the tapestry of interlocking contacts at all levels in our two societies. In the greatly changing world we face as the second decade of this century unfolds we

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must respond to change or be left behind. Talk, rhetoric and aspiration must be reinforced by action underpinned and supported by changed attitudes and actions. The importance of our relations with Indonesia in the future, and in the context of the Asian Century, cannot be overstated. It is essential that each country comes to know more about its neighbouring country. There is a fundamental and consistent national interest for Australia in a stable relationship with the very large and different neighbour with which we will share this neighbourhood for the rest of time.

Reference Schwarz, Adam (1999) A Nation in Waiting: Indonesia in the 1990s (2nd edition, St Leonards: Allen and Unwin).

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3 Perceptions and the Capacity to Persuade JOHN McCARTHY

It is now axiomatic that the relationship between Australia and Indonesia has its troubles. This is not surprising. We are neighbours, and neighbours have problems. Nonetheless these difficulties sap our political energy, diminish the actual and potential advantages stemming from the relationship, and, if not addressed, have the long-term capacity to cause us damage. Much of what follows has a salience beyond our country’s dealings with Indonesia but it applies most to our relations with that country. Statecraft or diplomacy is, at bedrock, about persuasion—the ability to entice, cajole, pressure or coerce other countries to act in way that benefits us or is at least consistent with our interests. The spectre of military or economic might is central here. Persuasion is also a more subtle concept. It is based not only on what a government, corporation or army says and does but on the allure of a society—and hence its ability to attract others to its ways. The capacity to persuade also derives from a nation’s ability to understand and better engage its broader, international environment. These aspects of the capacity to persuade are increasingly addressed under the rubric of soft power. Persuasion is different to advocacy, which is to argue a case on a specific topic or issue. This distinction also places emphasis on the importance in statecraft of the longer-term value of building understanding and trust, rather than the expenditure of diplomatic energy on shorter-term transactional gains. Australia as a nation has generally been adept and thorough in building and encouraging the sort of diplomatic machinery in the region—including with Indonesia—that has allowed us to engage our neighbours to the benefit of our interests. We have been less dexterous in developing our qualities as a nation as elements in our diplomacy and in effectively projecting those qualities. Moreover, the eccentricities of Australian political discourse are not always benevolently received elsewhere, above all in Indonesia. We do some things well. When properly led in our regional endeavours, we have been good at both the original thinking and grunt work of conventional

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diplomacy. In the post-World War Two period, we developed strong commercial links with Japan and Korea. We were to the forefront of pushing the China relationship in the eighties. The merits of our involvement in Vietnam are rightly disputed but it energised and gave structure to our enmeshment with the rest of Southeast Asia. From about 2002 onward—and not before time—we began to put our dealings with India on a solid, long-term footing, and did so with accomplishment. In a regional context, we were the first dialogue partner of ASEAN. We were the co-initiator of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and the initiator of the APEC summit process. Former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans created much of the intellectual basis of the ASEAN Regional Forum. More than any other country, Australia created the framework for the Cambodia settlement that ended the last chapter of the Indochina wars that had rent South East Asia since the 1950s. We were instrumental in the expansion of the East Asia Summit to include the US and Russia. Specifically with Indonesia, we acted perceptively and in their interests in the lead-up to their independence. The Timor Gap Treaty was, at its time, sensible and far-sighted. The 1995 security agreement, while jettisoned by Indonesia during the Timor crisis, was revived in the form of the Lombok Treaty in 2006. It is a sensible, if not wholly successful, confidence-building measure. There exists a plethora of bilateral structures for security and economic dialogue.

Australia’s Diplomatic Challenge All that said, Australia faces a particular challenge, one that impacts on our ­capacity to persuade. It is a challenge of cultural divides. Most countries have significant characteristics in common with their neighbours. Most Latin American countries, for example, have a similar colonial experience, religion, and stage of development. Arab nations share language, religion and a common perception of their humiliation at the hands of the West. Confucian cultures stem from China and have in common patterns of family, social and business interaction. The Western political tradition—evolving from early Christendom and from democratic concepts developed in Europe from the twelfth century onward— bred a commonality of political and cultural outlook within Europe and, later, in the countries settled by Europeans, principally by the British. The outlook of the countries colonised by the Europeans, but not settled by them, was shaped by a blend of different influences, including that of the colonising power, but also their own rich histories, political and social structures, religions, and so on. The primary foreign policy focus of all countries with a Western democratic background and tradition, (except New Zealand and the US, which is sui generis), is on countries similar to themselves.

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Australia is different. The other Anglophones and the Europeans matter hugely to us but the countries that fall within our primary foreign policy focus—our neighbours—differ from us in terms of political systems, culture and history. We thus face a cultural divide with our external environment that countries like Canada, the Netherlands or Sweden do not—or at least not to the same extent.1 This cultural divide is also thrown into relief because in recent decades, security and economic issues have not created major divisions between Australia and our neighbours. During the Cold War, we were on the same side of the ideological gap dividing the Western alliance, Japan and most of the ASEAN nations on the one hand, and the communist powers on the other. Hence security issues, perhaps most frequently the cause of difficulties between countries, reinforced rather than disturbed our relations with our neighbours. In the post-Cold War era, we remain undivided from most of our more immediate neighbours by security issues. Most countries in the region share unease about the rise of China and the threats of Islamic fundamentalism, even if they have different views about how best to approach these issues. And most of our economic difficulties have tended to be with our biggest trading partners, Japan and the US, rather than with our neighbours.

And Now to Indonesia During the Soekarno period, Indonesia tended to be seen through the prism of the Cold War. Indonesia was not on the other side but, given developments in nearby Indochina, there were fears about where Indonesia would go. Security issues were therefore central to our emerging relationship with the Indonesians. They guided

1  Even a casual appraisal of the bilateral difficulties we have in the region suggests that many stem from differing cultural factors. Differences with Indonesia are the most obvious. On the wiretaps question, it is instructive to note the difference in the reactions of Germany’s Merkel and Brazil’s Roussef to revelations that they had been bugged by the US. Roussef ’s reaction was much the stronger, and more akin in scope to Yudhoyono’s reaction to Australia’s management of the issue. Most differences with Thailand have related to Thai actions contrary to democratic norms, for example, the recent coup. Thailand has difficulties with most Western countries (Britain and the United States in particular) but we are the only such country in the region. Issues of difference have arisen with Malaysia and Singapore over executions. In the case of China, the South China Sea question—a security issue—is probably the most contentious problem Australia faces. Others have tended to revolve around Tibet, relating to religious and cultural freedoms. Yet these issues are not particularly relevant to other regional countries, especially ASEAN countries. The five most difficult bilateral issues with which I dealt during my five years as an Australian diplomat in India were: Uranium exports; the perception that Australia had sold out to China; the Haneef affair; the row over allegations of racist comments by an Indian cricketer about an Australian team member; and the Indian student crisis. Three of these five issues had a racial component. Arguably the most difficult set of bilateral problems with Japan in recent years did not relate to beef or rice but to whaling, with community views playing a major role in shaping the policies of each country.

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our thinking on Confrontation and were relevant to our policy on Irian Jaya (as Papua was then known). Since then, Australia’s diplomatic efforts have been consumed mainly in managing the impact of the cultural gap with Indonesia. Initially, Australia saw the East Timor issue primarily in security terms. From a security perspective, Australia (and the US) saw merit in East Timor’s incorporation into Indonesia. It is not surprising that a year after the fall of Saigon there would be apprehension about a leftist East Timor somewhat akin to, say, Mozambique in political complexion. It was, however, Australia’s reaction to the killing of five Australian journalists in Balibo in 1975, and the subsequent military occupation of East Timor and the cruelty that followed, that consolidated the division over this issue, which lasted until the independence ballot in 1999. Some Indonesians saw the 1999 loss of East Timor in security terms because of its potential to stimulate separatism elsewhere in Indonesia. But the main reaction was that it was a humiliation inflicted on Indonesia by the West, of which Australia was, in this instance, the most prominent actor. Other problems have arisen because Australia has been seen as impugning the dignity of Indonesian leaders. These problems included the ban on Australian journalists in 1986 after the Australian media reported on the Soeharto family’s alleged corruption, and, in 2013, poor Australian political management of revelations about the bugging of President Yudhoyono and his wife. Indonesians are acutely conscious of suggestions of condescension or disrespect. For example, national dignity was as much at stake as economic factors when Australia imposed a ban on the export of live cattle to Indonesia in 2011. Australian views about Indonesia were formed in the Soeharto era and were premised on the autocratic nature of the regime, East Timor, poverty and corruption. Despite the fact that Indonesia has been a democracy since 1999, and East Timor is no longer an issue, these views have not changed as much as they should have. Polling conducted by the Lowy Institute for International Policy highlights this discrepancy, reporting that only a third of Australians included in the poll regard Indonesia as a democracy.2

The Power of Perceptions It is common for foreign policy practitioners to observe that it is power and mutual interests that count, and it does not matter much whether or not countries have ‘warm feelings’ towards each other. However, relationships are easier to manage if they do. Politicians react to public opinion and the latter is driven by public

2 

For a detailed discussion of Australian polling of attitudes to Indonesia, see ch 5.

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perceptions, not only about the specific problem but also about the country or countries with which the problem exists. In an epoch when globalisation is pushing more knowledge around, it is not unreasonable to postulate that people just know more than two decades ago— whether in New York, Central Java or Andhra Pradesh. And as democracy becomes stronger, as it clearly has in Indonesia, public perceptions impact more on a country’s leadership than when that country was an autocracy. Both these propositions suggest that a better-informed population in a more democratic country is now logically more important in influencing policies towards another country than hitherto, and, furthermore, that general community attitudes towards another country matter. In recent years, there has been increased work done—largely through polling— on how countries are perceived by others in terms of specific sectors like governance or high culture or, in an economic context, manufacturing or tourism, and also in more general or holistic contexts. Systems have evolved to measure how a country is perceived across a number of sectors. Results are calculated to arrive at overall reputation. These gauges are relevant in terms of how Indonesia and Australia see each other, but caution needs to be exercised for a number of reasons. First, in looking at the results of several polls, overall ratings of a country’s reputation, however assessed, tend to favour developed countries. Developed countries will tend to fill between eight to ten of the top ten spots.3 This appears to be the case whether developed or developing countries are doing the assessing. In other words, Indians are as likely to rate Sweden in the top ten as are Canadians. Second, some results are self-evident in much of the sectoral polling: the ­Germans and Koreans do well on manufacturing, the British and Norwegians on governance. Third, timing inevitably is crucial. A 2015 Lowy Institute poll of Australian attitudes towards other countries put Indonesia between Egypt and Russia—at least partially a reflection of public sentiment around the time when Australians Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran were executed in Indonesia for drug trafficking. In India, polls taken within a year of the Indian student crisis in Australia (2009–10) put the country as the least liked on the entire list. Japanese polls, which usually show Australian and Japanese views of each in a positive light, demonstrated different, more adverse, mutual perceptions when the whaling issue was at its height. Finally, the methodology used in some polling can be imprecise, and, in a lot of polling, answers do not show how strongly a respondent feels about a particular issue or where that issue fits in the range of his or her concerns. But all that said, certain trends do come through. Lowy Institute polls show that Indonesia has constantly rated low in terms of Australian perceptions of other countries drawn up over a period and that Australian ignorance about

3 

See, for example, London-based consultancy, Portland (2016).

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I­ndonesia runs high.4 Polling in Indonesia about Australia has varied but suggests that we rank lower than most developed countries in Indonesia’s perception of us—both in general terms and by sector. Although a 2012 poll, taken when Australia’s relationship with Indonesia was arguably at its most positive, put us very high, Indonesians generally rate Australia lower than do most other ASEAN nations. But then, the sceptic would argue, so what?

Soft Power Much of the work done in the past couple of decades on gauging perceptions relates to thinking about ‘soft power’. How much does this matter? The concept in its classical form was developed by Professor Joseph Nye of ­Harvard University from the ’80s onward to describe a nation’s ability to attract and persuade, in contradistinction to its ‘hard power’ or actual or capacity to persuade or coerce through actual or potential use of military or economic power. Nye saw soft power as comprised of culture (in the broad sense) plus political ideals and government policies. He also argued that, to be effective, soft power needed to be deployed alongside military or economic power, the final amalgam being termed ‘smart power’. Nye saw the US’ soft power as critical to its victory in the Cold War, a view incidentally shared in China. Nye assessed—and this was supported by polling—that US soft power declined with the invasion or Iraq and grew again after the election of Obama. There have been various glosses placed on Nye’s doctrine by think tanks and market research firms. These often have a commercial focus, assessing a country’s reputation with a view to recommending policies to develop a national ‘brand’, which is, in turn, intended to attract others to engage in economic dealings with the country in question. At bedrock, this approach is about the application to nations of marketing techniques for products. And, of course, the things we do and say all contribute to perceptions, our soft power and our capacity to persuade. When we couch our security rhetoric in terms 4  Caution has to be exercised about methodology in polling, particularly in various measures of soft power. One pollster, for example, only drew on polling in G8 countries. Different pollsters use different sectors to aggregate soft power—some placing emphasis on economic factors, others on governance issues. Polling commissioned by Austrade in 2010 showed, however, that Indonesians ranked Australia much lower in terms of general or holistic image than our overall ranking, with one poll putting us at 17 when our overall rating was 3. While it is hard to draw empirically-based conclusions, these perceptions show up in relatively low Indonesian scoring about Australian exports or even as a tourist destination (where our scores are generally very high). Australia has usually ranked high as an education destination, coming sixth in the Austrade poll in 2010. Lowy Institute polling in Indonesia in 2012 showed Australia much more positively, with a 62% rating, than six years earlier, when it achieved a rating of only 51%. Of the 21 countries about which views were sought, only Japan, the US and Singapore scored higher. There was overwhelming support for much closer Indonesian government engagement with Australia, particularly in education. The 2015 Lowy Institute poll on Australia however showed Australian perceptions of Indonesia at an all-time low—on a par with Russia.

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of unalloyed adherence to US views, we risk having our input in security discussions being perceived as an echo of the US approaches. This view undermines the value of our contributions. When our unions make life difficult for foreign companies investing here, argue against sensible business visa policy or question our trade commitments, foreign companies will give priority, other things being equal, to investing elsewhere. The importance of overall reputation is harder to gauge, whether it is to be tested globally, regionally, or in the eyes of another nation. At one end of the spectrum it obviously does matter. Iraq and Syria are at the bottom of the scale in most systems and no one wants anything much to do with them on anything. There is also clear evidence that the better a country’s overall reputation, the more likely are others to invest in it or visit it. As another illustration: after the Indian student crisis, polling in India by the Reputation Institute showed Australia at the bottom of the list in terms of overall reputation, not just in the obvious sectors such as education or a place to visit. Hence the issue damaged Australia not just where it would be expected to do so, but across the board. Nye’s version of soft power is, however, underdone for the Australian experience. New thinking from East Asia,5 where nations have a particular fascination with the soft power concept, offers important insights into soft power beyond the commercially-oriented, short-term value of polling and brand surveys. This thinking, although still in development, points to new models of soft power that might hold to the complexity of soft power’s multifaceted nature, in particular distinguishing attractiveness (affective soft power) from legitimacy (normative soft power). Affective soft power, resting in an actor’s cultural richness, economic competitiveness, political stability, and high quality education, facilitates the emotional attraction of others. It is useful in raising an actor’s profile and visibility, and drawing others into its company or position. This is where much of the soft power discussion has been focused, particularly amongst Western nations. By contrast, normative soft power is generated through behaviours and actions such as the observation of international norms, responses to international humanitarian disaster, economic contributions and development assistance, and other activities aimed at building trust through cooperation. When we start to think of soft power in more complex and nuanced ways we start to understand reputation as being similarly multifaceted and dynamic. The various facets of reputation offer different potential for a nation’s ­persuasive capacity. Attractive soft power is important in raising visibility and profile. But legitimacy— developed through consistent policy and behaviour, informed by national values, and demonstrated through the nature and quality of our ­interactions—builds understanding, familiarity and trust. Where these qualities exist in relationships at the individual and national levels persuasion becomes an easier task.

5 

See, for example, Sook and Melissen (2011).

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In terms of its impact on our capacity to persuade, reputation does count. Irrespective of the conduct of other countries, it is generally better to keep one’s word. Hence, when we relinquish our aid undertakings, neighbours must wonder about the veracity of future undertakings. Countries like the UK and France, more affected than we were by the Global Financial Crisis, kept their word. We did not. Our rhetoric and actions on boats creates an image in the region of an uncaring nation, irrespective of the other positive aspects of our immigration policies. It undermines our credibility as a country, which is basically a decent one. When we talk of the values that we would like to see prevail in the region, we are open to the charge of hypocrisy. This damages our capacity to persuade. In the final analysis there is also a very basic question we have to ask ourselves. How do we as a nation want to be seen, whether or not our direct interests are in question? Very few individuals are indifferent to their reputation. Equally, if polled, few would wish their country to be poorly regarded—globally, regionally or by other individual countries. In the end, that sentiment in itself amounts to a national interest. If we accept that perceptions in each country of the other have adverse aspects and impact on our capacity to persuade, we must decide what we should do. These issues and ideas for addressing them have been around for a while. If we are to make progress, much will turn not only on new approaches but also on doing what we do better and in a sustained and bipartisan way.

What Now? Three avenues suggest themselves if Australia is to improve its capacity to persuade in the region as a whole, but with particular reference to Indonesia: consideration of our political culture, soft power for an Australian context, and public diplomacy.

Political Culture There are certain practical steps that need to be taken at a political level to adapt— not change—our political culture better to deal with our neighbourhood, and particularly with Indonesia. Many would deem such a suggestion a waste of time or plain silly. Others would see it as somehow un-Australian. However, we have long been prone to self-criticism about how to deal with the region without coming up with too many ideas for getting things more right and less wrong. It might be worth trying to do something about it. I am not advocating weakness—above all, when we are right. Australian national interest, when properly weighed, must always be paramount. The maturation and adaptation of our political culture to better deal with the region has in the end to be done by the political class itself—whether i­nitially

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through work done in parliamentary committees, between ministerial staff, or through wider community consultation. We should be clear about limitations. Australia and regional countries will continue to affront one another. ­Indonesia and Australia will do so quite often. Even after the advent of democracy in I­ndonesia, the manner in which political leaders are treated, particularly by the media, is different to Australia. Indonesians will continue to be sensitive to perceived condescension or slights to their sovereignty. There will be aspects of ­Indonesian behaviour that Australians will simply dislike, and quite rightly so. Certain steps could, however, be taken without excessive changes to the way we do government business and without extra cost. Some of these concepts are not new, and many would have application elsewhere in the region, that is, beyond our dealings with Indonesia alone. A first suggestion would be to ensure that decisions, particularly those taken in haste (such as in response to a story in the morning’s media while parliament is sitting), reflect proper consideration of the likely impact, where relevant, of that decision on our dealings with a foreign country. This is not to argue that the adverse consequences for our relations with a country should prevail in a decision, if the other outcomes of that decision are judged better to serve our national interest. Rather, it is to suggest that better mechanisms need to be in place—just as they are for formal cabinet decisions—for the matter to be considered properly. It may not be coincidental that when at least two bad decisions affecting our dealings with Indonesia were made—on the cattle issue and the wiretaps affair— Kevin Rudd and Julie Bishop, the respective foreign ministers at the time, were out of the country. Interestingly when the David Jenkins affair broke in 1986, Foreign Minister Mochtar was not in Jakarta. Foreign ministers can help. No ­special formulae suggest themselves to avoid bad decisions taken too quickly, other than improved systems within departments or between ministers and ­ministers’ offices, and there does have to be a bi-partisan approach. A second proposal is to move to a hotline system that actually works. To be effective this needs to be at the level of both head of government and foreign minister. But it is no use unless it is used sparingly and for real emergencies. Use of such a method—even without a specific apology—might have avoided the worst consequences of the Yudhoyono bugging affair. But it should not be used, as it has so often been, as an Australian domestic political tool to show that our prime minister has done his or her utmost on an issue, or to reflect his or her personal relationship with his opposite number. It might be noted, however that the ­Indonesians—for whom the telephone call does not have the same appeal as an instrument of statecraft as it does in Australian political culture—are well aware of the Australian tendency to brief the media immediately after the call: not merely on the fact of the call but to establish the Australian version of what transpired in the minds of the domestic audience. A third proposal is to seek to reach a bipartisan consensus on dealing with Indonesia on the basis of sustained hard work. Our politicians need to avoid partisan point scoring or announcements that, through the rhetoric a­ ccompanying

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them, raise expectations which, when not met, exacerbate disappointment. We should have fewer false dawns. A parliamentary committee could be a place to start.

Soft Power and the Australian Domestic Dimension Soft power is subject to diverse interpretations. Moreover, the phrase has been seized upon throughout the community to define activities with an international dimension that do not clearly fit into the category of military or economic power but which suit the requirements and aspirations of those involved in that activity. This includes, for example, exchange in areas of high culture, sport, education, science. Nye’s soft power, developed for the American context, is insufficient for other contexts. While middle powers look to it as a chance to gain influence, or at least ‘level the playing field’ in the global arena, there is still much to understand about how soft power is comprised and leveraged especially for persuasive impact or value. The current focus on commercially oriented short-term soft power schemas obscures a deeper understanding and the wider potential of soft power. It is useful to move away from that trap and look at Australian soft power in terms of those parts of our national entity that attract and persuade other countries to act in ways that further our interests. Important features are governance, education, and skill as miners and farmers or in science and technology, not to mention being a pleasant place to visit. All these aspects of Australia persuade and attract other countries to act in our interests, either by benefitting us through interaction in the areas themselves, or because our overall reputation as a nation is a good one. Our soft power is lacking in terms of our education about, and knowledge of, the region in which we live. This adversely affects our general reputation but also means that we are less well equipped than we should be to take advantage of those areas in which we can demonstrate soft power. The areas in which we are not sufficiently striving to educate ourselves are well rehearsed elsewhere. They were extensively canvassed in the late lamented Asian Century White Paper. From time to time, there is recognition in the Australian community that we know too little about our neighbourhood, that this shows, and that we need to lift our game. We did this in the post-war Colombo Plan period, then in the ‘70s, and again in the ‘90s. These surges have been followed by ebb tides, in which we tend to reflect that what we are is good enough. We then cope less well with our region. Our reputation in Asia for blowing hot and cold is further developed and our interests suffer. Quite simply, it is time that we looked at what we need to do as a priority bipartisan endeavour. The longer we wait, the harder will be the task. Of all our regional relationships that would benefit most from such an approach, none would be more prominent than that with Indonesia.

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Public Diplomacy While conventional diplomacy is about the furtherance, through persuasion, of national interests with other governments, public diplomacy is about pursuit of those interests, again through persuasion, with foreign publics and institutions. Public diplomacy ranges from propaganda (as used extensively during wartime or, as with the Russian state broadcasts of today, through straightforward government statements extolling policies) to a broad range of activities intended to increase awareness abroad of a country’s soft power assets. To this end, public diplomacy has been described as soft power’s key instrument. These activities include visits to make future foreign leaders aware of national policies, scholarship programs, films, international television, and display of high and popular culture, including sport. In the final analysis, it is about creating perceptions of us that generate a climate of receptiveness to the ideas or policies we seek to further or to project. Two caveats should be entered. First, as John Adams said, facts are obstinate things. Public diplomacy will not allow us to convince others that Australia never had a White Australia Policy or allow Jakarta to claim that the behaviour of the Indonesian military in Timor was benevolent. But public diplomacy can help in ‘myth busting’. When validated through consistent policy and behaviour, public diplomacy can demonstrate that Australia is unequivocally multicultural, or that Indonesia is now one of the most democratic countries in Southeast Asia. Equally, the degree to which a government’s public diplomacy will affect perceptions of that country is usually overshadowed by all the other information channels that affect reputation: the media, tourism, trade, sport, education—and even word of mouth. But public diplomacy does make a difference. Public diplomacy has always been the poor relation in Australian foreign policy implementation. This is staggering when one takes into account the particular cultural challenge to Australian diplomacy. Canada spends more on public diplomacy than Australia spends on the whole of its foreign service. Excluding public broadcasting, France spends an estimated A$1.9 billion, Germany A$1.6 billion, the UK A$350 million, and the Netherlands A$100 million. Australia spends A$12 million, of which, in most years, our Indonesia program will receive about A$1 million (not including soft power/public diplomacy relevant programs such as the Australia Awards scholarships or the New Colombo Plan). None of the savings achieved with the abolition of Australia Network were put towards public diplomacy. There are some bright spots. Increasingly public diplomacy incorporates use of social media including units in embassies. To its credit, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) is now putting some emphasis on public diplomacy, particularly in Indonesia, where the social media unit is making a genuine impact. Here the focus is on building relationships and people-to-people networks. This is important but its impact is incremental and long term. Given the importance

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of the cultural divide as a challenge to our diplomacy, the amount of resources devoted to public diplomacy in Indonesia (or for that matter anywhere else in the region) has historically been pitifully inadequate. It has always been hard for any country to justify public diplomacy because it is difficult to measure its impact. It is somewhat like religion: there are true believers and non-believers with a wide range in between but only a minority reject it outright. In the end, logic suggests that if we accept the need to persuade as an aspect of our regional engagement, and that persuasion must reach into areas beyond government, it is not only a mistake to neglect it, it is grossly negligent of Australia’s national interest internationally. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of Indonesia.

Conclusion We have to grasp as a nation—not just as an intellectual exercise but as a national imperative—that Australia’s diplomatic challenge is different to that of others like us. An effective capacity to persuade is thus more important. Legitimacy, basic decency, and—let us face it—skill, underpin persuasion. It is incremental and long term, developed through consistent policy positions, behaviour and public diplomacy, all of which reflect our national values. This is most salient in our dealings with Indonesia.

References Portland (2016) ‘Soft Power 30’, . Sook Jong Lee and Melissen, Jan (eds) (2011) Public Diplomacy and Soft Power in East Asia (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

4 President Joko Widodo’s Foreign Policy: Implications for Indonesia-Australia Relations EVI FITRIANI

Countries may choose with whom they want to maintain close relations but they cannot choose their geographical location. Whether they like it or not, countries have to be able to live with their neighbours. In an ideal situation, neighbouring countries will have productive relations and support each other at both governmental and societal levels. In a worst-case scenario, they should strive not to upset each other and should certainly avoid war. Indonesia and Australia are a pair of neighbouring countries that have had very dynamic relations. Differing in their culture and religious demography, the two countries have often found themselves adopting opposing positions on global and regional issues. Suspicion and ignorance remain paramount in their bilateral ties, despite a long history of traditional relations dating back to centuries ago. At both governmental and societal levels, sporadic incidents have frequently hijacked Indonesia-Australia ties, sometimes damaging the relationship in the process. At the societal level, relations are variously close and even warm, or marked by ignorance and even dislike. At both governmental and societal levels, leaders play a critical role, shaping the relationship while also being influenced by internal and external pressures. Changes in the political leadership of either country often affect bilateral ties. The transition from President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to President Joko Widodo in Indonesia in 2014 attracted significant attention from the Australian media and academia. Despite generating initial enthusiasm in Australia during the presidential election and at the outset of his administration, President Widodo rapidly became the second ‘least admired’ foreign leader in the eyes of Australians after he refused to pardon two Australian drug traffickers (Oliver 2015). By contrast, Indonesians have paid little attention to Australia’s leadership changes, whether from Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to Julia Gillard, back to Rudd, and then to Tony Abbott and, most recently, Malcolm Turnbull. Despite these differing levels of public attention, the coming and going of leaders in each country has significantly shaped Indonesia-Australia ties.

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Leaders exert an important influence owing to their individual personalities and their understanding of the importance of the bilateral relationship. This chapter focuses on Indonesia’s foreign policy during Widodo’s presidency and how it has affected Indonesian-Australian relations, bearing in mind that he has only been in office for approximately three years. To situate Widodo’s contribution to bilateral ties appropriately within a longer-term context, however, the chapter will also discuss Indonesia-Australia ties prior to Widodo’s election. Recognising that Widodo has not acted in a vacuum, this chapter will also discuss his interaction with Tony Abbott, who was Australian Prime Minister from September 2013 until September 2015. This chapter comprises four parts. The first looks briefly at close historical connections between Indonesia and Australia, too often overlooked and ignored. The second discusses the two countries’ relations during Yudhoyono’s presidency. The third part examines Indonesia’s foreign policy during the early years of Widodo’s presidency, with a focus on Indonesia-Australia relations. Finally, the conclusion highlights the latest developments in Indonesia-Australia relations and discusses how leaders of the two countries have shaped bilateral ties.

Close Historical Ties Many people tend to look at relations between Indonesia and Australia only over a short time frame, based on semi-regular recurring incidents over the past two decades. By contrast, some scholars have investigated ancient linkages and archaeological sites to prove the existence of close economic and cultural relations between the eastern part of Indonesia and the northern part of Australia. The extensive writings of scholars such as Macknight (1976), Chaloupka (1996), and Knapp and Sutherland (2004) are rarely referenced by international relations scholars, who focus on more short-term observations of the two countries’ interactions. Arguably, the long-term historical framework not only provides a more holistic picture of the two countries’ relations but also demonstrates changes in relations. Works by Clark and May (2013) and Reid (2013) reveal a significant change in relations that took place as result of the fact that traditional linkages between people from Indonesia and Australia could not prevail after each country adopted the Westphalian state system—a system in which the state holds (almost) absolute sovereignty over territory and controls a nation’s borders. A longer-term historical framework also reveals Australia’s historical engagement with Asia (Milner and Quilty 1998; Ganter 2013; Thomas 2013), which started long before Prime Minister Bob Hawke initiated an ‘Australian’ approach to Asia. As Indonesia has been the bridge for Australia’s linkages to Asia since ancient times, Australians and Indonesians are actually not strangers to each other. They have been involved in regional trading networks for centuries. It has been the demographic change in Australia over the last 200 years that now makes the two countries look strange to each other.

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Relations between Indonesia and Australia date back at least several centuries to when people from South Sulawesi used to collect trepang (sea cucumbers) in the coastal area of the region now called the Northern Territory of Australia. From the port of Makassar in South Sulawesi, Bugis, Buton and Bajo people embarked on dangerous sea journeys via the Arafura Sea to the coastline of Arnhem Land and the Kimberly in northern Australia to collect trepang (Fox 1998; Macknight 1976; 2013). Archaeological and linguistic studies in northern Australia have indicated that trepangers from the eastern parts of Indonesia also interacted in social and cultural spheres with indigenous peoples in northern Australia (Brady 2013; Tacon and May 2013; Thomas 2013). Later in the nineteenth century, people from other parts of eastern Indonesia, as well as Dutch businessmen, sailed to northern Australia seeking pearls and pearl shell (Reid 2013). These traditional economic and cultural relations between Indonesians and Australians indicate close societal level ties in the past. The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 all but severed these traditional interactions between eastern Indonesian and northern Australian people, however (Reid 2013). More recently, the strict border controls Australia has instituted since the government of Prime Minister John Howard have truly stopped these traditional linkages, underpinned by ‘the politics of refugees, asylum-seekers and people smugglers operating in Australia’s Northern maritime border zone’ (Clark and May 2013). The Second World War was another period of close interaction between Indonesia and Australia. Australia provided a safe haven for exiled Dutch colonial rulers after the Netherlands’ East Indies fell to the Japanese. The Australian military also occupied North and East Kalimantan and parts of eastern Indonesia from 1945 to 1946, following the defeat of the Japanese (Reid 2013). Nevertheless, the Labor Party Prime Minister, Ben Chifley, who governed Australia at the end of the war, indirectly supported Indonesia’s independence on 17 August 1945 when he stated ‘… [T]he policy of this country is that every other country should be free to choose its own form of government’ (House of Representatives of Australia, as quoted in Adil 1973). In fact, the Labor government formally changed Australian policy to support Indonesian independence in mid-1947, and Indonesia later chose Australia to be its representative in the final UN negotiations that led to the Dutch decision to transfer sovereignty (Belgium represented the Dutch and the US chaired) (Pietch 2010, as quoted from George 1980). Various groups in Australia also supported Indonesian independence, including the trade union movement, which refused to load the war and trade ships of the Dutch colonial governmentin-exile in Australian ports (Adil 1973; Agung 1990; Reid 2013, Pietch 2015). Moreover, in the period after independence in 1945, President Soeharto developed a personal and close engagement with Prime Minister Paul Keating towards the end of his presidency, a relationship that eventually resulted in closer relations between the two countries as well. Among his Asian-oriented policies, Keating initiated a regular program to send senior government officers to Asian countries, including Indonesia, called the ‘Leading Australia’s Future in Asia’ (LAFIA) scheme, intended to help Australia understand its Asian neighbours.

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Keating’s predecessor as Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, is credited as the first Australian prime minister to have an explicitly Asia-oriented vision. These positive episodes notwithstanding, numerous other incidents have damaged bilateral ties throughout the history of Indonesia and Australia as modern nation-states. In the post-war period, Indonesia was perceived as a threat to Australian security because the newly-independent country was unstable, supported by what was seen by Australians as a radical nationalist spirit, and prone to communist insurgencies (Adil 1973; Agung 1990). Even though the Labor Party was supportive of Indonesian self-determination, a Labor Foreign Minister, H V Evatt, frequently expressed his desire to keep the Netherlands’ East Indies intact due to the fear of having an immediate border with a fragile and communistprone country like Indonesia (Adil 1973, pp. 29–30). The perception of Indonesia as a threat to Australia strengthened during the tenure of Liberal Party Prime Minister Robert Menzies, who governed Australia from 1939 to 1941, and was Prime Minister again from 1949 to 1966 (Defense Studies Project 1966; Lyon 1969; Grant 1972; Adil 1973). Four factors from the Indonesian side strengthened the perception: Soekarno’s attitude of hostility to Western countries, which he identified as neo-colonialists; his assertive approach to integrating West Papua into the Republic of Indonesia; Indonesia’s close relations with the Soviet Union and China, the two biggest nations in the communist bloc; and the revolutionary, radical character of Indonesian nationalism and political developments, which gave space to communist and radical elements. Four factors from the Australian side also contributed to the perception: Australia’s close relations with the US; its self-identification as a Western power condemned by Soekarno as a part of a neo-colonialist club; its close proximity to, and border with, Indonesia; and its feeling of vulnerability due to geographical isolation and a weak defence posture. In the second half of the 1950s, the anti-Western policy of Soekarno’s government, and his close relations with big communist countries like the Soviet Union and China, caused alarm in the Australian government, which by that time was embedded in the Western alliance led by the US. The fear was such that Menzies even ordered a jet bomber that could reach Jakarta (Defence Studies Project 1966). Similarly, Indonesians perceived Australia as a bad neighbour during the Menzies era (Agung 1990). While the Labor government under Prime Minister Chifley had been successful in nurturing goodwill towards Australia in Indonesia by applying a pro-Indonesia policy, the Menzies government adopted more antagonistic behaviour towards Indonesia. During his tenure, the Liberal Prime Minister launched the staunchest pro-Dutch policy on the West Papua case (Agung 1990: 199), dragged Australia into a military pact with other western powers in the Australia, New Zealand and the US Treaty (ANZUS)1 in 1952, and, in 1954, built a security alliance with

1  ANZUS was created in 1951 by the US as a part of its Containment Policy to prevent Communist expansion in Southeast Asia. However, it is likely that the purpose of Australia’s accession to this ColdWar institution involved targeting Indonesia.

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regional countries that were considered unfriendly neighbours by Indonesia under the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO).2 Indeed, upon request by Britain and as a member of the British Commonwealth, Australia deployed its military in Malaysia3 to north Borneo to help with the defence of Malaysia in the Confrontation with Indonesia. All these policies seemed to derive from Menzies’ concern about an ‘aggressive threat’ from Indonesia (Agung 1990: 199). The perception that Indonesia—whether strong or weak—is an inherent threat to Australia has sparked much debate. The fact is that this perception has prevailed to the present day in some parts of Australian society (Dibb and Brabin-Smith 2007; Fitriani 2012; White 2013). Various events have not only strengthened Australia’s perception of Indonesia as a threat, but have also given rise to anti-Indonesia sentiment among some parts of Australian society. Most significant amongst these events were the integration of East Timor into Indonesia and the assassination of Australian journalists in Balibo, East Timor, in 1975. Ever since, Australia has become a safe haven for anti-Indonesia groups, including separatists, and for individual opponents of the Indonesian government. The Australian media has also adopted a critical stance towards Indonesia, especially during Soeharto’s presidency. Even taking into consideration that the media, by its nature, have their own framing agenda, the Australian media seems to focus on negative news about Indonesia. The early 2000s was another important period that contributed to difficulties between Indonesia and Australia. Bomb blasts in Bali in 2002 and 2005 killed numerous Australian tourists, while the Australian Embassy in Jakarta was also the target of a terrorist bombing attack in 2004. These blasts fuelled antiMuslim sentiment in Australia, in line with the US-led ‘war on terrorism’ that emerged after the 11 September 2001 terror attacks in that country. As the country with the largest Muslim population in the world, Indonesia suffered both in terms of its security and its reputation. The arrest and 20-year sentence handed down to Australian drug trafficker Schapelle Corby in Bali in 2005 also spurred further negative sentiment towards Indonesia in Australia. Following this case, Indonesia was deeply disappointed by Australia’s intervention in its domestic affairs. In 2006, the Australian government granted asylum to 43 West Papuans who fled from their land in January of that year claiming their lives were under threat. As a result, the Indonesian government, for the first time in its history, recalled its ambassador in Canberra. Another diplomatic crisis occurred when Australia imposed a short-lived ban on live cattle exports to 2  SEATO was established in the wake of the Indochina Crisis in September 1954 to contain the spread of Communist influence in Southeast Asia. It consisted mostly of extra-regional states such as the US, the UK, France, Australia, New Zealand and Pakistan, but included some regional countries, namely Thailand and the Phillipines. SEATO was disbanded after the Vietnam War (US Department of State nd). Again, Australian involvement in this American global institution of the Cold War was intended to help the superpower secure protection against any threat (Modelski 1960), including from Indonesia. 3  As part of its commitment to SEATO to combat communist insurgencies in Malaya, Australia sent troops, military equipment and vehicles to be stationed in the new state of Malaysia and placed under the Commonwealth Far East Strategic Reserve (FESR); see Pfennigwerth (2012).

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Indonesia in 2011 after reports of animal cruelty in slaughterhouses. This resulted in more negative media coverage of Indonesia in Australia, even though the ban was lifted after protests by Australian cattle exporters. Irregular migration is another issue that has damaged Indonesian-Australian relations in recent times. Australia has a phobia of an influx of Muslim migrants from conflict-affected countries in the Middle East and South Asia, and has blamed Indonesia for taking insufficient action to prevent such migrants from embarking on sea voyages to Australia (Hugo, Tan and Napitupulu c2014). Indeed, the Australian media frequently reports on the role of people smuggling networks in Indonesia in facilitating irregular migrants. In order to escape its responsibilities as a party to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, Australia has provided a range of incentives to Indonesia to ensure that irregular migrants do not reach Australian soil (Nethery and Gordyn 2014). When Prime Minister Tony Abbott launched a tough policy of ‘turning back the boats’ to Indonesia for irregular migrants, Indonesia’s then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Marty Natalegawa, replied that Indonesia’s neighbour was shifting, rather than sharing, responsibility (Bachelard 2014). The Indonesian government and people were furious when they found that Australian naval vessels had trespassed into Indonesian water to push back the boats. They considered this a violation of Indonesian territorial sovereignty. Again, in 2015, Indonesians were shocked by the illegal ‘creativity’ of Australian border officers who, it was reported, had bribed irregular migrants and smugglers in order to persuade them to return to the Indonesian landmass. The Indonesian Vice President, Jusuf Kalla, commented that Australia ‘did not show good etiquette’ and violated the UN convention on curbing human trafficking by providing financial support to smuggling activities (Tempo 2015). At a societal level, some developments are quite amazing. The Australian higher education sector has developed into a strong industry that targets young Indonesian students. Together with scholarship-awardees, private-paying Indonesian students in Australian universities have contributed to the development of people-topeople contacts between the two neighbouring countries. University-to-university contacts have also increased, but due to asymmetrical funding sources and interests, more Australians undertake research in, and on, Indonesia than do Indonesians on Australia. While the number of Indonesian tourists to Australia may increase over time, Indonesian interest in studying Australia is generally low. For example, one top university in Indonesia has not run a class on Australia’s international relations for several years due to the very small number of students enrolling in the class. It is no wonder that there are many Indonesian experts in Australia, whereas it is rare to find an Indonesian who is an expert on Australia.

Before Widodo: ‘Australia’s Best Friend’ Yudhoyono Despite the ‘roller-coaster relations’ between Indonesia and Australia, one of the most important figures contributing to positive ties was President Susilo Bambang

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Yudhoyono. His presidency (2004–14), however, sowed the seeds of problems that subsequently gave rise to animosity between the two governments and sections of each society. President Yudhoyono commenced his presidential term under difficult circumstances. Indonesia was in the midst of significant political, economic and social transformation, faced recurring terror attacks, and was also struck by the 26 December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which devastated large swathes of the north-eastern province of Aceh. Although Yudhoyono was the target of much criticism domestically, he successfully returned Indonesia to the global stage (Fitriani 2015). Yudhoyono’s presidency left a legacy of a high international profile for Indonesia. Since its transformation to a democratic system began in 1998, Indonesia has managed austerity to overcome the financial crisis, maintained a reasonably stable pluralistic society, transformed into a democratic country, and continued the development of a moderate Muslim population. During his presidency, Yudhoyono skilfully demonstrated to the world that Indonesia could develop democracy amidst a predominantly Muslim population. He also led Indonesia to become a very active global player and established friendly relations with many countries around the world, including Australia. Yudhoyono was, in fact, the Indonesian president who was closest to, and most friendly with, Australia. He is reputed to have had personal affection for Australia and once lived in Perth for several months. During the ten years of his presidency, Yudhoyono and his Australian counterparts brought bilateral ties to their highest level, evident in the two countries’ close political relations, active security cooperation, increasing economic engagement, and vibrant socio-cultural contacts. During his first year as president, the Australian government and society also provided a large amount of aid to the tsunami-stricken Aceh province. In 2006, President Yudhoyono and Prime Minister Howard signed a second agreement on the security sector, known as the Lombok Treaty.4 This underlines the two countries’ mutual commitment to respect and support each other’s political independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and national unity. Subsequently, the treaty has become an umbrella agreement for functional bilateral cooperation, including in the police, intelligence and immigration sectors. In the Yudhoyono era, Indonesia also became the largest recipient of Australian overseas development assistance (ODA). Vital Indonesian institutions such as the police, immigration, and the Ministry of Finance welcomed Australian support for their offices in the form of equipment and consultants. Up to 500 scholarships were awarded to young Indonesians annually to undertake masters or doctorate programs in Australian universities. Many government institutions also became targeted recipients of Australian aid to send their staff for either short or long training programmes in Australia. Apart from promoting good governance in

4  A similar agreement—the first of its kind—was signed by President Soeharto and Prime Minister Paul Keating in 1995 under the title ‘Agreement on Maintaining Security’ but Indonesia abrogated this treaty in objection to Australia’s role in East Timor’s transition to independence. See White 2013.

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Indonesia, Australian aid aimed to improve gender relations, environmental protection, and the development of eastern Indonesian provinces. Following the Bali bombings, Australian aid was also used to increase hospital services and health care in Bali, the favourite destination of Australian tourists. This support for health services in Bali continued into Yudhoyono’s era. Because of his personality and active international involvement (Fitriani 2015), Yudhoyono strived to maintain good relations between the two countries, despite the fact that his Australian counterparts did not always become true friends. Toward the end of his term, Yudhoyono, in fact, incurred significant domestic criticism when the Australian leaders who frequently claimed that the two countries were ‘best friends’ essentially stabbed Yudhoyono in the back by spying on his communications with his closest aides and wife. This spying scandal not only violated the president’s privacy but also threatened Indonesia’s security. Yudhoyono did not always bow to Australia. It was during his presidency that, for the first time, Indonesia recalled ambassadors from Canberra—not once but twice. The first instance was in January 2006, when the Indonesian government recalled Ambassador Hamzah Thayeb to Jakarta after Australia granted protection visas to the group of asylum seekers from Papua mentioned earlier. The second instance was in November 2013, in response to revelations of phone surveillance by Australian intelligence agencies against the Indonesian president and his close aides. The Australian spying scandal not only damaged Indonesian perceptions of Australian goodwill but also revealed that Australia—not Indonesia—poses a serious threat to its neighbour’s security. If an Australian spying operation could reach the Indonesian president, Indonesia’s security was obviously at risk. Ironically, Ambassador Nadjib Riphat Kesoema, who was scheduled to open a dialogue forum between Australian and Indonesian scholars at Griffith University in Brisbane that was intended to enhance relations between the two countries, found himself forced to rush back to Canberra and then on to Jakarta. Subsequently, Yudhoyono suspended security cooperation between the two countries and demanded that the Australian government apologise, cease intelligence operations against Indonesia, and agree on a code of conduct. Until the end of his presidency, Yudhoyono never received an apology from the Australian government. Nevertheless, the diplomatic spat seemed to have ended with the signing of the ‘Australia-Indonesia Joint Understanding on a Code of Conduct’ by the two Ministers of Foreign Affairs, witnessed by President Yudhoyono, on 28 August 2014, two months before the president ended his presidency. Arguably, Yudhoyono wished to conclude his presidential term with a positive image, as if he had managed to force his Australian counterpart to apologise. By contrast, the Australian media depicted Prime Minister Abbott and Foreign Minister Bishop as victors in the settlement of this sensitive problem (see chapter sixteen). In fact, the agreement reflects the two governments’ approach to overcoming crisis by framing facts—mostly to domestic audiences—as if they had handled the crisis well, even though the issues at hand remained unresolved. Despite these diplomatic crises between the two countries, overall President Yudhoyono’s era saw an expansion of the Indonesia-Australia relationship.

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However, this encouraging phenomenon took place concomitantly with two asymmetrical perceptions in Australia and Indonesia. In Australia, the general perception has been that Australians place Indonesia at a much higher priority than Indonesians place Australia. This perception was generated by the Australian geopolitical perspective (Dibb and Brabin-Smith 2007) and an insecure perception that whatever happened in Indonesia would eventually affect Australia (White 2013). By contrast, in Indonesia, the dominant perception of bilateral ties has been that President Yudhoyono rarely took a decisive stance towards Australia, even when Australia transgressed the limits of acceptable behaviour. With his principle of ‘a million friends, zero enemies’, Yudhoyono was perhaps the most foreign policyoriented Indonesian president, a national leader who eagerly entered the ‘club of world leaders’ (Fitriani 2015) and was very concerned with both Indonesia’s image and his own personal international image. As a result, many Indonesians perceived that Australia determinedly took advantage of a conflict-averse Indonesia in this period. Such a perception accords with the analysis by Nethery and Gordyn (2014) that Australia used its resources to influence Indonesian policies to be in line with Australia’s interests. The ‘convenient’ position that Australia therefore enjoyed during the Yudhoyono period may have led to the shock that Australia appeared to experience at President Widodo’s unexpectedly firm stance to complete an overdue and prolonged legal process by executing drug traffickers, regardless of their country of origin, including Australians.

President Widodo: High Hopes and Reality In his first presidential year, President Widodo seemed to be a surprise for Australia. Although they had supported him during his presidential candidacy, Australians were quick to dislike Widodo when his policies did not meet their expectations. In his first year in office, the president had different priorities and a different style of foreign policy to his predecessor, including in his dealings with Australia. These circumstances led Indonesia’s former Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa to worry that the bilateral relationship was at its ‘lowest point’ (Bourke 2015). In 2014, the Indonesian presidential election attracted significant attention in Australia. The Australian media provided extensive coverage before, during and after the election. Taking into consideration that the next Indonesian leader would be important to bilateral relations as well as to regional development, Australian scholars from universities and think-tanks also closely observed the election process and scrutinised the presidential candidates. Perhaps, because of former military general Prabowo Subianto’s track record and anti-Soeharto sentiment in Australia, Australians regarded Prabowo’s tilt for the presidency with suspicion. Naturally, Australians supported whoever ran against a military man. The newlyelected Jakarta governor, Widodo, appeared to receive substantial support, not only from Indonesians living in Australia but also from Australians who cared

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for the bilateral relationship, reflecting Australians’ hope for democratic political development in Indonesia. The support also seemed to be in line with the hope that Widodo would continue Yudhoyono’s efforts to maintain good relations with Australia and adopt foreign policy positions in line with Australian interests. The presidential election happened to be a tight competition between Widodo and Prabowo, and the Australian media and scholars closely watched the process. When Widodo eventually won the presidency, many Australians expressed relief. Less than a month after his inauguration, President Widodo announced Indonesia’s aspiration to become a ‘global maritime fulcrum’, during the ninth East Asia Summit in Myanmar. Subsequently, the new president described five pillars underpinning this aspiration: first, to revive Indonesia’s maritime culture; second, to achieve seabased food sufficiency by empowering Indonesian fishermen; third, to increase cooperation and to mitigate conflict in the maritime sector; fourth, to prioritise the development of maritime infrastructure and connectivity through the construction of a ‘sea-toll’ and deep-sea harbours, as well as the strengthening of logistical networks and marine tourism; and, finally, to undertake maritime diplomacy (Diplomasi 2015). In his speech, the president also called for enhanced maritime cooperation for peaceful purposes and urged countries to cease competition over marine natural resources and maritime supremacy. In regard to the South China Sea, the president expressed his appreciation for the implementation of the Declaration of Conduct (DoC) and called for involved countries to conclude the Code of Conduct (CoC) as soon as possible. Widodo’s first speech at an international forum as Indonesia’s president attracted attention not only from the international community but also from people at home, since the president brought the concept of a maritime state back into the country’s foreign policy. He also spelled out without hesitation his aspiration to develop Indonesia’s maritime power and clarified immediately that this power was for peaceful purposes. President Widodo is well aware that Indonesia has a long way to go to achieve the aspiration of becoming a maritime power. He realises that cooperation is important but, if Indonesia must act on its own, so be it. He has, for instance, supported Fisheries Minister Susi Pudjiastuti’s policy to sink fishing vessels found to have been involved in illegal, unregulated and unreported operations in Indonesian waters, as discussed below. Despite seeming to adopt a contrasting approach to his predecessor, President Widodo has, in fact, not significantly changed Indonesia’s foreign policy. The core principle of a ‘free and active’ foreign policy—under which Indonesia is free to determine its own interests and foreign policy without any pressure or influence from any other country—prevails. However, President Widodo’s foreign policy has to be seen in the context of his personality. Leaders’ perceptions in understanding both their countries’ interests and external challenges are likely to determine their approaches and priorities in international relations. Rising to the top of the political ladder in one of the most populous and democratic countries in the world, President Widodo has been determined to undertake foreign policy in the ways that, according to his understanding, serve the best interests of his country (Diplomasi 2015). Despite there being no radical change in Indonesia’s foreign

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policy principles, certain shifts in the country’s priorities and style in managing its international relations are therefore to be expected. At a roundtable discussion at the Universitas Indonesia in early December 2014, one of Widodo’s advisors revealed five priorities for the new president’s diplomatic agenda: maritime diplomacy; economic diplomacy; middle power diplomacy; paying heed to the Pacific and Indian Oceans; and improving Indonesia’s diplomatic infrastructure by strengthening the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. These priorities reveal an underlying assumption that foreign policy should directly serve the needs of the country—any action and operation in international relations should have a strong and direct impact on people. Through economic and maritime diplomacy, the new president wants the country’s external relations to create direct benefit and real impacts on Indonesian people, including those whose lives depend on the country’s exports and on maritime economic activities. These priorities also reflect the new president’s aspiration to maintain Indonesia as a middle power and to broaden the focus of foreign policy beyond Southeast Asia and the Association of the Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). However, a focus extending beyond ASEAN does not mean actively involving Indonesia in global forums, as did Yudhoyono. Instead, President Widodo has focused more on the regions surrounding Indonesia. He wants to pay more attention to the eastern, not just the western, areas of the Indonesian archipelago. Both the Pacific region and the Indian Ocean have now become important strategic considerations for the country. Understanding that Indonesia is a country with an active international role but with limited resources, President Widodo is determined to lead the country to become a regional power with selective global engagements. This means the country will not strive for international positions, roles, and images at the expense of its basic interests in serving the people. Indonesia’s participation in the G20 may create a high profile for the country and a good image for the leader but it has not had significant impact in terms of improving the lives and economy of the Indonesian people. Indonesia will decide which issues it would like to engage with, based on their impact on the country’s national interests and people. Some people suspect that by directing the foreign policy orientation toward these objectives, the new president has set an inward-looking foreign policy. It could be argued, however, that since foreign policy is an expansion of national policy to advance the country’s interests, no normal country in the world would seek to do otherwise. Thus, Indonesia is not currently doing anything differently to any other country. In line with his domestic policies, President Widodo decided, as mentioned, to emphasise a ‘pro-people foreign policy’, meaning that Indonesia’s foreign policy strategies and approaches have to serve the best interests of the people and the country. In the application of this pro-people policy, he requested the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to focus on three important problems that have frequently been overlooked in the past: guarding Indonesian sovereignty; protecting Indonesian citizens and legal entities abroad; and activating economic diplomacy. The emphasis on guarding the country’s sovereignty relates to President Widodo’s concern for border problems and foreign intrusions on Indonesian

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territory. Indonesia has maritime and land borders with ten countries and in the past has not taken good care of its border areas. Land borders in North Kalimantan, Papua and Timor are sites not only of poverty but also transnational crime, people trafficking, and commodities smuggling. President Widodo aims to develop border areas to curb poverty and crime. In his third year in office, the president has developed basic infrastructure in border areas, for example, constructing a roadway along the land border with Malaysia in North Kalimantan, not only to stimulate economic activity but also to give a confidence to Indonesians vis-avis neighbouring countries. It is also an approach to nation building because some peripheral areas and islands have previously fragmented from the country. In addition, the president instructed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to speed up negotiations on remaining undetermined borders. For their own reasons, some neighbouring countries have appeared to prefer an unclear borderline. Australia, for example, seems to be unwilling to negotiate and conclude the two countries’ maritime demarcation in the Timor Sea. Indonesia is aware of this and requests these countries to cooperate.5 President Widodo also realised that the inability of the Indonesian state to control and guard the country’s waters has resulted not only in fragmentation but also uncounted economic losses due to rampant poaching. As such, Indonesia faces not only a problem of politics and security but also of economics. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the world lost between US$10 billion to US$23 billion to illegal fishing in 2003, 30% of which happened in Indonesian waters (Fardah 2014). The Indonesian Minister of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, Susi Pudjiastuti, affirmed that Indonesia actually suffered much greater losses from illegal fishing in recent years, estimated at approximately US$20 billion per year (IOM 2015). In the first year of Widodo’s presidency, Indonesia therefore took harsh measures to eradicate illegal fishing, destroying over 100 seized fishing vessels in highly-publicised sinkings using explosives. Some of these detonated and sunk vessels came from ‘friendly’ neighbouring countries such as Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and China. Those countries—as well as others—appeared to be shocked by Indonesia’s unprecedented punitive response. Countries like Thailand raised this issue in second track meetings such as the Network of East Asian Think Tanks (NEAT), which Indonesia, by coincidence, hosted in 2015. Others complained through other formal and informal channels. In response, the Minister of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries replied that Indonesia has to guard the country’s territorial sovereignty, just like any other country. The minister’s statement sent a strong signal to Australia, whose vessels, in recent years, have frequently crossed into Indonesian territory—not to poach but to turn migrant boats back to the Indonesian landmass. It was well known publicly that under the Abbott government, Australia conducted ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’ (OSB) to prevent irregular migrant vessels from landing on Australian

5 

Personal conversations with senior Indonesian diplomats (2012–2016).

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territory. This practice has not only been criticised in Indonesia and Australia but also contributed to damaging the two counties’ relations (Fitriani 2014). The Yudhoyono government barely complained about Australian government practices that included pushing boats back to Indonesian water, providing boats and supplies to irregular migrants so they could sail back to Indonesia, and trespassing into Indonesian waters to escort migrant boats towards the Indonesian coastline. The minister’s statement suggests that the current government will respond differently to these practices, as foreign intrusions can be carried out not only by perpetrators of illegal fishing but also by unfriendly neighbours. The second component of the president’s pro-people foreign policy is to protect Indonesian citizens and legal entities abroad. This focus is driven by the numerous problems in which Indonesians working abroad can become entangled. Many Indonesians are, for example, involved in legal disputes in host countries such as in Malaysia and Saudi Arabia. Most of them work in domestic and plantation sectors. President Widodo intends to extend his state’s protection to them, since many of these troubled workers, because of their low levels of education, do not understand the legal system of their host country nor are they provided with legal protection by employers. He wants Indonesians abroad to get help—as he promised in his presidential campaign—and for the state to be present. The state’s protection is also extended to Indonesians who commit crimes in foreign countries, although it does so within the legal framework of the host countries, as Indonesia respects other countries’ legal systems. Under this framework, Indonesia will not tolerate any intrusion into its legal system. President Widodo was brave enough to accomplish the work that was not undertaken by his predecessor, to carry out the executions of those who had been sentenced to death in his country. Many of these had been sentenced many years ago but the previous president seems to have wished to avoid being criticised by the international community. In the lead-up to the execution, President Widodo received much criticism, especially from countries whose citizens were on death row. Australia launched perhaps the loudest criticism, with the Australian media, people and government reacting strongly to the execution of two Australian drug smugglers. Initially, Prime Minister Abbott and his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Julie Bishop, tried to lobby the Indonesian government, requesting clemency. When this strategy failed, they undertook open and blatant criticism, using human rights arguments, and managed to get the UN Secretary to support their plea. Indeed, Prime Minister Abbott made a statement that Australia helped Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami and requested Indonesia take a reciprocal attitude by granting clemency to the two Australian drug smugglers. Some Indonesians, especially human rights activists and NGOs, supported the Australian criticism and put pressure on the president and the government to cancel the executions. However, many other Indonesians—as well as many Australians— supported the president’s decision because of acute drug problems in Indonesia and the fact that the offenders had known that they faced the death penalty for drug smuggling (Kompas 2015a; Thakur 2015). Abbott’s statement linking the

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executions with Australian aid after the tsunami sparked severe criticism from Indonesians, especially the Acehnese, who immediately collected coins to repay Abbott, with some even contributed by Australians (Republika 2015). Abbott’s statement strengthened negative sentiments among Indonesians towards Australia (Kompas 2015a); Australia was perceived as an insincere donor and an arrogant country that interfered in the Indonesian criminal justice system. The Indonesian government replied that other countries had to respect Indonesian law in the same way that Indonesia respects other countries’ legal systems. When the executions took place in April 2015, it caused public outcry in Australia, expressed in a range of ways. Prime Minister Abbott expressed his displeasure to Indonesia and recalled the Australian ambassador from Jakarta. The executions received substantial media coverage. Some Australians urged the Abbott government to reallocate foreign aid from Indonesia to Vanuatu, as the latter had been hit by tornados, and the Australian National Portrait Gallery in Canberra took down President Widodo’s photo from its exhibition (Kompas 2015b). In a poll undertaken by the Lowy Institute in the months prior to the executions, when Australia was pressuring Indonesia not to execute the drug traffickers, President Widodo attracted the second highest ‘don’t admire’ result after President Putin of Russia among selected foreign leaders (Oliver 2015). In Indonesia, there was almost no reaction to the drug traffickers’ executions. There was almost no response to furious Australian reactions either. Indonesian people did not seem to pay attention to an issue that dominated the Australian media for months. Nevertheless, relations between the two countries fell into another crisis. The diplomatic crisis between Indonesia and Australia before and after the April 2015 executions stands as the most damaging in the history of bilateral ties; it appears worse than the row over Timor-Leste at the end of 1990s. The crisis was compounded by several other incidents: the eavesdropping on the Indonesian president by Australian intelligence; and the issue of irregular migration problems, including Australian government vessels trespassing into Indonesian waters to turn back migrant boats. Despite Abbott’s attendance at Widodo’s inauguration, the Abbott and Widodo governments did not have good or effective communications. The diplomatic crisis generated by the executions was further exacerbated because both the Indonesian and the Australian governments were under significant public pressure. Widodo was still in his first year as president and the public expected him to take a firm policy line against foreign countries, which were widely perceived to have exerted too much influence under his predecessor. Abbott was also under severe political pressure, as he had just survived a leadership bid launched against him by his own party in February 2015. Abbott thus needed to demonstrate to the Australian people that he could represent their interests. The political reason behind Abbott’s harsh behaviour towards Indonesia is obvious, even though he based his claim on human rights. His human rights arguments were questioned by Indonesians as he had presided over a very tough immigration policy that had led to several hundred irregular migrants being stranded at sea and drowning between Indonesia and Australia, as well as the inhuman treatment

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of migrants in Australian detention centres. Although the Australian government sought to cover up the issue, media reportage also revealed that many Indonesian children working in fishing boats were detained in maximum security prisons in Australia due to smuggling allegations. Some Indonesians also highlighted the treatment of Aboriginal people as second-class citizens in Australia, even though, as Prime Minister, Tony Abbott made a week-long visit to indigenous communities in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, where he ran the government from a tent during his stay. Nor does Australia condemn other countries that carry out many more executions, such as the US, Saudi Arabia, China, Singapore and others. Australia also did not express human rights concern when the Indonesian government executed the perpetrators of the Bali Bombings in 2008 (Thakur 2015). Thus, based on their understanding of Australian human rights practices, Indonesians did not buy the human rights arguments made by Australians. Relations between Indonesia and Australia did not recover even after the Australian ambassador returned to his post in Jakarta in June 2015. In the same month, another incident took place in relation to irregular migrants, when reports emerged that the crew and passengers of an irregular migrant vessel were given thousands of dollars in cash to turn their boat back to Indonesia (Kompas 2015c). The Indonesian government and people were stunned to hear this report. In response, the Vice President and legislators, as well as many members of the public suggested that the Indonesian government should report Australia to the United Nations for supporting people smuggling by bribing smugglers (Kompas 2015d). Various other phenomena show that the two countries, at least at the governmental level, have drifted away from each other. Australian aid to Indonesia, including scholarships, has been reduced. It is true that this was part of broader aid cuts to other countries but, in the context of worsening relations between the two countries, the cut cannot be ignored. Indonesia has also tried to reduce its dependence on Australian beef by opening its meat market to other countries. Until the change of Australian leaders from Abbott to Malcolm Turnbull, relations between Indonesia and Australia were at a stalemate. The two neighbours were not involved in an open conflict but government-to-government interactions were not friendly and robust. The drug-smuggler execution crisis revealed three problems in the relationship. First, as if to confirm that the two neighbouring societies are strangers to each other, Indonesian and Australian people perceived the event differently. For Australians, the drug smuggler execution was a practice that violates human rights. There was also a perception that Australian citizens were murdered, based on an unfair legal process. In addition, the Australian government appeared to believe that Indonesia had to listen to their pleas for clemency, and became angry when the Indonesian government rejected the pleas and confirmed the original decision. In contrast, for Indonesians, the executions were the consequence of crimes committed by the drug smugglers. They had been warned before entering the country that drug smuggling would result in the death penalty. Regardless of their country of origin, the Indonesian legal system applies the death penalty for ‘extraordinary crimes’ such as terrorism and drug smuggling.

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Moreover, the Australian pleas, because of their intensity and manner, were seen as interference in Indonesia’s sovereignty. In fact, this interference was perhaps seen as a more serious matter within Indonesia than the executions themselves, so the more Australians applied pressure on this issue, the more Indonesians supported the Indonesian government’s decision. After the spying scandal involving Australian intelligence, the turning back of migrant boats into Indonesian water, and the frequent trespassing on Indonesian territory by Australian vessels, Indonesia will not easily allow Australian interference in its sovereignty again. Second, the drug-smuggler execution crisis also indicated that government-togovernment relations between the two countries are not as friendly as has frequently been claimed. Previously, good government-to-government relations played a significant role in maintaining communications during crisis situations. In the crisis over Papuan asylum seekers in early 2006, for example, the two governments were able to find a solution and improve relations. In the Soeharto era, the government-to-government channel was also a reliable way to keep relations close, despite rows between the Indonesian president and the Australian media. Former foreign minister Marty Natalegawa, who occupied the post in Yudhoyono’s second term, was also frequently criticised—and bullied—by the Australian media for his objections to Australian policy on the handling of irregular migrants, but the two governments nevertheless maintained stable relations and an open channel of communication. Recent governments appear, however, to have lost the political will to rebuild relations. On the Indonesian side, this lack of political will may result from different priorities; on the Australian side, the lack of will is likely due to a culture of domination and control. Third, the execution crisis shows that relations between the two countries were at risk of becoming a victim of domestic politics. Linkage theory is a familiar scholarly lens that emphasises the connection between domestic politics and international relations but in Australia today, political elites seem to have made tremendous use of international relations for political gain. Australian politicians have exploited the issues of asylum seekers and migration for electoral gain. Australian elites also appeared to use the executions to increase their political advantage. Bilateral relations are more prone to crisis when political elites are able to use bilateral issues for domestic political gain. With the change of political leadership in Australia in late 2015, there was hope that the diplomatic ruptures could be mitigated. Despite a bold statement by one analyst that President Widodo had no interest in Australia and was perceived to ignore neighbouring countries for the sake of being a global maritime fulcrum, thereby engaging only the major powers (Croft-Cusworth 2015), the Indonesian president merely needed a more sensitive counterpart in Australia in order to develop more stable relations between the two countries. In contrast to his predecessor, Prime Minister Turnbull has been more effective in managing more harmonious interactions with President Widodo. The two men’s friendly personal relations have eventually had a flow-on effect on the bilateral relationship.

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Perhaps, the most remarkable progress has been the development of the Indonesia-Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (IA-CEPA). In 2016, the governments of the two countries resumed the negotiation of the IA-CEPA, which had started in 2011 but halted during the crisis. This agreement is expected to enhance bilateral economic relations in the future. As of mid-2017, negotiations have proceeded into a third round and the agreement is expected to be concluded by the end of 2017 (Bisnis 2017). Summits between the two leaders have also helped enhance Indonesia-Australia relations in the last two years. In an early trip abroad as Prime Minister, Turnbull visited President Widodo in Jakarta in November 2015; the two leaders immediately got along well. Unlike their predecessors, Widodo and Turnbull put aside the usual state formality and abruptly immersed themselves in the busy market of Tanah Abang. Indeed, the two took advantage of their fondness of social media by taking ‘selfie’ photos right in the middle of the market, to the surprise of other visitors. In February 2017, the two leaders met again in Sydney. They managed to have an informal talk while walking through the Sydney Botanical Gardens and to spend some private time—accompanied by their spouses—by taking more selfies of the two couples on the foreshore of Sydney Harbour. At this summit, the two leaders witnessed the signing of the Joint Declaration on Maritime Cooperation between Australia and Indonesia and launched the Declaration of Intent between the government of Australia and the government of the Republic of Indonesia to strengthen and promote cooperation between peoples of the two countries in the field of creative economy. The maritime and creative economies are among the top priorities of President Widodo’s government. The Australian government seemed to very quickly win the President’s heart through these two cooperation agreements, despite the fact that Australia is not the most advanced country in either areas. Leaders significantly affect international relations with their personality and perceptions, and President Widodo seems to have been able to establish much better relations with Prime Minister Turnbull than with Turnbull’s predecessor. Supported by their personalities, the two leaders are concomitantly able to engage in more fruitful interactions, showing to their people that mutually beneficial engagements—not hostile relations—are in line with the two countries’ interests. This approach is much needed to stabilise and strengthen bilateral relations since relations remain fragile, as seen from the tension that emerged in the weeks before Widodo’s Sydney visit due to strained military relations. President Widodo’s visit to Sydney in February 2017 not only renewed military cooperation but also enhanced it, with a plan to undertake a joint patrol in the South China Sea.6 In the earlier period of his presidency, some Australians appeared dismayed by Widodo’s ignorance of Indonesia’s southern neighbour, perceiving the new president

6  The Indonesian government quickly switched the title of this plan to ‘coordinated patrol’ after China expressed its dislike of the two countries’ earlier plan for a joint operation.

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to be more interested in approaching major states that could offer investment, technology and a market (Hodge 2017). Apparently, they failed to understand that Prime Minister Abbott’s approach was too hostile for a Javanese person like President Widodo. Once leaders can get along well, bilateral relations can be enhanced as close relations between leaders open access to other officials in their governments and states. Thus, the notion of Indonesia and Australia being ‘strangers’ to each other is actually the function of key persons’ perceptions. Some leaders like Soeharto and Paul Keating, as well as Widodo and Turnbull, are able to establish warm relations—and positively affect the two countries’ relationship—despite the fact that they come from different cultures and political traditions. Perhaps, it is important not to depend too much on leaders’ relations as they can create quite extreme dynamics within bilateral relations. People-to-people relations through more interaction between the younger generations from the two countries seem to be more promising in building bilateral trust and understanding. The two countries may build healthier relations once they can overcome the lack of trust and pay respect to each other. People-to-people connections can play a significant role at this juncture.

Conclusion Indonesia and Australia have a long history of relations dating back centuries in the form of economic and cultural interactions between traditional societies in eastern Indonesia and northern Australia. Over the last 70 years of the modern nation state era, however, these traditional engagements have transformed into an up-and-down relationship. Bilateral ties have been influenced by politics—be it domestic or international—and the character of the two countries’ leaders. The role of historical ties has been almost entirely ignored, as the relationship has been determined by short-term interests and sporadic, damaging incidents. In the post-independence period, the leaders of each country have been important in shaping Indonesia-Australia relations. They have affected the relationship through their personality, worldviews, and understanding of their countries’ interests, which subsequently determine their respective countries’ priorities and style in conducting international relations. Previous Indonesian and Australian leaders have created cycles of crisis and friendship, contributing to the fluctuating pattern of bilateral relations. President Soeharto and Prime Minister Paul Keating seem to have been the first leaders to establish close personal ties, eventually generating close neighbourly relations between the two countries. It was President Yudhoyono, however, who was considered ‘Australia’s best friend’. During his presidency, bilateral relations developed robustly, even though Yudhoyono twice recalled his ambassadors from Canberra, and despite Australian intelligence spying on his official, as well as private, phone conversations.

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President Widodo, who has led Indonesia since October 2014, appeared to surprise neighbouring countries, including Australia, with his conduct of foreign policy. Previously, President Yudhoyono was well-known as being very concerned for Indonesia’s international image, as well as his own personal reputation abroad. By contrast, President Widodo has undertaken a ‘pro-people’ foreign policy that prioritises the Indonesian people and the national interest in international relations, regardless of its effect on his or Indonesia’s international image. The new president has taken a firm stance on curbing illegal fishing, drug trafficking, commodity smuggling, and violations of Indonesia’s territory. He took criticism from Australia and other countries in his stride when he accomplished work that his predecessor Yudhoyono should have completed: executing drug traffickers, including those from Australia. President Widodo’s firm decisions and actions were appreciated and supported by the majority of Indonesians. Many Australians also agreed with his decision. The crisis the executions spurred was exacerbated when Indonesians discovered that Australian personnel apparently had bribed irregular migrants and their smugglers to turn a boat around en-route to Australia, to return to Indonesian waters (ABC 2015; Kompasiana 2015). ln 2015, Australian government vessels had trespassed on Indonesian territory to return irregular boats to Indonesia. The execution crisis and Australian unilateralism in handling irregular migrants brought bilateral relations to a low level. President Widodo also launched an aspiration to transform Indonesia into a global maritime fulcrum. This requires Indonesia to develop a strong navy, construct maritime infrastructure and connectivity, empower the marine economy, and engage in maritime diplomacy. This aspiration has attracted attention not only from neighbouring countries like Australia but also the new superpower, China. The Chinese government has eagerly approached Indonesia and offered cooperation in developing maritime infrastructure under the policy of ‘one belt, one road’. Indonesia wants to use its close relations with China to help mitigate tension in the South China Sea. Indonesia’s mediating position in this case was different from that of Australia, which had sided with the US to control China’s rise, until the Indonesia-China incidents in the Natuna Sea of 2016 and early 2017. Having once appeared to have different responses and positions towards China, the two countries have recently agreed upon military cooperation in areas next to the South China Sea. Many foreigners have commented that Indonesia’s foreign policy has become inward-looking and nationalistic under President Widodo. There is, however, no major change in Indonesia’s policy in conducting international relations, since the core principle of a ‘free and active foreign policy’ has been maintained. What may look different are the style and priorities, because the new president has consistently refused to be used by, or to serve the interests of, other countries at the expense of the Indonesian people and national interests. Australians may be disappointed that the current Indonesian president has adopted policies that are not in line with their interests but, after all, foreign policy has to serve a country’s national interests. Like his counterpart in Australia, the Indonesian leader has to

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listen to his people too and pursue the country’s national interests. Indonesia under President Widodo will not let Australia dominate the relationship as has happened in the past (Nethery and Gordyn 2014); incentives do not work anymore. The change of political leadership in Australia toward the end of 2015 did affect the bilateral relations of the two neighbouring countries. Tony Abbott’s successor, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, has been able to establish more friendly relations with President Widodo as the two have more suitable personalities. The President’s warm relations with Prime Minister Turnbull—and their support for the bilateral IA-CEPA despite Australia’s small market size—indicate that personality does matter in leaders’ relationships. Naturally, the leaders’ close relations have smoothed relations between the two countries too. Bilateral engagement between Indonesia and Australia has improved in the last two years despite tensions between the two countries’ militaries at the end of 2016. Since their summit in February 2017, the two leaders have provided political support for maritime cooperation and peopleto-people engagement in the creative economy, in addition to their earlier support for the conclusion of the IA-CEPA negotiations. President Widodo and Prime Minister Turnbull have shown that leaders have choices in their approach. The two have chosen to develop friendly relations and informal interactions to push for mutually beneficial bilateral relations. Nevertheless, the role of leaders in Indonesian-Australian relations should not be exaggerated. It is unrealistic to expect the Indonesian-Australian relationship to improve without sufficient political will from both sides. This can only be solicited once the two countries have confidence in each other. Being ‘strange’ to each other does not stop people from knowing each other. This is where people-to-people connections can contribute to bilateral relations. These kinds of relations already exist but they need to be strengthened. The stranger next door can turn into a sincere friend when the two neighbouring countries are better able to respect and accept each other’s differences.

References ABC (2015) ‘Tony Abbott Rebuffs Indonesian Questions on Alleged Cash Payments to People Smugglers’, 15 June, . Adil, H (1973) ‘Australia’s Relations with Indonesia 1945–1965’, PhD Dissertation, Leiden University. Agung, A (1990) Twenty Years Indonesian Foreign Policy 1945–1965 (Jogjakarta, Duta Wacana Press). Bachelard, M (2014) ‘Indonesia Makes Veiled Criticism of Tony Abbott as Marty Natalegawa Emphasises Human Rights of Asylum Seekers’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 21 April. .

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Bisnis (2017) ‘Indonesia-Australia Dorong Negosiasi IA-CEPA Selesai Akhir Tahun Ini’, . Bourke, L (2015) ‘Australia-Indonesia Relationship at a “Key Juncture”, Dialogue Needed on Boats, says Marty Natalegawa’, Sydney Morning Herald, 29 June, . Brady, M (2013) ‘Drug Substances Introduced by the Malaccans: The Mystery of the Tobacco Pipe’ in M Clark and S May (eds), Macassan History and Heritage: Journeys, Encounters and Influences (Canberra, Australian National University E-Press). Chaloupka, G (1996) ‘Praus in Marege: Makassan Subjects in Aboriginal Rock Art of Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, Australia’ 34(1–2) Anthropologie 131. Clark, M and May, S (2013) ‘Understanding the Macassans: A Regional Approach’ in M Clark and S May (eds), Macassan History and Heritage: Journeys, Encounters and Influences (Canberra, Australian National University E-Press). Croft-Cusworth, C (2015) ‘Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo Losing Political Support after Nine Months’ South Morning Herald, 11 July, . Defense Study Project (1966) Commonwealth Responsibilities for Security in the Indo-Pacific Region (Canberra, The Australian Institute of International Affairs and the Australian National University). Dibb, P and Brabin-Smith, R (2007) ‘Indonesia in Australian Defence Planning’ 3(4) Security Challenges 67, November. Diplomasi (2015) ‘Diplomasi Indonesia Akan Terkoneksi dengan Kepentingan Rakyat’, No 85, Tahun VIII, 15 February—14 March. Fardah, (2014) ‘New Indonesian Maritime Affairs Minister Declares War against Illegal Fishing’, Antara, 31 October. Fitriani, E (2012) ‘Indonesia dan Australia: Dekat tapi Jauh’ in E Fitriani (ed), Australia dan Negara-Negara Kepulauan Pasifik (Jakarta, Universitas Indonesia Press). Fitriani, E (2015) ‘Yudhoyono’s Foreign Policy: Is Indonesia a Rising Power?’ in E Aspinall, M Mietzner and D Tomsa (eds), The Yudhoyono Presidency: Indonesia’s Decade of Stability and Stagnation (Singapore, ISEAS). Fitriani, E et al (2014) ‘Menanggulangi Trans-national Organized Crime tanpa Melanggar Hak Pengungsi: Masalah Migrasi Irregular dalam Hubungan Indonesia-Australia’, Laporan Penelitian (Jakarta, Universitas Indonesia). Fox, J (1998) ‘Reef and Shoal in Australia-Indonesia Relations: Traditional Indonesia Fishermen’ in A Milner and M Quilty (eds) Australia in Asia: Episodes (Melbourne, Oxford University Press). Ganter, R (2013) ‘Histories with Traction: Macassan Contact in the Framework of Muslim Australian History’ in M Clark and S May (eds), Macassan History and

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Heritage: Journeys, Encounters and Influences (Canberra, Australian National University E-Press). George, M (1980) Australia and the Indonesian Revolution (Carlton Vic, Melbourne University Press). Grant, B (1972) The Crisis of Loyalty: A Study of Australian Foreign Policy (Canberra, The Australian Institute of International Affairs). Hodge, A (2017) ‘Joko Widodo, Malcolm Turnbull Mending Fences’, The ­Australian, 25 February, . House of Representatives, Australia, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates (CPD), Vol 193, 25 September 1947, as quoted in H Adil 1973, ‘Australia’s Relations with Indonesia 1945–1965’, PhD Dissertation, Leiden (Leiden University). Hugo, G; Tan, G; and Napitupulu, C (2014) ‘Indonesia as a Transit Country in Irregular Migration to Australia’, Australia. Department of Immigration and Border Protection, Occasional Paper Series—Irregular Migrant Research Program, No 8, September. International Organization of Migration (IOM) (2015) ‘Focus Group Discussion on Maritime Security Issues in Indonesia’, IOM Newsletter, Issue 7, June. Knaap, G and Sutherland, H (2004) Monsoon Traders: Ships, Skippers and ­Commodities in Eighteenth-century Makassar (Leiden, KITLV Press). Kompas (2015a) ‘Jajak Pendapat Kompas: Publik Apresiasi Ketegasan Pemerintah’, 2 March: 5. Kompas (2015b) ‘Foto Presiden Widodo Disingkirkan dari Pameran di Australia’, 30 April. Kompas (2015c) ‘Imigran Gelap Diberi Uang dan Kapal oleh Tentara Australia’, 2 June. Kompas (2015d) ‘Pemerintah Diminta Laporkan Australia kepada PBB’, 22 June. Kompasiana (2015) ‘“Uang Haram” Australia untuk Penyelundup Manusia’, 15  June,  . Lyon, P (1969) War and Peace in South-East Asia (London, Oxford University Press). Macknight, C (1976) Voyage to Marege: Macassan Trepangers in Northern Australia (Carlton Vic, Melbourne University Press). Macknight, C (2013) ‘Study Trepangers’ in M Clark and S May (eds), Macassan History and Heritage: Journeys, Encounters and Influences (Canberra, Australian National University E-Press). Milner, A and Quilty, M (eds) (1998) Australia in Asia: Episodes (Melbourne, Oxford University Press). Modelski, G (1960) ‘Australia and SEATO’ 14(3) International Organization, Summer: 429. Nethery, A and Gordyn, C (2014) ‘Australia-Indonesia Cooperation on Asylumseekers: A Case of ‘Incentivised Policy Transfer’ 68(2) Australian Journal of International Affairs 177.

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Oliver, A (2015) ‘The Lowy Institute Poll 2015’, . Pfennigwerth, I (2012) ‘Some Facts about Indonesian Confrontation’, Military History and Heritage Victoria, Inc., . Pietch, S (2015) ‘Indonesian Independence and Australia Imperialism’, Marxist Left Review, No 10, http://marxistleftreview.org/index.php/no-10-winter-2015/ 122-indonesian-independence-and-australian-imperialism. Reid, A (2013) ‘Crossing the Great Divide: Australia and Eastern Indonesia’ in M Clark and S May (eds), Macassan History and Heritage: Journeys, Encounters and Influences (Canberra, Australian National University E-Press). Republika (2016) ‘8 Ribu Keping Koin untuk Abbott, Ini Spesifikasinya’, 2 March, . Tacon, P and May, S (2013) ‘Rock Art Evidence for Macassan-Aboriginal C ­ ontact in Northwestern Arnhem Land’ in M Clark and S May (eds), Macassan ­History and Heritage: Journeys, Encounters and Influences (Canberra, Australian National University E-Press). Tempo (2015) ‘Soal Pencari Suaka, JK Sayangkan Sikap Australia’, 15 June, . Thakur, R (2015) ‘Australia’s Moral Posturing at Indonesia is Misguided’, The Japan Times, Opinion, 4 May. Thomas, P (2013) ‘Interpreting the Maassans: Language Exchange in ­Historical Encounters’ in M Clark and S May (eds), Macassan History and Heritage: ­Journeys, Encounters and Influences, (Canberra, Australian National University E-Press). USA Department of State (nd) ‘Milestone 1953–1960: Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), 1954’, Office of the Historian, . White, H (2013) ‘What Indonesia’s Rise Means for Australia’, The Monthly Essay, .

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5 Ignorant and Ill-disposed?: Opinion Polling and Attitudes to the other between Australia and Indonesia DAVE McRAE AND DIANE ZHANG1

Over the past decade, public opinion polls have played an important role in ­framing public discourse on Australia-Indonesia ties. Polling commissioned by the Sydney-based Lowy Institute for International Policy has been especially influential, receiving repeated mention by politicians, scholars and the media. This polling has underpinned two dominant narratives about Australian attitudes to Indonesia: that the Australian public is ignorant regarding Indonesia, and that Australians are ill-disposed towards Indonesia. Evidence that Australians have negative attitudes is abundant. Across a range of polls dating back more than two decades, a majority of Australians have consistently identified Indonesia as a threat. Other results show persistent, widespread mistrust. Roughly half of Australians say they distrust Indonesia to act responsibly in the world across multiple Lowy Institute polls. The 2009 result to this question—in which 54% of Australians did not trust Indonesia to act responsibly, significantly lower than trust in Russia and China—even came to presidential attention. In an address to a joint sitting of the Australian parliament in 2010, then President Yudhoyono cited this result as emblematic of the need for a change of mind-set in bilateral ties, to put aside age-old stereotypes (Yudhoyono 2010). There is also evidence, albeit lesser in volume, that Australians lack knowledge of Indonesia. Asked in the 2006 Lowy Institute poll to name the Indonesian ­president, only 20% of respondents gave answers approximating Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. In another Lowy poll in 2015, 40% of Australians said they did not know who Yudhoyono’s successor, Joko Widodo, was when asked for their attitude to him. Australians have also harboured a persistent skepticism of ­Indonesia’s ­status as a democracy. As few as a quarter to a third of Australians agreed

1  The authors would like to thank Tim Mann for his diligent research assistance in the early stages of this project, as well as Alex Oliver for generously providing a compilation of Lowy Institute polling results on Indonesia. As full disclosure, Dave McRae worked for the Lowy Institute from 2011–2014 and was involved in the formulation of questions for some of the polls discussed.

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Indonesia was a democracy in three Lowy polls fielded between 2013 and 2017, for example, whereas 47% identified Indonesia as a democracy in a 2012 Newspoll commissioned by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT).2 Nor do Australians feel they are well-informed about Indonesia: 81% of respondents rated their knowledge either as fair or poor in this DFAT Newspoll; in a more recent Australia-Indonesia Centre poll in 2016, 47% rated themselves as having little or no knowledge of Indonesia. Many observers have asserted that these two narratives about Indonesia are inter-related, arguing either that Australians would think better of Indonesia if they knew more about their northern neighbour, or that Australians know little because of their negative attitudes to Indonesia. In chapter twenty-four, Debnath Guharoy provides an example of this first stream of analysis, in arguing that Australia’s business community suffers from a fear of the unknown with regards to Indonesia. Michael Bachelard’s fine contribution on media reportage (chapter sixteen) is one example of the latter stream. Bachelard argues that it looks like ­wilful, rather than casual, ignorance for only a third of Australians to have agreed that Indonesia is a democracy in the 2015 Lowy poll, a year after the ­Australian media had provided extensive coverage of Indonesia’s democratic presidential elections. Here Bachelard appears to assume implicitly that Australians’ ignorance of Indonesia is exceptional. The idea that knowledge and attitudes are causally linked has also framed policy responses and recommendations aimed at improving bilateral ties, particularly in Australia. The Australia-Indonesia Centre, for example, followed up its 2016 perceptions study by funding ‘tactical research projects’ to ‘contribute to improvements in and increasing awareness of the Australia-Indonesia relationship’.3 Senior Australian academic David Hill (2016: 375) also drew on results from the 2012 DFAT Newspoll to the effect that those who had learned Indonesian tended to hold more positive attitudes towards Indonesia to argue for increased investment by both the Australian and Indonesian governments in the teaching of Indonesian language in Australia. However, although the idea of a causal link between ignorance and ill-disposed attitudes is pervasive, it is also unproven. Most observers and studies assume or suggest such a causal link exists, rather than presenting strong evidence of its operation. This chapter thus aims to investigate what evidence exists for either assumption: that ignorance produces negative attitudes, or that because they are ill-disposed to Indonesia, Australians know little about it. Before turning to this task, we first consider the history of public opinion polling in Australia regarding attitudes to Indonesia, and analyse in detail the results that this polling has ­produced, particularly in comparison to knowledge of, and attitudes towards, other Asian countries. 2  This poll was published in 2013 but was fielded in June 2012, and is referred to throughout the text by the year in which the poll was fielded. 3  http://australiaindonesiacentre.org/app/uploads/2017/01/TRP-Guidelines-for-ProposalsAttitudes-Perceptions-JAN2016.pdf.

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The Evolution of Public Opinion Polling on Indonesia The earliest surveys of Australian attitudes towards Indonesia were fielded in 1945, to test public opinion on Indonesian independence (Sobocinska 2015). According to Sobocinska, in her excellent survey of public opinion polling of Australian attitudes to Indonesia—on which this and the next two paragraphs draw—polling questions focussed from the outset on security issues such as Indonesian independence, and later, Indonesia’s claim to West Papua and the Australian military’s involvement in the 1960s Konfrontasi conflict between Indonesia and Malaysia. Sobocinska found that polling was initially conducted by Gallup until the 1970s, when a large number of organisations including Roy Morgan, The Age, ­Saulwick Agency and the United States International Communications Agencies all started testing Australian attitudes to Indonesia. The 1970s continued the focus on security with questions about the East Timor conflict. During this time, polls also started asking the Australian public about whether they thought a strong relationship with Indonesia was important and needed to become closer. In 1968, Gallup asked the first questions concerning whether Indonesia was a perceived threat to Australian security. According to Sobocinska, the perceived threat question was asked again in 1980 in an opinion poll by The Age and has since been a consistent part of public opinion polling on Indonesia. Since 1983, the Australian Election Study—a self-completion survey mailed to electors following the Australian federal elections—has fielded questions on Australian security and the countries that threaten it, including Indonesia. The Lowy Institute has also regularly asked questions on whether Indonesia is a perceived threat in their polling. Since 2005, the Lowy Institute has, in fact, published an annual poll on ­Australian public attitudes to foreign policy, in which Indonesia-related questions feature regularly. The Lowy polls collectively represents the most comprehensive multi-year view of Australian attitudes towards Indonesia. At least one Indonesiarelated question was fielded in the poll every year and Indonesia is the third most asked-about foreign country in the Lowy polls behind the US and China. In their annual warmth of feelings poll, Indonesia is one of five countries that featured in this poll every year along with the US, China, Japan and India. The Lowy Institute also conducted two Indonesia-specific polls, in 2006 and 2011, where public ­attitudes of both Australians and Indonesians were surveyed.4 In addition to the Lowy Institute polls, two other significant pieces of polling that specifically tested attitudes to Indonesia and the bilateral relationship were conducted by DFAT (carried out by Newspoll) in 2012 and the Australia-­Indonesia Centre (AIC) in 2016. The DFAT/Newspoll fielded questions only in Australia, although the polling report drew on Lowy Institute polling in both countries

4 The second Lowy Institute Indonesia poll was published in 2012 but the survey was fielded in 2011.

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to draw broader comparisons. The AIC fielded questions in both Australia and Indonesia but did not employ a national representative sample in Indonesia. The different sampling strategies and significant developments in the bilateral relationship that took place after the Australian survey was fielded, but during the fielding of the Indonesian survey, means the results from the two countries in this AIC poll cannot be directly compared. In analysing Australian attitudes to, and knowledge of, Indonesia, this chapter will predominantly draw on data from the Lowy Institute polls, the Australian Election Study and the DFAT/Newspoll study.5 Earlier surveys are not used as they do not necessarily represent current attitudes towards Indonesia. The AIC survey has several methodological issues, discussed in the footnote below, and so is only referred to where the results are meaningful despite these methodological issues.6

Attitudes to Indonesia Public opinion polling has consistently found that Australians have relatively unfavourable attitudes toward Indonesia, seemingly driven by a lack of trust in the country and a perception that Indonesia poses a threat to Australian security. The perception of Indonesia as a security threat is not tempered by a similar perception that the two countries have a strong economic relationship, as exists in the case of China.7 This section explores further the dual perceptions that Indonesia is a threat to Australian security and that their economy is not that important to Australia that seemingly drive mistrust and unfavourable attitudes towards the country.

Unfavourable Feelings Australians’ perception of Indonesia is relatively unfavourable in comparison to their feelings towards other countries. In the warmth of feeling index, conducted 5  Only polls listed in Appendix A of Sobocinska’s survey of Australian attitudes to Indonesia are referred to in this chapter. Although not complete (for example, the 2005 Roy Morgan poll was not included), the authors believe the comprehensive nature of her study means that other ad hoc polling data will not change the conclusions of this chapter. 6  There are two main methodological issues with AIC’s survey of Australian and Indonesian perceptions that limited its ability to be used to analyse Australian attitudes to Indonesia. First, the polling carried out in Indonesia cannot be directly compared to the polling carried out in Australia because each country’s survey was conducted at different time periods using different sampling methods, as mentioned above. Second, answers in relation to word associations to each country (Question 10) are less meaningful because the study almost exclusively chose words that had positive associations with the country such as ‘progressive’, ‘beautiful’ and ‘friendly’. In contrast, the survey did not include words or phrases such as ‘corrupt’ and ‘military dictatorship’, which suggest more negative attitudes, but which other polls have shown that Australians do associate with Indonesia. Consequently, the AIC poll does not enable comparison between answers for words that have negative associations with Indonesia, and answers to the positively-associated words, limiting the significance of its results. 7 On this latter point, Australians are arguably correct—see ch 23 on the modest state of ­Australia-Indonesia economic ties.

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annually by the Lowy Institute since 2006, Indonesia is consistently rated as one of the most unfavourably regarded amongst countries surveyed. The poll asks respondents to rate their warmth of feeling towards each country by assigning a value between zero and 100, with 100 meaning a very warm and favourable feeling. Between 2006–17, Indonesia received an average rating of 51, with only Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Syria, Libya, Myanmar and Afghanistan ranked lower. In comparison, authoritarian states such as Vietnam, Singapore, China and Russia were all consistently viewed more favourably by Australians than Indonesia. Table 1:  Thermometer of feeling towards Indonesia, 2006–16 Year

Warmth

Rank

Countries that ranked lower than Indonesia

2006

50

11/14

Iran, North Korea, Iraq

2007

47

13/15

Iran, Iraq

2008

50

12/17

Iran, Iraq, Pakistan (same as South Korea and Israel)

2009

49

13/18

Iran, North Korea, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Pakistan

2010

54

14/19

Iran, North Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan (same as China)

2011

51

13/19

Iran, North Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Libya

2012

54

12/19

Iran, North Korea, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Libya

2013

53

15/18

Iran, North Korea, Myanmar

2014

52

16/21

Iran, North Korea, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Israel

2015

46

14/18

North Korea, Iraq, Russia, Syria

2016

54

15/19

Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria

2017

55

14/18

North Korea, Russia, Israel, Myanmar

Average (2006–2017)

51

37/46

Source: Authors’ analysis based on data from Lowy Institute Annual Poll 2006–17.

The idea that bilateral ties are ‘cyclical’ or subject to ‘peaks and troughs’ is almost axiomatic in commentary on Australia-Indonesia relations. A corollary to this view has been that spats between the two countries generate particularly intense reactions because of their status as neighbours. At face value, the volatility of Australian feelings towards Indonesia is consistent with such analysis. Although never exceeding 55 on the warmth of feeling index, Australians were particularly unfavourable towards Indonesia in 2007 and 2015. In 2007, Australians only rated

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Indonesia 47 on the ‘thermometer of feeling’, perhaps reflecting lingering illfeeling over the withdrawal in 2006 of Indonesia’s ambassador after Australia granted temporary protection visas to a group of Papuans (see chapter fourteen). Unfavourable attitudes to Indonesia reached a new low of 46 in 2016, most likely reflecting ill-will in the lead-up to the April 2015 execution of Australians Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. The consecutive record highs in 2016 and 2017, of 54 and 55 respectively, may in turn reflect the reset of the tone of bilateral ties through Turnbull’s November 2015 visit to Jakarta and Jokowi’s reciprocal Sydney visit in early 2017. The idea that such volatility arises from Australia and Indonesia being neighbours appears less credible, however, when results for Indonesia are compared to other countries’ Lowy thermometer ratings. In general, Australian attitudes are more volatile towards countries of which they think unfavourably, and more stable when they think favourably of countries, regardless of whether these countries are geographically proximate or distant. Graph 1 below charts the mean warmth of feelings of a country against its standard deviation—a statistical measure often used to measure volatility—for countries that were included in the Lowy Institute’s thermometer measure at least four times between 2006 and 2017 (23 countries). The standard deviation shows how spread out a set of numbers are by measuring the average deviation of each number from its mean.8 For example, Indonesia has a standard deviation of 2.8, which means Australians’ warmth of feelings deviated, on average, 2.8 points from the mean of 51.

Graph 1: Warmer feelings are typically more stable Source: Authors’ analysis based on data from Lowy Institute Annual Poll 2006–2017. For graphical purposes, this graph excludes United States, Afghanistan, Great Britain and Iran.

8  Standard deviation is the square root of the variance for a variable. Variance is calculated by subtracting the mean thermometer rating for each country from each year’s rating, squaring the resultant values (to remove negative values), then taking an average of each individual year’s variance.

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Graph 1 shows that when Australians have warmer attitudes towards a country (higher mean warmth of feelings), attitudes were typically also more stable (lower standard deviation). Indonesia’s standard deviation of 2.8 is higher than the median standard deviation (2.34) but similar to Myanmar (2.91), which also has a mean warmth of feeling of 51. Volatility of feelings towards Indonesia is considerably higher than New Zealand, the country towards which Australians have the warmest attitudes. With a standard deviation of only 1.1, Australian attitudes toward New Zealand only deviated, on average, 1.1 points from the mean of 84. North Korea, with the lowest mean warmth of feelings of 32 also has the highest standard deviation of 4.62. The intensity of Australian reactions to each development in bilateral ties— whether favourable or unfavourable—thus more likely reflects underlying negative attitudes. The two exceptions to this rule are Afghanistan and the US. Although Afghanistan has one of the most unfavourable attitudes (average 38), it was also one of the most stable (standard deviation of 1.1), where feelings ranged between 37 and 40. In contrast, although feelings towards the US were relatively high (average 68), it was extremely volatile (standard deviation of 3.74), seemingly reflecting the very different international attitudes to the US under different presidents.

Mistrust Multiple polls on Australians’ attitudes towards Indonesia show an inherent lack of trust in the country. A persistent perception of Indonesia as a security threat to Australia appears as the primary driver of this mistrust. In contrast to China, which is also seen as threatening, Australian insecurity towards Indonesia is, as mentioned, not offset by a perception of strong economic importance to Australia. Lowy Institute polling has asked respondents on three occasions since 2009, ‘How much do you trust the following countries to act responsibly in the world?’. Trust of Indonesia has been consistently low, ranging from only 45% of respondents saying they either trusted Indonesia ‘a great deal’ or ‘somewhat’ in 2009 to 52% in 2017. Notably, China has consistently ranked above ­Indonesia, although the gap has decreased over time. Until a stark decrease in trust coinciding with Russia’s increased geo-political assertiveness under Vladimir Putin, Australians also placed greater trust in Russia (59% in 2009) than Indonesia. Reflecting Australian’s limited trust in its northern neighbour, Indonesia has also ranked modestly when the Lowy poll has asked respondents to nominate ­Australia’s ‘best friend in Asia’. Only 9% of respondents identified Indonesia as Australia’s best regional friend in 2014, significantly lower than China (31%) and Japan (28%) and also lower than Singapore (12%). An improved rating in 2016 of 15%, nevertheless remained lower than China and Japan.

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Table 2:  Percentage of respondents who answered ‘a great deal’ or ‘somewhat’ when asked ‘how much do you trust the following countries to act responsibly in the world? 2009

2011

2017

United States

83%

83%

61%

Japan

81%

83%

86%

China

59%

60%

54%

India

61%

61%

64%

Russia

59%

53%

38%

Indonesia

45%

46%

52%

Iran

25%

15%

N/A

North Korea

N/A

N/A

12%

Source: Lowy Institute Annual Poll, 2009, 2011 and 2017. Respondents were asked to select between ‘a great deal’, ‘somewhat’, ‘not very much’ or ‘not at all’. Selected countries that were only included once between 2009 and 2017 have been excluded.

Table 3:  Responses to ‘In your personal opinion, which one of the following countries is Australia’s best friend in Asia?’ 2014

2016

China

31%

30%

Japan

28%

25%

Indonesia

9%

15%

Singapore

12%

12%

5%

6%

5%

4%

11%

9%

India South Korea None/don’t know Source: Lowy Institute Annual Poll, 2014 and 2016.

While George Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump appear to have shaped Australian attitudes to the US, the figure of the Indonesian president has not been a strong driver of distrust. Although Australia trusts Indonesia less than other Asian countries, its leaders are the most admired in Asia. In the 2015 Lowy poll, 25% of Australians admired President Joko Widodo, who was rated higher than President Xi Jinping of China (23%), Shinzo Abe of Japan (21%) and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India (20%). Former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was significantly more popular amongst Australians than Widodo. Polling in 2014 found that 37% of respondents admired President Yudhoyono,

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making him significantly more liked than President Xi Jinping (17%) and only slightly less popular than German Chancellor Angela Merkel (44%). Table 4:  Percentage of respondents that answered ‘admire a little’ and ‘admire a lot’ when asked ‘for each of the following leaders, please say whether you personally admire them a lot, admire them a little or you don’t admire them’ 2014

2015

Barack Obama

87%

86%

Angela Merkel

44%

47%

Joko Widodo

25%

Peter O’Neill

24%

Vladimir Putin

23%

Xi Jinping

17%

23%

Shinzo Abe

21%

Narendra Modi

20%

Helen Clark

48%

Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono

37%

Aung Sang Suu Kyi

36%

Source: Lowy Institute Annual Poll, 2014 and 2015. In 2014, respondents were asked to select between ‘admire a lot’, ‘admire a little’, ‘don’t know/no view’. In 2015, an additional category ‘don’t know (the person)’ was added.

Instead, the perception that Indonesia continues to be a security threat to Australia appears to drive mistrust of Indonesia. The 2015 Lowy Institute poll found that 54% of respondents agreed with the statement that ‘Australia is right to worry about Indonesia as a military threat’ and 61% of respondents agreed that ‘Indonesia is dangerous source of Islamic terrorism’. The 2012 DFAT/­Newspoll survey found that 45% of respondents agreed that Indonesia is ‘a threat to ­Australian national security’. Similarly, multiple Australian Election Study surveys over the past two decades have showed that more Australians thought Indonesia was more ‘likely to pose a threat to Australia’s security’ than other nations such as China and Japan. China finally eclipsed Indonesia in the 2016 survey. Public perceptions on this front stand at odds with expert opinion, which has long classed China as a greater potential security threat to Australia. Indeed, establishment thinking on Indonesia in Australia has evolved sufficiently that Carr (2014: 231) terms the 2013 Defence White Paper as the first ‘post-Indonesia ­strategic document’, shifting Indonesia from ‘being an implicit or explicit threat to a neutral or even natural partner’. This mistrust and high threat perception is also reflected in the fact that more Australians feel that it is acceptable to spy on Indonesia than most other countries.

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74

72

70 60

% likely threat

60

73 62

62

52

50

59 50

40 30 24 20

17 15 12

10 0

1996

1998

Indonesia

2001 China

2004 Japan

2007 Malaysia

2010 Vietnam

2013

2016

United States

Graph 2: Percentage of Australians who responded ‘very likely’ or ‘highly likely’ when asked ‘In your opinion, are any of the following countries likely to pose a threat to Australia’s security?’ Source: Australian Election Study, 1996, 1998, 2001, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016.

In the 2014 Lowy poll, fielded after the 2013 espionage crisis between Australia and Indonesia, 62% of respondents believed it was acceptable to spy on Indonesia. Among Asian countries included in the survey, acceptance of spying was higher only towards China (65%). Table 5:  Percentage of respondents who answered ‘acceptable’ when asked ‘whether you personally think it is acceptable or not acceptable for the Australian government to spy on each of the following countries’ 2014 China

65%

Indonesia

62%

East Timor

60%

Japan

58%

United States

54%

France

53%

New Zealand

51%

Source: Lowy Institute Annual Poll, 2014. This question was asked in two parts. Respondents were first asked ‘Is it acceptable or not acceptable to spy on the governments of countries with which (a) Australian has good relations; (b) Australia does not have good relations? Respondents who answered ‘unacceptable’ to one of (a) or (b) were asked a follow-up question: ‘Whether you personally think it is acceptable or not acceptable for the Australian government to spy on each of the following countries’. The percentage who responded ‘acceptable’ for each country were added to those who responded ‘acceptable’ to both (a) and (b).

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The significant increase in security and defence cooperation between Australia and Indonesia over the last twenty years has not significantly allayed the ­Australian public’s fears about an Indonesian security threat. The 2010 Lowy Institute poll found a greater proportion of respondents (34%) who thought Indonesia was ‘more of a threat’ than it was 10 years ago than respondents who thought Indonesia was ‘less of a threat’ (27%). Between 1996 and 2007, the ­Australian Election Study tested to what extent respondents agreed with the statement ‘[t]he security agreement between Australia and Indonesia means that we can trust Indonesia never to be a military threat’. A majority of respondents either ‘disagreed’ or ‘strongly disagreed’ with the statement each time it was asked, with ­disagreement peaking at 68% in 2001, when the question was asked, despite no security agreement being in place between the two countries (Indonesia had abrogated the 1995 treaty in 1999 over Australia’s involvement in the International Force East Timor (Interfet)). 70.0% 68.0% 68.0% 66.0%

64.5%

64.0% 62.0%

62.9% 61.0% 61.2%

60.0% 58.0% 56.0% 1996

1998

2001

2004

2007

Graph 3: Percentage of Australians who responded ‘disagree’ or ‘strongly disagree’ when asked ‘The security agreement between Australia and Indonesia means that we can trust Indonesia never to be a military threat’ Source: Australian Election Study, 1996, 1998, 2001, 2004, 2007.

Australians’ mistrust of Indonesia also means that the public does not see Indonesia as an important security partner. When asked to nominate the country that ‘will be Australia’s most important security partner over the next 10 years’, only 2% of respondents in the 2012 Lowy poll nominated Indonesia, a far lower ­proportion than nominated China (24%). A further 6% of respondents ranked Indonesia as Australia’s second most important security partner.

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Table 6:  Percentage of respondents who identified each country as Australia’s ‘most important security partner’ and ‘second most important security partner’ in the next ten years 2012 United States

87%

China

24%

New Zealand

19%

Great Britain

35%

Indonesia

8%

Japan

6%

Other

11%

Don’t know/None

2%

Source: Lowy Institute Annual Poll, 2012.

Economic Relations Unlike China, which Lowy poll respondents consistently identify as the most important economy to Australia, mistrust towards Indonesia is, as mentioned, not counter-balanced by a public judgment that the two countries share a very close economic relationship. In the 2013 Lowy poll, asked to choose between America, Japan and China, 76% of Australians identified China as the most important. The same year, only 65% of Australians agreed that ‘Indonesia is an important economy to Australia’ (emphasis added). The 2012 DFAT/Newspoll study produced a very similar result, with 66% agreeing that Indonesia is ‘an important economy’. When asked to identify Australia’s biggest trading partners by the AIC, only 11% selected Indonesia, far lower than those that identified China (75%). In another sign of the limited significance Australians attribute to economic ties with Indonesia, trade and investment ranked well below a suite of security issues when the 2014 Lowy poll asked respondents to identify important areas on which the Australian and Indonesian governments should work together. Just 57% identified trade and investment as ‘very important’, only outdoing ‘aid to Indonesia’ among the six issues put to respondents (see Table 7). Table 7:  Percentage of respondents who identified it as ‘very important’ for the Indonesian and Australian governments to be working together 2014 Security in the region

75%

Terrorism

75% (continued)

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Table 7:  (Continued) 2014 Asylum seekers and people smuggling

73%

Trade and Investment

57%

Aid to Indonesia

29%

Source: Lowy Institute Annual Poll, 2014.

Nevertheless, despite this underlying mistrust, the majority of Australians believe that it is important for Australia and Indonesia to work together. In the 2016 Lowy Institute poll, 91% of respondents either ‘agreed’ or ‘strongly agreed’ that Indonesia is important to Australia. In the 2006 poll, almost twice as many respondents (64%) agreed with the statement that ‘it is very important that Australia and Indonesia work together to develop a close relationship’ than agreed with the statement, ‘Australia and Indonesia are too different to develop a close relationship’ (36%).

Knowledge of Indonesia There is no doubt that Australians know little about Indonesia—indeed, ­Australians consider their own knowledge of Indonesia as modest when asked to self-rate. Given the prominence of this discourse of ignorance in discussion of bilateral ties, however, it is surprising how few knowledge questions have been asked in public opinion surveys. Across 13 iterations of the Lowy Institute’s annual poll between 2005 and 2017, where hundreds of questions on foreign policy have been fielded, respondents have been asked only a single time to answer a knowledgespecific question about Indonesia, although several other attitudes questions provide indirect measures of knowledge. The 2012 DFAT/Newspoll made a more concerted effort to measure knowledge, asking eight questions. Although no-one would contest the idea that Australians know little about Indonesia, the sparse polling data available on knowledge of Indonesia means there is not a clear-cut case that Australian knowledge of Indonesia is exceptionally low. This sparseness of data and the inconsistent manner in which knowledge questions have been formulated also means there is little basis to rigorously investigate connections between knowledge and attitudes. The sole knowledge question fielded by the Lowy Institute on Indonesia asked respondents in 2006 to name the Indonesian president. As mentioned at the outset of this chapter, only 20% gave answers approximating Susilo Bambang ­Yudhoyono. Four further opinion questions in the Lowy polls have exposed the Australian p ­ ublic’s lack of knowledge on Indonesia. The first in 2015 asked respondents to ­identify which leaders they admired (from a prescribed list), prompting 42% to answer

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that they did not know who Joko Widodo was. Second, from 2013 to 2017, respondents have been asked whether they agree Indonesia is a democracy. After almost 20 years of democratic governance, in what is often hailed as one of the world’s most successful transitions from authoritarian rule, only approximately one quarter to one third of Australians believe Indonesia is a democracy. (Graph 4)

2017

5%

2015

22%

10%

2013

7%

0%

32%

24%

27%

26%

10%

20%

18%

27%

26%

30%

40%

50%

22%

12%

25%

60%

Strongly agree

Somewhat agree

Strongly disagree

Don’t know/no view

70%

16%

80%

90%

100%

Somewhat disagree

Graph 4: Responses to the question ‘Do you personally agree or disagree that Indonesia is a democracy? And is that strongly or somewhat?’ Source: Lowy Institute Annual Poll, 2013, 2015, 2017.

Third, a second question in 2010 asked Australians whether they saw Indonesia as more or less ‘open and democratic’ compared to 15 years prior, or about the same. Although not spelt out, this question was effectively asking respondents to compare the political situation in Indonesia in 1995, three years before Suharto’s authoritarian regime fell, with current day Indonesia, in which draconian restrictions on freedom of expression, association and political activity have long been abolished. Only 41% of Australians said Indonesia was ‘more open and democratic’, with 39% choosing ‘about the same’, whereas 14% believed Indonesia was ‘less open and democratic’. A final battery of opinion questions fielded in 2006 and 2011 asked ­Australians to show their extent of agreement to various statements about Indonesia on a scale between 0 to 10 (with 10 being strong agreement). Respondents expressed the strongest agreement to the statement ‘Indonesia is essentially controlled by the military’, averaging a score of 6.8 out of 10 in 2006 and 6.9 in 2011. These answers stand at odds with expert opinion—Mietzner (2011), for example, cites the ­Indonesian military’s withdrawal from a major political role in the first decade of the 2000s as the only exception to a pattern of politically ­resurgent

Ignorant and Ill-disposed?

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­ ilitaries across Southeast Asia. The statements put to respondents also included m an earlier version of the democracy question, with an average score of 5.2 in 2011 and 5.1 in 2006 in response to the statement, ‘Indonesia is an emerging democracy’. In contrast to the limited direct measures of Australians’ knowledge of Indonesia in Lowy polling, the 2012 DFAT/Newspoll study includes eight direct knowledge questions. Seven of these knowledge questions were asked as a set, covering topics such as the Indonesian economy, political system and AustraliaIndonesia relations. On average, respondents received a score of 3.2 out of seven, with 59% of respondents answering three or fewer questions correctly. Only 1% of respondents received a perfect score and 2% had no correct answers. Respondents did best on questions relating to Australia-Indonesia relations, and most poorly on questions testing their knowledge of Indonesia’s political system. Table 8:  Percentage of Respondents who correctly answered the following questions % correct Law-making in Indonesia is based on Islamic law (false)

28%

About 50% of Indonesians live on less than $2/day (true)

36%

Indonesia is one of the largest 20 economies in the world (true)

39%

Indonesia is one of the fastest growing economies in the world (true)

43%

Indonesia is a democracy (true)

47%

Australian government does not advise Australians to avoid travelling to Indonesia (true)

55%

No country donates more aid money to Indonesia than Australia (true)

70%

Source: Australian attitudes towards Indonesia, May 2013, Newspoll. The survey asked respondents to answer ‘for each of the following, please tell me whether you believe this is definitely true, probably true, probably false, or definitely false.

Separately, respondents were also asked whether Bali was a country in its own right or part of another country. 70% correctly identified the province as part of Indonesia, although 21% answered either that it was a country (17%) or part of a country other than Indonesia (4%). Given the survey responses outlined above, it is not surprising that respondents have claimed to have low levels of knowledge about Indonesia when asked to self-assess. Only 17% of the respondents of the DFAT/Newspoll study rated their own knowledge of Indonesia as ‘good’, with the majority choosing ‘fair’ (50%) or ‘poor’ (31%). In the AIC Perceptions Study, only 19% of respondents thought they had a ‘good understanding’ of Indonesia, whereas 34% rated themselves having ‘moderate understanding’ and almost half (47%) of respondents said they have ‘little or no understanding’ or Indonesia.

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Australian Knowledge of Indonesia in Context To properly interpret Australian levels of knowledge about Indonesia, however, these survey answers need to be considered in comparison to the public’s knowledge of other international and domestic political issues. In a few cases, answers about Indonesia can be compared to other answers from the same polls. Answers to the Australian Election Study and other international polls provide a further point of comparison. In either case, knowledge of Indonesia does not stand out as exceptionally low. Two of the three knowledge questions not about Indonesia fielded in Lowy Institute polls have asked respondents to name the United Nations Secretary General in 2006 and the New Zealand Prime Minister in 2007: 41% correctly named Kofi Annan and 38% named Helen Clark. In a similar question in the Australian Election Study in 2013, 47% were able to correctly select Ban Ki-moon as UN Secretary General in a multiple-choice question, which typically produce higher scores for public knowledge than open-ended question (Robison 2015). Certainly the 2006 Lowy Institute figure of 20% recognition of Yudhoyono is lower than any of the other responses. On the other hand, Yudhoyono had been in office only for just over a year when the survey was fielded, whereas Annan and Clark had occupied their posts for closer to a decade when the questions were asked, and all the correct response rates are arguably modest. The comparison with knowledge of other countries is even more direct for the 2015 Lowy Institute poll figure on Jokowi, in which 42% admitted they did not know who he was when asked whether they admired him. This figure was similar to those who did not know German Chancellor Angela Merkel (40%), and the ­survey also revealed significantly lower levels of knowledge of other Asia-Pacific leaders Xi Jinping (53%), Shinzo Abe (59%), Narenda Modi (68%) and Peter O’Neill (61%) than of Jokowi. Table 9:  Percentage of Respondents who stated they did not know the following people 2015 Barack Obama

1%

Hillary Clinton

3%

Pope Francis

8%

Vladimir Putin

8%

Angela Merkel

40%

Joko Widodo

42%

Peter O’Neill

61%

Xi Jinping

53% (continued)

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Table 9:  (Continued) 2015 Shinzo Abe

59%

Narenda Modi

68%

Source: Lowy Institute Annual Poll, 2015. Respondents were asked ‘For each of the following leaders, please say whether you personally admire them a lot, admire them a little or you don’t admire them.’ Respondents were also asked to identify if they did not know the leader.

Knowledge questions about Australia’s own political system provide an interesting point of comparison to the Lowy Institute and DFAT/Newspoll questions on whether Australians see Indonesia as a democracy. Across the four Australian Election Study surveys from 2007 to 2016, an average of 28% of Australians correctly answered ‘false’ to the proposition that the longest time allowed between federal elections is four years. Only 40% correctly identified that there are not a total of 75 members in Australia’s federal House of Representatives.9 In the 2004 survey, only 54% correctly identified ‘citizens’ as the category of people entitled to vote when presented with four options in a multiple choice question. Nor does the Australian public’s modest knowledge of Indonesia stand out as exceptional when compared with survey results that measure public knowledge of international affairs in other countries. Australians ranked in the middle of the pack in a 2010 survey conducted by a group of academic researchers that tested basic knowledge of international news in eleven countries, outdoing South Korea, the US, Japan, India and Canada, but less knowledgeable than respondents in Colombia, the UK, Italy, Greece and Norway. The survey tested respondents on their knowledge of three ‘Western’ and three ‘Eastern’ knowledge questions, in an attempt to ensure the questions were not easier for respondents in any one region to answer.10 Australia achieved its rating despite having the lowest percentage of international and foreign news in its television coverage, according to content analysis conducted by the article’s authors. Overall knowledge in most countries was modest among countries where all six questions were asked. Only in Norway, the UK and Colombia did more than 50% on average of each country’s population know the correct answer to each question.11

9  The House of Representatives expires three years after its first meeting, although it can be dissolved earlier, and writs triggering an election must be issued within ten days (AEC 2013). There are 150 members of the House of Representatives. 10  Questions ranged from identifying what the Copenhagen summit was about, shortly after it was held, to identifying Vladimir Putin, Angela Merkel, the Thai Red Shirts, the Taliban, and naming Ban Ki-Moon’s job. 11  The authors conducted the survey in eleven countries but we have excluded Italy and Greece from the figures, as fewer questions were asked in these countries than elsewhere. See Aalberg et al (2013: 387–406).

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In another example, a study of European Union (EU) citizens’ knowledge of the EU concluded that 65% of the union’s citizens held ‘some but not much ­knowledge’ or less, based on their answers to a 1993 survey. Only 10% were very well informed (Sinnott 2000: 113–37). Empirically, then, the case for exceptional Australian ignorance of Indonesia is at best unclear. Australians have comparable low levels of knowledge about countries other than Indonesia and even about their own political system. The waters are further muddied by the fact that the relatively few knowledge q ­ uestions included in Australian surveys have not been asked in any consistent way. Some have been open-ended questions, others multiple-choice, still others true or false questions. Attitude questions that measure knowledge have similarly asked on occasion whether respondents strongly or somewhat agreed, but on others measured degree of agreement on a scale from 0 to 10. A substantial polling methodology literature critically evaluates the different apparent knowledge outcomes produced by asking multiple choice as opposed to open-ended questions, asking knowledge questions early in a survey or towards the end (Robison 2015), and including or omitting a ‘don’t know’ option (Mondak 2001), for example. Without summarising this literature at length, it is clear that questions asked with different formats in surveys with different sampling strategies cannot be compared directly, a caveat that most interpretation of polling about Indonesia has ignored. The limits this places on our precise understanding from polling data of Australians’ knowledge of Indonesia further undermines the empirical basis to consider whether a causal relationship exists between knowledge of Indonesia and attitudes towards Australia’s northern neighbour. Nevertheless, it is to this task that this chapter now turns.

Is Australian Ignorance Wilful? The preceding sections have shown Australian attitudes to Indonesia stand out as exceptionally negative. It consistently ranks as the most threatening country to Australian security and attracts high levels of mistrust. At the same time, the Australian public’s knowledge of Indonesia is poor but not exceptionally so. This weakens the case that negative attitudes produce wilful ignorance towards ­Indonesia. Public opinion polling demonstrates that Australians know similarly little about a great many things that they do not regard negatively. But if not negative attitudes, then what else could explain Australians’ modest knowledge of Indonesia? A starting point in answering this question is the musings of political scientists over the question of why the public lacks political knowledge, a question that has long occupied scholars’ attention in the context of elections. Studies of public knowledge have adopted two inter-related foci: looking either at the nature of information available to the public; or at the choices the public makes about what information to consume (Aalberg and Curran 2012; Hahn et al 2012: 199).

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A common thread running through studies of information provision is the observation that the emergence of cable news channels and the internet means that more information is available to the public now than ever before. There is some evidence that exposure to this information may produce a more informed public. For instance Aalberg et al (2013) conclude that greater ‘hard news’ content—reports about political, economic and social issues—in television news broadcasts correlates positively with greater public knowledge of domestic and international current affairs. Scholars have found no overall trend of the public becoming more informed over time, however, even on topics of geopolitical significance to their country, compared to previous generations with lesser access to information (Pew 2007).12 One explanation is that the diversity of media outlets now actually makes it easier for members of the public to opt out of consuming news content altogether (Prior 2005; Hahn et al 2012: 119). Among studies that instead focus on why members of the public do or do not consume available information, the concept of ‘rational ignorance’ dominates. Pioneered in the 1950s by the economist Anthony Downs, this school of thought argues that because the average citizen is little affected by most political debates and can exercise only a miniscule impact by casting an informed vote, the citizen makes the rational choice not to undertake the burdensome effort to become well-informed (Hardin 2006:182–83; Somin 2006: 257–58). Moreover, scholars of this school of thought argue, many of those who do choose to consume political or current affairs information do so for reasons of enjoyment, and not because they need the information because of its utility. Somin (2006: 261) likens the behaviour of some of these citizens to sports fans, consuming information to be better able to support their side of politics rather than to make an informed judgment about who is the better candidate or party. Either approach to understanding political ignorance could help to explain the Australian public’s knowledge deficiencies about Indonesia. If there is a correlation between knowledge and information availability, we saw earlier in the chapter that Australians receive comparatively little information about international affairs through television broadcasts (Aalberg et al 2013). The same study found coverage of international and foreign hard news to be concentrated on public broadcasters; a private television news viewer might see even fewer items about Indonesia. Nor would many Australians face an immediate ‘rational interest’ need to know the facts about Indonesia that public opinion surveys typically test. Few Australians would see a perceptible benefit in their immediate circumstances from knowing that Indonesia is a democracy, understanding what role the military plays in its political system, or from recognising Joko Widodo as president. Nor would many Australians necessarily be exposed to ready opportunities to develop a discretionary interest in consuming information about Indonesia for enjoyment rather than

12  The Pew survey found only 36% of Americans able to name the president of Russia in 2007, down from 47% in 1989.

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utility. Much as a third of Australians claim to have travelled to Indonesia, according to the 2012 DFAT/Newspoll study, Indonesian cultural products are notable by their relative absence from the Australian public sphere. Few Indonesian movies are screened on Australian television or in film festivals, Indonesian music artists have not penetrated the Australian market, and the shelves of Australian bookstores are mostly bereft of the translated works of Indonesia authors. Australia and Indonesia are not important rivals in any sport, and no Indonesian sportspeople of note play in Australian sporting competitions, or vice versa. Indonesian restaurants in Australian cities are also vastly outnumbered by those of other national cuisines, notwithstanding the recent successes of chefs of ­Indonesian background on Australian cooking reality television shows. The Indonesian diaspora living in Australia is also comparatively few in number—the 2016 census found only around 73,000 Indonesian born individuals in Australia, compared to almost 650,000 people born in China and Taiwan.13 None of this disproves the idea that negative attitudes motivate Australians to remain wilfully ignorant of Indonesia—instead we seek to demonstrate that other mechanisms are also plausible. Moreover, when considered in terms of the broad sweep of studies of public knowledge, it would almost be surprising if Australians did score well on the sorts of questions about Indonesia they have been asked to answer in public opinion surveys.

‘Australians Know Little about Indonesia and Consequently Have Negative Attitudes’ Does the Australian public’s lack of knowledge drive negative attitudes towards Indonesia? The assumption that better knowledge of Indonesia would improve public attitudes is implicit in various poll reports but there is only limited ­evidence for this proposition. The DFAT/Newspoll survey fielded in 2012 makes the most direct attempt to marshal evidence that a better-informed public would view Indonesia more positively. Based on respondents’ answers to knowledge and perceptions questions, the poll authors divide respondents into four quadrants (low/high perceptions; low/ high knowledge), and find a positive correlation between knowledge and attitudes. Although they acknowledge that a correlation does not establish ‘in which direction the link operates’ (in fact, a correlation does not in itself establish a causal link at all),14 the poll authors conclude that it is ‘plausible that improving Australians’ factual knowledge of Indonesia could positively impact attitudes’. 13  Data accessed using Australian Bureau of Statistics Census Table Builder, 7 July 2017, . 14  See the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ explanation of the difference between correlation and causality: .

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More generally, the idea that greater knowledge would improve perceptions rests on the idea that Australians falsely believe Indonesia to possess a set of negative attributes, and so would view the country more positively if they knew this not to be the case. Then Lowy Institute polling director Fergus Hanson (2012) made this argument in discussing the institute’s Indonesia poll results published in 2012, saying Australians seemed unable ‘to look beyond the mental caricature of Indonesians as Islamic extremists or cruel cow slaughterers’. Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that the evidence is weak for the proposition that more knowledge would produce more positive attitudes. The DFAT/Newspoll study is the sole (polling) data-point available to support this ­proposition. Even then, the correlation between knowledge and attitudes was only moderate (the Pearson r score was +.3915), and it is not clear from the poll report whether the authors controlled for other confounding variables such as age, ­educational levels or travel experience. Nor does other polling data on Australian attitudes show a straightforward relationship with knowledge. In particular, Australians hold more positive attitudes about other countries that they know just as little about, and for which ­Australians self-identify as having even less knowledge of than Indonesia. The 2015 Lowy Institute poll found that although more many more Australians recognised the name of Indonesian president Joko Widodo compared to the leaders of China, Japan, Papua New Guinea and India, Australians nevertheless viewed Indonesia more unfavourably than any of these five other Asia-Pacific countries. Table 10:  Higher knowledge did not necessarily mean more favourable attitudes % who did not recognise the name of the country’s leader

Warmth of feeling (degrees)

Indonesia (Joko Widodo)

42%

46

Papua New Guinea (Peter O’Neill)

61%

58

China (Xi Jinping)

53%

58

Japan (Shinzo Abe)

59%

68

India (Narenda Modi)

68%

56

Source: Lowy Institute Annual Poll, 2015.

15  The Pearson correlation is a common measure of the correlation between two variables. It measures the linear relationship between two variables and extent of the correlation between these two variables is shown by the Pearson r score (for samples). Pearson r scores ranges between −1 and 1. The closer the r score is to zero, the weaker the correlation. If the Pearson r score is between 0.51 (or −0.5—1), correlation is considered high. Pearson r score of 0.3-0.5 (and -0.3—0.5) are interpreted as medium correlation and scores that are greater than -0.3 and less than 0.3 are interpreted as low correlation (zero is no correlation).

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The AIC Perceptions Study also found mixed results in relation to self-­identified knowledge and attitudes of countries. In comparison to other Asian countries surveyed, Australians’ self-identified level of knowledge of I­ndonesia was ­moderate—less than China, Japan, Singapore and India but more than Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines. In contrast, fewer Australians had favourable opinions of Indonesia than any other country including those countries that Australians had lower self-identified level of knowledge. Table 11:  Higher self-identified knowledge did not necessarily mean more favourable attitudes % respondents who self-identified as having a ‘good understanding’ or ‘moderate understanding’ of each country*

% respondents who had ‘very favourable’ or ‘somewhat favourable’ overall opinion of each country^

China

66%

58%

Japan

64%

80%

Singapore

57%

76%

India

55%

49%

Indonesia

53%

43%

Thailand

48%

59%

Malaysia

46%

58%

South Korea

42%

59%

Vietnam

42%

56%

Philippines

41%

53%

Source: Indonesia and Australia: A research report on: The perceptions of Indonesians and Australians, The Australian Centre, 2016: (Q8) How well do you feel you know and understand each of the following countries. By this, we mean how knowledgeable you feel about the country, its people, its culture and so on. (Q7) Please select if you have a very favourable, somewhat favourable, somewhat unfavourable or very unfavourable overall opinion of each of the following countries.

If Australians’ negative attitudes towards Indonesia are not driven by i­gnorance, then what factors might account for these unfavourable feelings? A surprising finding from analysing polling data is not that Australians have negative a­ ttitudes towards Indonesia, but that they have consistently more favourable feelings towards China in comparison to Indonesia. China is an authoritarian state that security experts in Australia view as a significantly larger threat to Australian security than Indonesia. In contrast, the Australian public perceive that China is a more trusted partner than Indonesia. The two factors that may account for why China is perceived more favourably may provide insight as to why Australians view Indonesia so negatively.

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First, Australians perceive that China is Australia’s most important economic partner, a view they do not hold for Indonesia. This perception (and the reality) of a strong existing economic relationship may counter concerns about China’s authoritarian government and its threats to Australian security. Second, the large Chinese diaspora in Australia may also counter potential feelings of threat towards China. The large Chinese diaspora not only means greater interaction between Australian and Chinese people within Australia, but also results in greater business and cultural links between the diaspora and their native country. Chinese-­Australians are more easily able to: establish joint ventures with Chinese businesses; attract Chinese investment to Australia; provide a larger pool of latent linguistic skills (Hughes 2012); and establish cultural exchanges that will foster greater understanding. Why do assumptions persist that Australian negative attitudes towards Indonesia are a function of a lack of knowledge, despite limited evidence? One ­possible explanation is that those designing and interpreting the public opinion polls are projecting their views onto the population. Typically, those who write about Indonesia and commission polls know more about Indonesia and hold more positive attitudes towards the country than do the public at large. The risk of projection is further compounded by the fact that several of the organisations that have commissioned polls—such as DFAT and the Australia-Indonesia Centre— are explicitly committed to promoting bilateral relations.

Conclusion This chapter has outlined the limited evidence for the common propositions that Australians know little about Indonesia because of their negative attitudes, and vice versa. In conclusion, we turn to the implications for policy makers seeking to improve knowledge, attitudes, and Australia-Indonesia relations. First, although the authors consider it desirable for Australians to have greater knowledge of Indonesia, broader studies of political knowledge suggest this would be a very difficult outcome to achieve. Moreover, if the policy goal of such an endeavour was to produce improved public attitudes towards Australia’s northern neighbour, there is no guarantee that this would be the outcome. Second, there is some suggestion in polling data that a perception that a country is an important economic partner may temper negative public attitudes towards it. Greater economic relations with Indonesia are widely seen as a good in themselves (see chapters twenty-three and twenty-four), and the possible dividend for attitudes to Indonesia may merit further research. Third, commentators and policy-makers should be cautious in drawing causal links from polling data. Doing so requires a volume of data, generated with consistent methodology, over a period of time. Such data simply is not available in

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the case of Australia-Indonesia relations. The Lowy Institute polls stand alone in providing a picture of Australian attitudes to Indonesia over time, but even this body of data gives no indication as to drivers of these attitudes. Fourth, as the resources available to policy-makers to improve bilateral ties have historically been limited, an emphasis on improving overall public attitudes and knowledge may not be the most efficient way to improve Australia-Indonesia ­relations. Political attitudes are notoriously difficult to shift.16 Given the limited government resource envelope, it may be more within reach to focus on expanding the core of Australians and Indonesians who are engaging intensively with each other, instead of seeking to shift polling numbers. Even a substantial expansion in this committed core would not show up as more positive attitudes or greater knowledge expressed in surveys but would nevertheless enrich the overall bilateral relationship. For the foreseeable term at least, the Australian public is likely to remain ignorant and ill-disposed towards Indonesia.

References Aalberg, Toril; Papathanassopoulos, Stylianos; Soroka, Stuart; Curran, James; Hayashi, Kaori; Iyengar, Shanto; Jones, Paul K; Mazzoleni, Gianpietro; Roja, Hernando; Rowe, David; and Tiffen, Rodney (2013) ‘International TV News, Foreign Affairs Interest and Public Knowledge’ 14(3) Journalism Studies 387. Australian Electoral Commission (2013) Federal Election Timetable . Carr, Andrew (2014) ‘The Asian Century’ in Chris Aulich (ed), The Gillard Governments (Melbourne, Melbourne University Press). Hahn, Kyu S; Iyengar, Shanto; Aelst, Peter van; and Curran, James (2013) ‘Does Knowledge of Hard News Go with Knowledge of Soft News? A Cross-National Analysis of the Structure of Public Affairs Knowledge’ in James P Curran and Toril Aalberg (eds), How Media Inform Democracy: A Comparative Approach (New York, Routledge). Hanson, Fergus (2012) ‘Wake-up Call for a Stale Relationship’, The Australian, 20 March. Hardin, Russell (2006) ‘Ignorant Democracy’ 18(1–3) Critical Review 179. Hill, David (2016) ‘Language as “Soft Power” in Bilateral Relations: The Case of Indonesian Language in Australia’ 36(3) Asia Pacific Journal of Education 364.

16  See Sides (2016: 390) for a review of various studies that find that the public ‘tend[s] to discount facts that are contrary to their existing attitudes or interpret facts in ways that support these attitudes’, although Sides himself concludes that correct factual information is able to shift attitudes to the estate tax in the US.

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Hughes, Kirrilee (2012) ‘Australia’s Latent Asia Literacy’, The Interpreter, 24 August. Mietzner, Marcus (2011) ‘Conflict and Leadership: The Resurgent Political Role of the Military in Southeast Asia’ in M Mietzner (ed), The Political Resurgence of the Military in Southeast Asia: Conflict and Leadership (London and New York: Routledge). Mondak, Jeffrey J (2001) ‘Developing Valid Knowledge Scales’ 45(1) American Journal of Political Science 224. Pew Research Center (2007) ‘What Americans Know: 1989-2007’, . Prior, Markus (2005) ‘News v. Entertainment: How Increasing Media Choice Widens Gaps in Political Knowledge and Turnout’ 49(3) American Journal of Political Science 594. Robison, Joshua (2015) ‘Who Knows? Question Format and Political Knowledge’ 27(1) International Journal of Public Opinion Research 1. Sides, John (2016) ‘Stories or Science? Facts, Frames and Policy Attitudes’ 44(3) American Politics Research 387. Sinnott, Richard (2000) ‘Knowledge and the Position of Attitudes to a European Foreign Policy on the Real-to-Random Continuum’ 12(2) International Journal of Public Opinion Research 113. Sobocinska, Agnieszka (2015) ‘Australia-Indonesia Attitudes Impact Study— Historical’, Australia-Indonesia Centre, Monash University, unpublished. Somin, Ilya (2006) ‘Knowledge about Ignorance: New Directions in the Study of Political Information’ 18(1–3) Critical Review 255. Yudhoyono, Susilo Bambang (2010) ‘Address by the President of the Republic of Indonesia’, to Joint Sitting of the Australian Parliament, Canberra, 10 March, in Parliamentary Debates: House of Representatives: Official Hansard: 2136–40.

List of Public Opinion Surveys Referred to in this Chapter Australian Election Study surveys from 1996–2016. Australia-Indonesia Centre’s ‘Australia-Indonesia Perceptions Report 2016’. DFAT/Newspoll, ‘Australian Attitudes towards Indonesia’, May 2013. Lowy Institute for International Policy Annual Polling from 2005–2017, as well as the 2012 Lowy Institute Indonesia Poll.

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6 Through a Glass, Darkly: Bali, Bad News and Australia-Indonesia Relations TIM LINDSEY

The Indonesian holiday resort island of Bali plays a strange, disruptive and important role in relations between Australia and Indonesia. If mainstream Australian media reports are to be believed, Bali is now a very dark and dangerous place. The unifying theme of the events these reports describe is of Australian visitors—some innocents, others up to no good—finding their tropical paradise turning suddenly to hell. In most cases, criminal behaviour is involved, whether by Indonesians or Australians. Sometimes it directly affects relations between the two countries at the highest level. Occasionally, bad news from Bali has brought them together but more often it has pushed them apart. In fact, it has been responsible for significant tensions in the Australian-Indonesia relationship in recent years. Yet, while Bali has become a significant source of the negative perceptions of Indonesia in Australia that sometimes make the bilateral relationship difficult for governments to manage, Australians are, paradoxically, more enthusiastic about spending their holidays there than ever before. Few visit any other part of the archipelago. In fact, for many Australians, Bali is the lens through which Indonesia as a whole is viewed. It is at once the part of Indonesia that Australians most like visiting and—probably because of that—the source of much that causes many of them to dislike that country. To demonstrate this, a brief historical survey follows of selected events over the last decade and a half that involved Australians in Bali and received extensive coverage in Australia.

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Bad News from Bali The Bali Bombings On 12 October 2002, bombs exploded by militant Islamist group Jemaah I­slamiyah in Paddy’s Pub and the Sari Club in Kuta, Bali’s principal tourism district, killed 202 and injured 209. Eighty-eight Australian holidaymakers were among the dead, with Australia suffering more fatalities than any other country. Bushfires aside, this was the largest number of Australians to die in a single incident since World War II. There is no doubt that Australian holidaymakers were a target of this attack. Mukhlas, a senior Jemaah Islamiyah figure executed in 2008 for his role in this attack, made this clear: [W]hy did we choose Bali as our target? Because it was understood that Bali is the area most often visited by foreign tourists, particularly from Western and other countries [including] … Australia (Mukhlas 2003).

For him, attacking tourists in Kuta was a ‘jihad of vengeance’, in which any ­Westerner was a legitimate target as part of efforts ‘to respond to the brutality of the leaders and armies of those countries that have murdered and slaughtered our women and our children’ (Mukhlas 2003).1 The Bali bombing was shocking and distressing for most Australians—it was, in fact, Australia’s 9/11. As Sobocinska has argued, it also shattered well-established, if naïve, Australian perceptions of Bali as paradise: [T]he Bali bombings unleashed a torrent of grief. Alongside the dreadful toll of dead and injured, Australians mourned the loss of Bali as a holiday idyll. Journalists turned to the image of ‘Paradise Lost’ to express this loss. Politicians spoke of the bombings as the moment when Australia lost its innocence (Sobocinska 2012).

Vickers (2012) has shown that the idea of Bali as paradise dates back to the early nineteenth century. After the island became the last part of the archipelago to be forcibly annexed to the Dutch East Indies in 1908, its unique, insular variant of Hindu culture made it fashionable in the West. Bali became a standard stop on the itineraries of the between-wars Transatlantic smart set who were seeking what was then, quite inaccurately, portrayed as a permissive utopia. Bali was only fixed in popular Australian consciousness as a paradise much later, after Nguarah Rai International Airport opened in 1969. When ‘package tourism and the hippie trail converged on Bali’ a growing stream of Australian visitors popularised images of an idyllic, permissive tropical getaway that was accessible on the average wage (Sobocinska 2011: 202–03). With Australian arrivals in ­Indonesia growing by almost 1,200% between 1974 and 1994, and more Australians travelling to Asia than Europe in every year since 1981 (Sobocinska 2011: 202–03), 1 

I am grateful to Greg Fealy for this quotation.

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Bali soon became Australia’s premier destination in Asia. It was seen as a ‘home away from home’ or, as Vickers puts it, a ‘paradise island’ that, as ‘Australia’s playground’, ‘stood apart from the rest of Indonesia in the Australian imagination’. It was an ‘extension of Byron and Noosa’, ‘a kind of tropical veranda tacked on to the top of Australia’ (Vickers 2004: 101). It was this that made the bombings in Kuta seem almost personal for so many Australians. However, if one of the aims of Jemaah Islamiyah was to drive a wedge between Australia and Indonesia by killing tourists in Bali, in Australia’s ‘home’, on ‘our doorstep’ or at ‘our backdoor’ (Sobocinska 2012), it failed, because Australia and Bali had been targeted together by the Islamist extremists—in part because both were seen as representing moral decadence (Perera 2009: 97). As Michael McKenzie shows in chapter twelve, the Bali bombing, in fact, forged new alliances between Indonesian and the Australian police, forming a foundation for close counter-terrorism cooperation that endured until 2007, when political differences disrupted the relationship.2 Just as importantly, Australia and Indonesia’s common interest in punishing the perpetrators of Indonesia’s most significant terrorist incident, and breaking the organisation behind them, allowed President Megawati Soekarnoputri and Prime Minister John Howard to smooth over the tensions that lingered from Australia’s intervention in support of East Timorese independence in 1999.

Schapelle Corby Almost exactly two years after the Bali bombings, while Australians were still recovering from the shock of that attack, Queenslander Schapelle Corby, 27, was arrested in Ngurah Rai International Airport on 8 October 2004, attempting to smuggle 4.1 kg of marijuana into Indonesia in her bodyboard bag.3 This time, the bad news from Bali was to divide Indonesia and Australia rather than unite them. Corby denied that the marijuana was hers and claimed that Australian baggage handlers planted the drugs in her bag as part of a failed smuggling operation. The case fascinated the Australian public, and most appeared to believe her version of events, at least at first. At the time of her sentencing, a television poll suggested, for example, that about 90% of Australians believed she was innocent (Australian Associated Press 2005). In the end, the intense coverage her trial generated probably did more damage to the imagery in Australia of Bali as a paradise than any other single event, triggering a new media trope of the island as tourist hell.

2 As McKenzie explains, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer’s public confirmation, before it was announced in Indonesia, that Jemaah Islamiyah leader Abu Dujana had been arrested, coupled with Australia’s decision to revise its travel advice for Indonesia to state that there a very high threat of terrorism in the country and Australians should reconsider their need to travel, was seen as a betrayal of trust by Indonesian politicians and many police. 3  This account of Corby’s trial and appeal draws in part on material in Butt and Lindsey (in press). I am grateful to Tim Mann for research assistance.

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As a result of Corby’s arrest, Indonesia’s legal system came under sustained attack in the Australian media. Australians were not accustomed to a Europeanderived civil law system in which there is no jury, and many journalists and commentators grossly misrepresented the Indonesian justice system, wrongly claiming, for example, that it did not recognise the presumption of innocence, which, for all that system’s many shortcomings,4 it certainly does.5 Rhetoric in Australia was often extreme and sometimes racist, with one Sydney radio presenter at one stage even describing the judges in the trial as monkeys ‘straight out of the trees’.6 The case sparked numerous conspiracy theories and hundreds of websites sprung up to support Corby’s cause,7 with many of her supporters doggedly harassing writers and commentators they believed were biased against her. One group, the Expendable Project, was particularly aggressive. Their vitriolic criticism of Indonesia, ­portraying Bali as a lawless and even terrifying place, reached a wide audience. It is hard to fully explain why this case became a national obsession in Australia, saturating the media for years and entangling politicians on both sides of the Arafura Sea. Pennell and McGregor (2008) argue that it reflects long-established tropes developed in the colonial period of vulnerable white women trapped in alien and barbaric Oriental legal systems. However, it also had much to do with the fact that this was the first time that a young Australian had faced trial in I­ ndonesia on serious charges—with her fate played out in Australian living rooms every night. The fall of Soeharto in 1998 had freed the media in Indonesia. The lifting of his regime’s oppressive state licensing regime saw the number of licensed print ­operators swell from just 289 to more than a thousand within a few months (Heryanto and Adi 2001).8 This triggered a new openness and led to foreign media

4 These include archaic judicial practices, corruption and incompetence, see Lindsey and Butt (2013). 5  Article 8(1) of Law 48 of 2009 on Judicial Power states that every person suspected, arrested, detained, prosecuted or summoned before the courts must be considered not guilty until there is a judicial decision of binding legal authority that establishes guilt. The Code of Criminal Procedure (KUHAP) places the burden of proof to establish guilt on prosecutors (art 66). Law 39 of 1999 on Human Rights also provides defendants’ rights. For example, art 18, which implements art 14(2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, grants the presumption of innocence to all ­persons arrested, detained or prosecuted on suspicion of committing a crime, until proven guilty in court. 6  The remarks were made by 2GB presenter Malcolm T Elliott in a discussion with a caller, as ­follows: ‘Elliott: The judges don’t even speak English, mate, they’re straight out of the trees, if you’ll excuse my expression. Caller: Don’t you think that disrespects the whole of our neighbouring nation? Elliott: I have total disrespect for our neighbouring nation, my friend. Total disrespect…. Whoa, give them a banana and away they go.’ See Ellis (2005). 7  See, eg, The Expendable Project (). 8  In 1982, a regulation was passed requiring all media to also obtain a Press Publication Enterprise Permit (Surat Izin Usaha Penerbitan Pers, SIUPP), which could also be easily withdrawn. During the Soeharto era, more than 25 publishing permits had other cancelled without judicial process, and a number of prominent news publishers were banned or forcibly closed. Most notably Tempo, Editor and Detik in 1994 (Kakialatu 2007). Under Soeharto’s successor, BJ Habibie, the SIUPP regime was quickly abandoned. See also Ismartono (2008).

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winning access they had been denied for decades.9 By 2004, Australian journalists were able to attend Indonesian courts and report every detail of proceedings. They could do so without fear of reprisal in a way that had been impossible under the New Order. The result was a media scrum outside the Denpasar District Court whenever Corby made an appearance, with mobs of foreign and local journalists jostling one another, the defendant, court officials and even police. Often, they were joined by rowdy protestors demonstrating for or against the accused, sometimes inside the court. Michael Bachelard offers a vivid insider’s account of the circus that erupted at every stage of Corby’s long legal saga in chapter sixteen. It was now to become standard when Australians faced drug charges in Bali. As cannabis is classified in Indonesian law among the most serious drugs, in the same category as heroin and cocaine,10 Corby faced the possibility of being sentenced to life in prison, or even death.11 In the end, she received 20 years in prison from the Denpasar District Court, the maximum term of imprisonment short of life. This sentence caused uproar in Australia, where, as discussed below, cannabis offences usually receive far lighter punishment. Corby’s sentence was reduced to 15 years on appeal to the High Court but increased again to 20 years on subsequent appeal to the Supreme Court. In 2012, after a great deal of behind-the-scenes diplomatic activity by Australia, Corby received a five-year sentence reduction from President Susilo Bambang ­Yudhoyono, in part over concerns about her mental health. The decision to grant clemency to Corby, despite the fact that she continued to maintain her innocence and therefore showed no remorse, met with a huge backlash from politicians and members of the Indonesian public (Saragih 2012), primarily over concerns that ­Yudhoyono was not serious about fighting drugs. The timing of the grant of ­clemency was also controversial in both Indonesia and Australia, because it roughly corresponded with Australia’s release of three young Indonesian men suspected of people smuggling from a prison in Western Australia. Suspicion was widespread that this release and Corby’s clemency were part of a secret deal between the two governments (Brown 2012). A hardline Indonesian anti-drugs NGO known as GRANAT (‘grenade’)12 therefore challenged Corby’s clemency before the Jakarta Administrative Court. The Court, however, held that clemency decisions were not reviewable because the power to make them was exercised at the absolute discretion of the president. 9  Foreign broadcasters may, for example, open an office in, and send correspondents to, I­ ndonesia, with a licence from the Minister: Government Regulation 49 of 2005 on Broadcast Guidance for ­Foreign Broadcasting Institutions. 10  An exhaustive appendix to Law No 35 of 2009 on Narcotics categorises drugs as Group I, II or III narcotics and the elucidation to the Law provides details of the categories. Group I covers ­narcotics that ‘have a very high potential to lead to addiction’ and these include heroin, opium, cocaine, ­marijuana plant products, ecstasy, MDA, LSD, mescaline, PCP, amphetamines, dexamphetamines and methamphetamines. 11  For details of penalties for drugs offences in Indonesia, see Lindsey and Nicholson (2016: 52–59 and 60–63). 12  National Anti-Narcotics Movement (Gerakan Nasional Anti-Narkotika).

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Combined with regular remissions, her five-year sentence cut meant Corby was able to leave prison on parole in 2014 but was confined to Bali for the duration of her sentence, where she lived quietly. By this time, public opinion had reversed itself and even as early as 2010 only 1 in 10 Australians believed she was innocent. (Allard and Gordon 2010). In 2017, Corby’s sentence was completed and in late May she was deported back to Australia, swapping flights at Ngurah Rai airport to avoid the media scrum that she still attracted, more than decade after her arrest.

The Bali Nine I: Arrest and Trial On 17 April 2005, while coverage of Corby’s trial in the Denpasar District Court saturated the Australian media, nine Australians aged between 18 and 28 (Andrew Chan, Si Yi Chen, Michael Czugaj, Renae Lawrence, Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen, ­Matthew Norman, Scott Rush, Martin Stephens and Myuran Sukumaran) were arrested in Denpasar airport. They were caught attempting to smuggle 8.3 ­kilograms of heroin to Australia, with a street value estimated at A$4 million. As McKenzie explains in chapter twelve, their arrest was a result of cooperation between Indonesian police and the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the fact that this exposed Australian citizens to execution created great controversy in Australia. This issue was eventually litigated in the Federal Court and the court’s decision led to new restrictions being imposed on the AFP’s ability to cooperate internationally where the offences involved were subject to the death penalty.13 Sukumaran and Chan had been designated the ‘ringleaders’ of the operation by the Indonesian courts. Their lawyers said this was quite wrong but it meant that after a long series of appeals the death sentence they received at trial remained unchanged.14 All other members of the group ended up with life sentences, except for Lawrence, the only woman in the group. She did not appeal and so served her original sentence of 20 years. Like Corby’s case, the Bali Nine case attracted intense media attention but, unlike Corby, who has always maintained her innocence, there was never any real doubt that the Bali Nine had done what they were accused of. This meant that the issues in this case were more about sentencing than guilt or innocence. Many Australians were shocked by the imposition of death sentence for an offence that, while very serious, would only attract a term of imprisonment in Australia, although few thought the executions would actually be carried out. After all, no Australian had ever been judicially executed in Indonesia and during the appeal process other Bali Nine members who had received death sentences had their sentences reduced, one by one. In May 2011, Scott Rush became the last member of Bali Nine to be released from death row by the Supreme Court.

13  Rush v Commissioner of Police [2006] FCA 12 (23 January 2006). See also Finlay (2011) and Sifris (2007). 14  Disclosure: the author was an advisor to Sukumaran and Chan’s legal team.

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In due course, Sukumaran and Chan applied to President Yudhoyono for c­ lemency but their application was not dealt with until his successor, President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) was in office. I return to what happened to them later in this chapter.

Michelle Lesley In August 2005, with the Corby and the Bali Nine front page news in Australia, Michelle Leslie, a lingerie model who had been a finalist in the Search for a Supermodel reality show, became the third Australian arrested for drugs in Bali in 12 months to attract massive media attention.15 A police search at an openair dance party near Ngurah Rai International Airport in Bali found two ecstasy ­tablets in Leslie’s handbag. Among the group accompanying her was, allegedly, a son of the then Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Aburizal Bakrie ­(McMahon 2005). Although a relatively minor case, Leslie’s arrest came quickly on the heels of those of Corby and the Bali Nine and, with the media now a fixture at the Denpasar District Court, her case quickly became another cause célèbre in ­ ­Australia. By now, the public seemed almost punch-drunk, struggling to deal with yet another ­Australian in Bali caught up in a legal system that they saw, usually without much accurate information, as unreasonable and unfair.16 Prime Minister John Howard, for one, was unsympathetic to Leslie’s plight, saying that Australians caught with drugs in Indonesia should not ‘expect the Government to bail them out.’ He added that, ‘it’s beyond belief that any Australian could be so stupid as to carry drugs into any country in Asia’ (Grattan and Forbes 2005). It would seem, however, that Leslie was well advised, perhaps because of influential Indonesian connections. At trial, she produced a report from an Australian doctor that said she was addicted to prescription medication, and this allowed her to be tried as a user of drugs, rather than for possession, a much more serious charge. On 18 November 2005, Leslie was convicted and sentenced to three months in prison but time served meant she was released the next day and deported to Singapore. During her trial, Leslie also created controversy by claiming to have converted to Islam and attended hearings dressed in a jilbab, or headscarf and, on one 15  There were other Australians arrested around this time who did not receive anything like as much coverage as Corby, the Bali Nine, and Lesley. Graham Payne, 20, an Australian teacher, was arrested in Sumatra for possession of amphetamines and heroin and in December was sentenced to nine months in prison. A few days before his arrest, John Pyle, 42, from Adelaide, was convicted of possessing 1.8 grams of hashish at his home in Ubud, Bali, receiving five months in prison. In February, Richard Wardill, 27, of Darwin, had been imprisoned in Batam for eight months for possessing four ecstasy pills (Grattan and Forbes 2005). 16  The DFAT/Newspoll survey of Australian attitudes to Indonesia showed, for example, that only 28% of Australians are aware that ‘law-making in Indonesia is not based on Islamic codes’ (Australian Government, 2013: 27).

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­occasion, a burqa. Many believed she did so to win sympathy from the judges, although she later said it was to avoid sexual abuse in prison and protect herself from the often wild media scrum (Hayes 2006). In any case, Leslie abandoned Islamic costume soon after she left Indonesia, later facing criticism for having ‘introduced the world to disposable Islam’ (Money and Ziffer 2007).

The Second Bali Bombing The animus towards tourists as representatives of the West—in Mukhlas’s eyes, ‘the dirty hands that are behind all of this destruction’ (Muklas 2003)—that motivated the first Bali bombing also drove a second lethal, but less destructive, bombing by Jemaah Islamiyah on 1 October 2005. Again, the attack targeted tourists in Kuta but this time in Jimbaran Bay as well. In Jemaah Islamiyah’s view, tourists had corrupted Bali, which, as a permissive Western tourist enclave on a Hindu island in a Muslim majority nation, was a source of moral evil in the heart of the nation that should be destroyed. Mukhlas said: [A] mission of ours was to save the Indonesian state and Indonesian nation from all forms of foreign intervention. Foreign intervention will bring nothing that is good for the Indonesian people and nation … either in moral or material terms … In moral terms, [it means] our youths are no longer ashamed to kiss, embrace in public, our women expose their navels and backsides with no feeling of shame, feel inferior if they do not have a boyfriend or girlfriend or have never made love, fornicated etc (Mukhlas 2003).

Four of the 20 killed were Australians, as were 19 of the 129 injured. Again, this event gave the governments of the two countries common cause and built solidarity between their security forces, who shared a commitment to crushing Jemaah Islamiyah. However, coming a year after Jemaah Islamiyah’s 9 September 2004 car bombing of the Australian embassy in Jakarta, the second Bali bombing also compounded the now very negative impressions widespread in Australia of Indonesia as a grim and potentially dangerous place.

The Bali Boy On 4 October 2011, a 14-year-old from Newcastle tagged the ‘Bali Boy’,17 was arrested in Kuta buying A$25 of cannabis (just 3.6 grams) and the now-routine Australia media circus quickly descended. Due to his age, he was held in police lock-up in Denpasar and never transferred to Kerobokan prison, which has housed most Australian detainees. The usual heavy coverage of this case in Australia meant the teenager soon found himself a pawn in the titanic leadership struggle between Australian Foreign 17 

The youth of ‘Bali Boy’ meant his name was not disclosed.

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Minister Kevin Rudd and Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who had toppled Rudd as leader in June 2010. Both took a very different approach to that of Howard in the Leslie case. Seeking to score points with an electorate that had been taught by often factually muddled coverage of previous high profile drugs prosecution to assume the Indonesian legal system was always unjust, Rudd opportunistically phoned the Year Nine student in his cell within a day of his arrest. He assured him he would be home soon. Rudd told the public that it was his ‘number one priority’ to ‘support this young boy and his family and do everything we can to obtain his early return to Australia’ (Illawarra Mercury 2011). He was soon accused of ‘over-egging the situation to advance his resurgent push for the leadership’ and Gillard countered by phoning the Bali Boy the very next day, telling him her government was doing ‘everything it could’ to get him home’ (Coorey 2011). With time served, the sentence of two months the Bali Boy received on 25 November meant he was, indeed, home in record time. He was on a plane just a week after pleading guilty in court and admitting to being an addict, allowing him to be dealt with as a user. His admission that he was a habitual user seems to have been true, as some years later he faced new charges of cannabis possession in Australia and claimed to have a A$300 a week habit (Rigney 2017).

The Black Widow In October 2014, the so-called ‘Black Widow’, Noor Ellis, paid A$14,000 to her maid’s boyfriend and four other locals to murder her husband of 25 years, ­millionaire Australian businessman Bob Ellis, in the kitchen of their Bali home. She hoped, prosecutors later said, to inherit his wealth. The killers cut her ­husband’s throat in the kitchen and left his body wrapped in black plastic in a nearby rice field. After extensive Australian media coverage, Ellis was imprisoned for 12 years in June 2015, although her children said she should have received 20 years. They claimed she had tried to bribe them while her trial was underway, and they released to Australian media a nine-page tribute to their father written by his friends and family, called ‘Murder in Bali—Paradise Lost’. In the end, Ellis’ motive for the murder proved futile: art 838 of the Indonesian Civil Code meant that as she was convicted of the murder of her husband she could not inherit from his estate (Wockner 2017).18

Nicholas Langan In January 2015, Townsville teacher Nicholas Langan, 24, was arrested with Hanung Hermantoro, an Indonesian driver from his hotel, sharing a joint on a 18  Article 8383 reads, in part: ‘Those considered not fit to be an heir and therefore excluded from inheritance are: 1. those found guilty of the murder or attempted murder of the deceased … ‘­Disclosure: the author provided advice to the children of Robert Ellis.

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beach in Canggu a few days into his planned surfing holiday. Prosecutors initially said the two men would face charges of drug possession, and they would seek a sentence of up to 12 years. This sparked media outrage in Australia. In the end, the prosecutors only pursued personal use charges, seeking a four-year term; Langan and Hermantoro received just a year. Once again, the Australian media reported the case widely and in the usual way—Langan was an innocent abroad who had fallen victim to a cruel foreign legal system. After his release he was, deported, and on his arrival in Australia it was reported that, ‘falling into the loving arms of his family’, ‘he could not hide his enormous relief at being back home’ after ‘a year in Bali’s notorious Kerobokan prison’ (Owen 2016).

The Bali Nine II: Sukumaran and Chan In early 2015, a decade after their arrest, President Jokowi dismissed applications for clemency of Bali Nine members Sukumaran and Chan, commenting publicly that he had not actually read the application, relying simply on a list of names, offences and countries of origin. He added that he would always reject any ­clemency application by a drugs offender. Sukumaran and Chan challenged this decision in the Jakarta Administrative Court, arguing that by rejecting the application out of hand, Jokowi did not ­comply with provisions of Law 22 of 2002 on Clemency, which they claimed required him to at least read their applications.19 There was also controversy as to whether Jokowi had considered advice from the Supreme Court in relation to the clemency application, as the law clearly requires him to do.20 It was a grim irony that the Administrative Court relied on its decision in Corby’s case (which ensured she received clemency from the president and so had her sentence cut) to hold that it had no jurisdiction over presidential clemency decisions (thus ensuring the two men did not receive clemency and would be executed). There can be little doubt that, as Bachelard points out, Corby’s case made it much harder to save Sukumaran and Chan from the firing squad.21 Lawyers for Sukumaran and Chan immediately took the question of how the Clemency Law should be interpreted to the Constitutional Court but this was not enough to stay the execution process, as this court is not an appeal court and ­cannot alter a Supreme Court decision such as that which upheld the two men’s 19  The General Elucidation (explanatory memorandum) to this Law provides that ‘… in issuing a decision in relation to a clemency application, the president needs to wisely and judiciously consider matters in relation to the crime committed by the convicted, particular in cases where the crime has been committed repeatedly, is a crime against morality and crimes that are sadistic or premeditated in nature.’ 20  Article 14 of Indonesia’s 1945 Constitution provides that the President may decide a clemency application after ‘having regard to the opinion of the Supreme Court’. 21  He cites former Indonesian Constitutional Court Chief Justice Jimly Asshiddiqie saying that Corby’s criticism of Indonesia was a significant problem for Sukumaran and Chan (Bachelard 2015).

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death sentence. Likewise, in the weeks leading up to their deaths, Indonesia’s ­independent Judicial Commission began investigating allegations by the lawyer who represented Sukumaran and Chan at their original trial. He claimed the death sentence was only imposed on his clients because they failed to pay bribes of A$130,000 requested by the judges in the Denpasar District Court. To its shame, the Commission did not call for Sukumaran and Chan’s executions to be stayed pending the completion of its inquiry and, in fact, never interviewed them. After the president refused clemency for Sukumaran and Chan in January, a major bilateral crisis erupted over the imminent execution of two Australian citizens in Indonesia, the first time this had ever seemed likely to happen. For ­Australians, this was chiefly a matter of human rights principles—similar tensions had erupted with Singapore in 2005 when an Australian, Van Tuong Nguyen, was executed there for attempting to smuggle heroin on a flight to Melbourne. New South Wales had abolished the death penalty in 1985, the last ­Australian state to do so, and in 2010 the Commonwealth legislated to prevent its reintroduction by the states. Prime Ministers Howard and Rudd had, unfortunately, endorsed Indonesia’s execution of the Bali bombers, Mukhlas, Amrozi and Imam Samudra, as appropriate and what they deserved22 but Australia has otherwise generally opposed the death penalty internationally. It has, for example, been a regular c­ o-sponsor of the United Nations Commission of Human Rights (now the Human Rights Council) annual resolution calling for abolition of the death penalty. Indonesia, by contrast, long considered a low application, even ­reductionist, state, shifted its position after Jokowi took office in late 2014. He repeatedly asserted that because his country faced an ‘emergency’ (Gadjah Mada ­University 2014), the death penalty was an essential part of his ‘war on drugs’, and he would show ‘no mercy’ to drugs offenders (Antara 2014). Fourteen people, mostly f­ oreigners, were therefore put to death for drugs offences in January and April of 2015. Although there are many in the Indonesian government and among civil society groups who oppose the death penalty, the mainstream view there clearly supported death for drugs offenders. The mainstream in Australia, by contrast, saw any execution, for any reason, as abhorrent. The result was that as the crisis unfolded the two countries spoke past each other. For Indonesia, the Sukumaran and Chan case was about being tough on offenders during a ‘drugs emergency’; for Australians, it was about a principled objection to the death penalty. Intense pressure from Australia eventually resulted in a number of foreign leaders, including the British Prime Minister, the French President and the ­ ­Secretary General of the United Nations, calling on Indonesia to halt executions. Protests broke out around Australia and vigils were held by politicians in Canberra and a number of state capitals. Unfortunately, however, Australia’s efforts to save 22  Howard, in fact, said it would be a major injustice if the Bali bombers were not executed. Rudd has also said that a government led by him would only intervene diplomatically to try to save the lives of ­Australians sentenced to death overseas (Shanahan 2007).

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Sukumaran and Chan had been severely hampered by a remark made by Prime Minister Tony Abbott on 18 February that Indonesia should ‘reciprocate’ for the A$1 billion assistance it had provided Indonesia in response to the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 by sparing the two men. Abbott made the remark in doorstop interview, apparently inspired by his friend, Sydney shock-jock, Alan Jones, who had begun promoting the idea some days earlier. Abbott’s remarks were seen in Indonesia as an attempt to impose ­retrospective conditionality on Australian aid. Aid conditionality is a highly sensitive issue in Indonesia. In 1964, Soekarno famously told the US ‘to go hell with your aid’ in response to a suggestion that unless Indonesia refrain from aggressive actions against Malaysia, the US government would halt aid to his country (Chicago ­Tribune 1964). Since then, aid conditionality has been historically closely linked in Indonesia to ideas about national sovereignty. The extensive governance reform conditions attached to the IMF bail-out during the Asian Economic Crisis that contributed to Soeharto’s fall in 1998 became a key grievance of Indonesian politicians, for similar reasons. Aid conditionality in Indonesia is therefore often understood as code for ‘foreign manipulation’ and neo-colonialism. The result was that Abbott’s comments soon became the key focus of public debate about the case in Indonesia. The human rights issues became lost in increasingly personal anger towards Abbott, expressed in a popular #KoinuntukAbbott, or ‘Coins for Abbott’ (sometimes, ‘coins for Australia’) social media campaign to ‘repay’ aid to Australia.23 This controversy led senior figures in the Indonesian government to immediately close down discussions with Australian counterparts about the fate of the two men. It irretrievably damaged Abbott’s standing in ­Indonesia and still resonates there. It probably also doomed the extraordinarily extensive efforts made by Australian diplomats and Sukumaran and Chan’s large legal team in Australia and Indonesia to save them. In any case, Jokowi, an ‘outsider’ president lacking strong elite support who had made a zero tolerance for drugs offenders a key part of his agenda early in his term, refused to budge. On 29 April 2015, Sukumaran and Chan were executed by firing squad on the prison island of Nusa Kambangan, off the south coast of Java. The Australian ambassador was temporarily recalled from Jakarta in protest, ‘for consultations’, the first time this had ever happened, and relations remained frosty for months. They began to rewarm only after Abbott was toppled by Malcolm Turnbull in September that year.

The Bucks Night Extortion Case In April 2015, seven Balinese police admitted they had extorted 16 Australian men who had flown to Bali for buck’s night celebrations for Melbourne man 23  Half of the A$1 billion was, in fact, a loan, which Indonesia had long since repaid, although this fact was lost in the furore Abbott’s remarks generated.

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Mark Ipaviz and hired a stripper for a party in Seminyak. The men claim they were threatened with indecency charges and ten years in prison, pistol-whipped, Tasered and only released after paying A$25,000 that they were forced to withdraw from ATMs. Bali Deputy Police Chief Nyoman Suryasta said ‘firm action’ would be taken against the policemen, and their punishment would be decided by a judge. He added, however, that the matter was only investigated after ‘the Indonesian Embassy in Australia reported strong reaction on social media to the … story’ (Topsfield 2015).

The Killing of Wayan Sudarsa A year later, on 16 August 2016, Balinese policeman, Wayan Sudarsa, died after a brutal alcohol-fuelled beating by two tourists, one Australian and the other ­English. Sudarsa received over 40 injuries from a range of weapons, including his own phone and a beer bottle, and was left covered in blood, face down in the sand on Kuta beach, where he suffocated. The tourists, who stole his wallet and went into hiding, cut up Sudarsa’s identity card and burnt the clothes they had been wearing that night. They surrendered after three days. Once again, the trial attracted intense media coverage from Australia. When the two tourists were made to re-enact the killing under spotlights at night on Kuta beach, Indonesian and foreign media were in attendance and the gruesome spectacle was broadcast widely in Australia. Byron Bay woman Sara Connor admitted involvement in the attack and was imprisoned for four years for a joint attack leading to death, increased on appeal to five years in May 2017. Her co-accused, Englishman David Taylor, who worked as ‘DJ Nutso’, received six years.

Jamie Murphy In December 2016, Perth teenager Jamie Murphy, 18, was arrested in Kuta after white powder was allegedly found in a baggie in his bumbag at the Sky ­Garden nightclub. The Australian media was full of reports that the Perth teenager faced years in prison but within a few days Murphy was released by apparently ­embarrassed police. They said that that the ‘drugs’ turned out simply to be crushed paracetamol and other over-the-counter medication. Urine tests proved negative too, so he was free to go. Much remained mysterious about this case. Was the baggie really Murphy’s, or did security guards plant it on him? Did they see Murphy coming and try to turn him into another easily-extorted ‘ATM case’? Were the police paid to substitute harmless headache pills for drugs? Or did Murphy really try to buy drugs and by a stroke of weird luck end up with headache tablets? Although there were no clear answers, many Australians speculated that bribery was the key to Murphy’s release.

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Ape Richardson On 10 May 2017, the bloodied body of Darwin maritime worker Stephen ‘Ape’ Richardson, 63, was found in his rented Sanur home in Bali. He had been beaten and stabbed but died of strangulation. Investigations were on foot as this chapter was being written.

Escape from Hotel K On 19 June 2017, Shaun Davidson, an Australian nicknamed ‘Rage’ who skipped bail in Australia and, on his own account, ‘partied and boxed’ a year away in Bali (Topsfield 2017) before being imprisoned for passport fraud, tunnelled his way out of Kerobokan prison with three other men. He had just ten weeks of his sentence left to serve but was facing charges in Perth relating to trafficking methamphetamine and cannabis and would have been deported upon his release, as is routine for foreigners who have served time in prison in Indonesia. Two of the inmates who joined him in the tiny, 40 cm-wide tunnel they used to escape were soon after arrested in Dili, the capital of Timor-Leste. At the time of writing Davidson and one other were still on the run, with messages purporting to be from Davidson giving his location in a myriad of different countries regularly appearing on Facebook to taunt the police.

Other Themes Major bad news stories about Bali like those described above get extensive coverage in the Australian media but they do not appear in isolation. They are accompanied by a flow of shorter reports. These are typically less dramatic but more frequent, and they also play a significant part in building the image of Bali as a grim and dangerous place. A common theme is the string of gruesome traffic accidents that have taken place in Bali, some fatal, involving Australian motorcyclists who were usually not wearing helmets or protective gear: Bali’s choked roads and chaotic traffic are not for the faint-hearted or for Australian tourists who have never ridden a bike or scooter bit decide to give it a go, sans helmet, whilst on holiday. Road accidents are big killers. [In 2015], 504 people died on Bali’s roads, 254 were severely injured and another 1890 suffered minor injuries … [M]any foreigners fail to wear their helmets properly—straps not done up or use sub-standard helmets (Wockner and Erviani 2016).

Another well-explored theme deals with tourists suffering illness and alcoholrelated injuries. For example, in December 2013, Perth woman Tess Mettam went blind for two days after drinking methanol-laced cocktails at a Kuta Bar. In January 2014, a holiday heart attack killed South Australian Duncan ­MacGillivray,

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66, creator of Australia’s popular ‘Two Dogs’ alcoholic lemonade, and then Rohan Fitzgerald, 28, also of South Australia, who died the following month in Kuta. In November 2014, Newcastle teenager Jason Tuckwell went temporarily blind after being poisoned by a drink containing methanol, while on ‘Schoolies’24 in Bali. A year earlier, Central Coast teenager Jasmine Baker suffered the same fate when she drank a methanol-laced drink, again while taking part in Schoolies. In January 2015, Australian tourists Noelene Bischoff and her daughter Yvana were found dead in their room less than 24 hours after arriving in Padang Bai on eastern Bali, for a holiday. The Queensland coroner later found they died from a rare allergic reaction to fish they ate for dinner. In April 2015, a 50-year-old Australian man died of a heart attack while breakfasting at the Rooftop Restaurant in Kuta. In September 2015, Daniel Evans, a 24-year-old man from Perth, died after he fell through a glass door in the Harris Hotel in Kuta while drunk. In July 2016, Perth woman Jan Neilson had to have part of her pancreas removed after being poisoned by cheap alcoholic drinks while on a night out with friends in Kuta. Also in August 2016, Australian Norris Berger, 74, died in Sanur, of a heart attack. As might be expected of a major holiday resort, these events are, in fact more frequent than even this list suggests. In the period May 2015 to May 2016, for example, a total of 59 Australians died in Bali and a further 121 were ill or hospitalised (Wockner and Erviani 2016). Finally, there is a more sinister leitmotif of pickpockets, muggings, bashings and sexual abuse, most of which is said to be ‘off the record’: Wockner and Erviani (2016) argue that: … the unreported crimes, many very serious, are more illuminating than the official ­statistics and the official statistics are just a fraction of what is really going on in Bali these days. Some rape and mugging victims prefer not to file police reports … One ­Australian long-time resident says that pick-pocketing, which can turn ugly and violent, is a big problem, especially in the packed Kuta district and seem to focus particularly on mobile phones … In addition, bags are snatched from motorbikes, theft from hotel rooms and villas, especially of laptop computers, is on the rise and ATM scams, the so-called ­skimming, are an increasing problem.

A Dangerous Destination? As mentioned, these media reports are just examples selected from a much broader range of articles that now form a distinct genre in Australia media reporting on Indonesia. It is therefore not surprising that statistics released by ­Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) for 2015 and 2016 ranked ­Indonesia as the third most likely place for Australian tourists to die overseas. 24  ‘Schoolies’ refers to celebratory ‘rite of passage’ holidays taken by many Australians teenagers after completing their final secondary school exams.

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Ninety-three Australians died there in that period, behind only Thailand with 168 and the Philippines with 101. Indonesia was also revealed to be the second most likely place for Australians to suffer serious injury, illness or hospitalisation (144 cases, behind Thailand on 157), and the most likely place for them to go missing (40, with Thailand close behind at 39).25 Given the numbers that travel there, it is reasonable to assume that most of the incidents reported for Indonesia took place in Bali. This portrayal of Bali as a high-risk destination is supported by DFAT’s travel warning that tourists should ‘exercise a high degree of caution’ there, as they should across most of Indonesia. The assessment is a reasonable one. Although millions of visitors arrive there every year—almost five million in 2016 alone (Bali Discovery 2016)—Bali is not a holiday resort off the coast of Queensland, a highly regulated destination in a high-income country. It is a province of Indonesia, a huge developing country. It is a largely rural province far from the capital Jakarta, and it has all the problems Indonesia shares with developing countries around the world. These include ramshackle government, clunky bureaucracy, corruption, crime and incompetent law enforcers—and large numbers of poor people, notwithstanding the wealth generated by the tourism industry in Bali. People visiting a developing country—wherever it is—take some level of risk and need to have their wits about them. It probably not a sensible place for parents to send their children unsupervised for Schoolies coming-of-age indulgence and rule-breaking. If Australian teenagers do get caught with drugs rather than powdered paracetamol they face far more severe punishment than they would in ­Australia, as the drugs prosecutions just described amply demonstrate. Penalties for drugs offences in Indonesia range from up to two decades in prison to life imprisonment or death in serious cases. Jokowi’s government has repeatedly stated its policy of ‘no mercy for drug offenders’—and especially not for foreigners, whom many Indonesians wrongly believe run the drug trade there.

Zero Tolerance or Harm Reduction? The very different attitudes to drugs in Indonesia and Australia (particularly regarding cannabis, seen as a ‘soft’ drug in Australia and classed with heroin in Indonesia) helps explain why there have been many Australians facing serious drugs charges in Bali. It also helps explain why these cases receive such intense media coverage in Australia, often in a way that presents the Indonesian legal ­system and Bali as hellish. In fact, the origins of Indonesia’s policies on drugs date back to the 1970s, when Australia’s infatuation with Bali began to develop. This was a time when many

25 

DFAT statistics for the period 8 June 2015 to 8 June 2016, cited in Ironside (2016).

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countries responded aggressively to the rapidly expanding trade in drugs.26 In the US—which then had the fastest growing illicit drugs market—the political response was to ‘declare war’ on the foreign providers rather than analyse and address the reasons for growing domestic demand. President Richard Nixon popularised the term ‘War on Drugs’ in 1971, declaring drug abuse to be ‘public enemy No 1’ (Global Commission on Drug Policies 2011). Other countries soon followed the US lead, whether willingly or not. A series of new conventions were established under the United Nations system, all of which are currently in force, and the US Congress enacted a disciplinary mechanism of drug certification in 1986. ­Countries that did not fully cooperate with the anti-narcotics efforts and thus failed to qualify for certification would face mandatory sanctions. These included the withdrawal of most foreign aid funded by the US, along with opposition to loans sought from multilateral development banks (Spencer 1998). Indonesia quickly fell into line and the policies of Jokowi today are an exemplar of the aggressive ‘zero tolerance’ approach to combating drug production and trafficking propagated by the US from the 1970s. Despite some reforms in 2009 to the Indonesian criminal law regime to allow for medical and social rehabilitation of addicts,27 there is wide social and political support for a harsh law enforcement agenda. Heavy prison sentences are therefore usually imposed by judges in preference to the rehabilitative options. This approach is, however, now widely questioned outside Indonesia. Some of the more socially regressive consequences of the escalation of the ‘war on drugs’ in the last two decades include a rapid and nearly worldwide increase in the prison populations; human rights violations; restricted access to essential medicines; and criminalisation of users, creating obstacles for health care, including as regards strategies for HIV/AIDS prevention. All these problems are present in contemporary Indonesia. It has been suggested that the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), and its predecessor, the United Nations Office International Drug Control Programme (UNIDCP), were the ‘defacto UN equivalent for an international policy ministry on issues relating to illicit drug use’ (Lee, Jack and Crofts 2013: 20). After UNODC joined the UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) in 1999, it recalibrated its approach to illicit ­narcotics to include harm reduction (Lee, Jack and Crofts 2013: 20). In opting for an alternative approach that places more emphasis on harm reduction and even decriminalisation, a small number of states that were early adopters of the harm reduction strategy triggered what would become a widespread ‘soft defection’ from the zero-tolerance repressive model. Some European states, Canada and Australia have become reluctant to continue prosecuting the ‘war on drugs’ in the bellicose way the US wants. They were the 26  This and the next four paragraphs draw on material in Lindsey and Nicholson (2016). I am ­grateful to Tim Mann for his research assistance. 27  Law No 35 of 2009 on Narcotics, arts 54, 103; and see Supreme Court Circular No 4 of 2010 on the Internment of Narcotics Users into Rehabilitation and Therapy Institutions.

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first to shift policy, followed more recently by several Latin American countries (Jelsma 2011: 2). They argue that increasing the severity of sanctions for drug users is, in fact, unlikely to significantly reduce overall levels of drug abuse (Wodak 2011). Harm reduction approaches require significant reforms to remove the harsh criminal sanctions that are the foundation of the zero-tolerance approach. This is often done by legislative reforms such as those introduced in Australia over the last two decades that deliver de-penalisation and decriminalisation. ‘Decriminalisation’ removes particular conduct or activity from the sphere of criminal law, while ‘de-penalisation’—much more common across Australian jurisdictions—is the relaxation of penal sanctions imposed by law for such activities (Jelsma 2011: 2). The result is that state responses to drug use now represent a very profound difference in social policy and criminal law between Australia and Indonesia. This gap means that Bali is likely to continue to be the source of criminal cases involving Australians that can cause significant tension in the bilateral relationship, for two reasons. First, the disparity between the two countries’ drugs policies and public attitudes to drugs clash directly in Bali, as Australian holidaymakers persist with recreational drug use behaviour that is often tolerated in Australia, but in a very different and far less permissive legal and political context. Second, ­Indonesian penalties for drug use seem excessive and pointless to many Australians, particularly because cannabis and so-called ‘party drugs’ such as ecstasy are treated far more leniently in Australia than other drugs such as heroin and cocaine. This is not the case in Indonesia, where Australian approaches seem too many to be lax, dangerous and irresponsible in the extreme.

The Weight of Numbers Despite everything presented so far in this chapter, the image of ‘Bali as tourist hell’ may be an effective genre for media reporting on terrorism and drugs trials in Bali but it is certainly not an accurate assessment of the experience of most ­Australians who visit the island, given the numbers who travel there without incident. Millions of Australians have ‘been to Bali too’: one in three (and more than half of all Western Australians) have been to Indonesia and most would have had Bali as their destination (Australian Government 2013: 3). The overwhelming majority spend big and return home happy, with suntans, souvenirs and good memories. Many return year after year. In fact, the high levels of death, injury and crime that make Indonesia, overall, the most dangerous destination for ­Australians (after Thailand and ahead of Vietnam) (Passmore 2013) are probably more the result of the sheer volume of Australians who go there each year, rather than of Bali being unusually evil or dangerous. In 2014, for example, 991,024 Australians arrived in Bali, and in 2015 that increased to 965,330. By 2016, it was 1,137,413, an increase of almost 18%, and

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in 2017, arrivals were on track to exceed 1.2 million. This made Australia the single largest market for Bali’s tourist industry in 2016, followed by China at 986,026, both well ahead of Japan, at 234,590, and the UK at 221,149 (although the ­Chinese seem to have taken the lead in 2017: Global Expat 2017). In June 2016, the ­Australian Embassy in Jakarta said 116,000 Australians got off a plane in ­Denpasar, more than in ‘any month in history’, meaning Indonesia had then overtaken New Zealand ‘as Australia’s number one destination’ (Australian Embassy Jakarta 2016). What’s more, Australians stayed, on average, more than nine nights, longer than tourists from any other country (Ibid). Perhaps most striking of all is the fact that, despite the stream of bad news stories from Bali described above, of the million or more Australians who went there in 2016, just 60 had direct contact with police that year, whether as suspects or victims—just 0.006%. On average, 81,000 visited every month in that year but only two were arrested. Likewise, a total of just 500 Australians sought consular assistance in Bali last year. They included people needing help because of lost p ­ assports and tickets, deaths from natural causes, traumatic relationship breakdowns, accidents, family emergencies, and so on. This amounts to 0.05% of the total who visited that year, which is a very low incident rate.28 Even given that it is likely that, as Wockner and Ervianai (2016) claim, there are many incidents involving tourists that are never reported, it remains the case that the image of holidaymakers being preyed on by corrupt locals or just running wild is simply not an accurate picture of the overall experience of Australians in Bali. As mentioned, Bali is part of a developing country, with all the dangers that go with that, and, with so many people visiting every year for the express purpose of letting off steam and having a good time, there will always be some who get into ­trouble. The vast majority of Australians who visit Bali do, however, ‘­exercise caution’ as the Australian government suggests, behave responsibly and are treated well. In fact, while horror stories about Bali have been standard fare in the ­Australian media since 2002, that has had very limited little impact on Australians’ decisions about where to travel—enthusiasm for holidays in Bali seems immune to almost any event in Indonesia. Australian arrivals did fall after the first Bali bombings in 2002. They dropped 59% in the first two months after the bombing and plunged from 288,800 in 2001 to 241,700 in 2002 (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2004), reaching just 186,000 in 2003 (Sobocinska 2012). According to Sobocinska, ‘This brought the figure back to 1992 levels and temporarily reversed a decades-long trend of increasing tourist numbers’. ‘Economists’, she says, ‘worried that the tourism industry, and the Balinese economy … [might] not recover’. They were wrong; numbers were up again by 2004, reaching 335,100 in 2004 (Sobocinska 2012). They slumped again after the Corby, Leslie and Bali Nine trials and the second Bali bombing in 2005, falling to 194,700 in 2006, but by 2007 a 45% rise had taken them to 282,500 and to 28 

Confidential information, official of the Australian Embassy to Indonesia, August 2016.

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a ‘record high’ of 380,600 by 2008 (Sobocinska 2011: 217)).29 In 2010, S­ obocinska (2011:218) says: A staggering 667,100 (or roughly one in 32) Australians nominated Indonesia as their primary destination on airport departure cards in 2010: a 236 per cent rise in just three years, and almost double the number arriving in the pre-Bali bombings record year of 1998.

Since then, arrivals from Australia have continued to soar every year. Another example of the way Australians choose to visit Bali, regardless of what happens there, is the outcome of the ‘boycott Bali’ push as Australian drugs offenders Sukumaran and Chan faced execution in 2015. The calls for a boycott were understandable but misplaced, as Balinese authorities generally opposed the killings. It was the government of Jokowi in Jakarta that was determined to see them dead, largely to shore up the president’s domestic political standing, as he places increasing emphasis on ‘tough on drugs’ rhetoric. In any case, the boycott had little discernable effect on numbers boarding flights from Australia to ­Denpasar. Even when the executions were looming and Indonesia was under attack in the Australian media and parliament, Australians were still about 25% of all visitors to Bali, increasing 16.74% in January and February that year (reaching a total in that period alone of 156,452).30 Australians still like going to Bali, almost as much as most Balinese want them to keep coming and pumping money into the local economy. It is a symbiotic relationship.

Conclusion: Bali, Crime and the Bilateral Relationship Naturally, in a major holiday resort some tourists will become prey—or even predator—but, again, the idea that Bali is a crime-ridden hell is wrong. This trope nonetheless has great traction in the Australian media and that can contribute to tensions in the bilateral relationship. This is essentially because although negative images of Bali do not often affect Australian holiday decisions they do feed into the wider feelings of negativity and hostility towards Indonesia that the polls, for all their shortcomings, consistently show are widespread among Australians (see chapter five). These attitudes play an important part in the decline of I­ ndonesian language studies in schools around the country (see chapter twenty) and our under-achieving commercial engagement with the vast archipelago directly to our north (see chapters twenty-three and twenty-four), among others. They can also sometimes trigger direct conflict between leaders of the two countries, as in the case of Abbott’s remarks about Sukumaran and Chan in 2015. Australians may be increasingly keen on spending their holidays in Bali— whether cheap packages that undercut Australian resort pricing or, less often, 29  30 

For intention and destination preference in this period, see Roy Morgan Research (2016). Confidential information, official of the Australian Embassy, Indonesia, August 2016.

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high-end luxury accommodation—but their visits often seem to occur in a sort of cognitive blur of Bintangs, beaches and massages. As the 2103 DFAT/­Newspoll survey found, ‘[d]espite exposure to the Indonesian language and culture, [­Australian] awareness of facts about Indonesia is generally poor’ (Australian Government 2013: 3). In other words, persistent Australian enthusiasm for Bali holidays has little lasting positive impact on wider Australian attitudes to Indonesia and may even be irrelevant when bad news from Bali disrupts bilateral relations with Indonesia, as it often does. In fact, when Bali appears in the media as hell for Australians, the blame often seems somehow to attach not so much to the island but to ‘Indonesia’. In 2010, the one year when Bali was included in the Lowy Institute’s ‘Australia and the World’ poll on public opinion and foreign policy, the island was ranked more favourably on the ‘feelings’ thermometer (57 degrees) than Indonesia (54), which was only able to beat Israel, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and North Korea (Hanson 2010). Bad news from Bali may not damage the tourist market in a lasting way but, equally, Australian tourists’ love of Bali holidays rarely manifests as warmth towards Indonesia—and that contributes to the complications in Australia’s bilateral relationship with Indonesia. It is inevitable that with more than a million Australians visiting every year, and with radically different approaches in Australia and Indonesia to drug law and policy and, indeed, criminal law and sentencing, there will continue to be serious criminal prosecutions involving Australians in Bali—and Australians serving long prison terms there. It is equally inevitable that some of these cases will be highly controversial and cause tension across the Arafura Sea, In fact, even as this chapter was being proofed for publication in October 2017, another Australian, Joshua Baker, was arrested in Bali for possessing and importing 28 grams of marijuana and 37 unprescribed diazepam (valium) pills. He escaped custody at the airport by climbing through a toilet window but was recaptured 12 hours later, eating lunch in a restaurant (Wocker and Erviani 2017). An admitted user, he is likely to receive a light sentence but does face possible sentences of death or life in prison for importing more than 5 grams of a Group 1 narcotic. As it stands, the bilateral mechanisms for dealing with these situations are still weak. As Denny Indrayana shows in chapter thirteen, Australian and Indonesia do have an extradition agreement that sometimes works but neither country is completely happy with it. There is also a problematic Treaty on Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters31 that needs review—especially as regards police cooperation. We still, however, lack a prisoner transfer agreement. Indonesia’s extradition agreement with Australia does not touch on the international transfer of ­prisoners32

31  Australian Statutory Rules No 50 of 1999. This section draws on Lindsey, and Nicholson (2016: 101–02). 32  Australian Statutory Rules No 441 of 1994.

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and the mutual assistance treaty expressly disclaims transfer of persons in custody to serve sentences as a form of assistance contemplated by it.33 In fact, Indonesia does not have a Law regulating the international transfer of prisoners. The Ministry of Law and Human Rights has prepared a policy paper on the transfer of prisoners (Direktorat Jenderal Peraturan Perundang-­Undangan 2014) but it is yet to be debated in the national legislature. The paper notes that Malaysia, China/Hong Kong, Thailand, the Philippines, France, Nigeria, Iran, ­Bulgaria, Romania, Brazil, Australia, Syria, India and England have all approached Indonesia with proposals for cooperation on the transfer of sentenced persons (Ibid: 3–14). Prisoner transfer legislation was included in the list of priority bills for discussion for the 2015–19 period but there is no sign of any progress yet (DPR 2015). Australia has made concerted efforts to bring Indonesia into its International Transfer of Prisoners scheme34 and the matter was discussed as early as July 2004.35 Negotiations stalled in December 2006 (Rondonuwu 2006), with the complex sticking points including whether or not judicial review could be sought by repatriated prisoners, differences in minimum imprisonment periods, and whether those convicted of drug or terrorism offences would qualify (House of Representatives 2006). Questions were asked in Australia’s parliament about the negotiations in February 2010 (Australian Senate 2010; House of Representatives 2010) but the bitter recriminations over the executions of Sukumaran and Chan seemed to have put the matter on hold. Many tens of thousands of tourists continue to arrive in Bali from Australia each week. Without a prisoner transfer agreement (which would necessarily also deal with the current huge sentencing disparities between the two jurisdictions), it is only a matter of time before another serious criminal case—most likely in Bali—becomes the latest bad news story, disrupts relations between Australia and Indonesia, and once again obstructs the important and unfinished work of building closer engagement between these two nearby, but in some ways very distant, countries.

References ABC (2007) ‘Howard Stands by Death Penalty for Terrorists’, ABC News, 10 October, www.abc.net.au/news/2007-10-10/howard-stands-by-death-penalty-forterrorists/694212. 33  Australian Statutory Rules No 50 of 1999, art 1(5(c)). Temporary transfer for the purpose of ­giving evidence is contemplated, however: art 12. 34  ComLaw website, search of Legislative Instruments for ‘transfer country’, consultation of CETS 112. As of 18 May 2011, it was not listed as a participant state on the Commonwealth Attorney-­General’s ITP information website: . 35  In a reply to a parliamentary question in 2006, the then Attorney General, Phillip Ruddock, ­indicated that the matter had been discussed as early as July 2004: House of Representatives (2006).

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Allard, Tom and Gordon, Josh (2010) ‘It’s Time to Bring Corby Home: Poll’, The Age, 14 August, . Antara News (2014) ‘No Mercy for Drug Dealers: President’, AntaraNews.com, 9 December, . Australian Associated Press (2005) ‘Australians find Corby Innocent in TV Program’, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 May, www.smh.com.au/news/World/Australiansfind-Corby-innocent-in-TV-program/2005/05/18/1116361619728.html. Australian Bureau of Statistics (2004) ‘Australian Social Trends’, 15 June, . Australian Embassy Jakarta (2016) ‘Media Release: Australian and Indonesian Tourists Make History’, 5 August, . Australian Government (2013) ‘Australian Attitudes towards Indonesia: A DFATcommissioned Newspoll Report’ (Canberra, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade), . Bachelard, Michael (2015) ‘Schapelle Corby Made It Harder to Save Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran’, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 August, . Badan Pembinaan Hukum Nasional (2014) ‘Naskah Akademik RUU tentang Pemindahan Narapidana’ [Academic Draft of the Bill on the Transfer of Prisoners], Kementerian Hukum dan Hak Asasi Manusia [Ministry of Law and Human Rights], . Bali Discovery (2016) ‘Bali by the Numbers: 2016 a Record Year for Foreign Tourist Arrivals’, . Butt, Simon and Lindsey, Tim (in press) Indonesian Law (Oxford, Oxford U ­ niversity Press). Chicago Tribune (1964) ‘Sukarno says US can Go to Hell with Aid’, Chicago ­Tribune, 26 March, . Coorey, Phillip (2011) Gillard calls Bali Boy to Offer Personal Support in Drug Charge Fight’, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 October. Direktorat Jenderal Peraturan Perundang-Undangan [Directorate General of Legislation], Kementerian Hukum dan Hak Asasi Manusia [Ministry of Law and Human Rights] (2014) ‘Sosialisasi Rancangan Undang-Undang Tentang Pemindahan Narapidana’ [Socialisation of the bill on transfer of prisoners] (1 N ­ ovember), .

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DPR Republic of Indonesia (2015) ‘Priority Bill Long List’, . Eric Ellis (2005) ‘The Whingers of Oz’, The Spectator, 11 June, . Finlay, Lorraine (2011) ‘Exporting the Death Penalty: Reconciling International Police Cooperation and the Abolition of the Death Penalty in Australia’ 33(95) Sydney Law Review 94. Gadjah Mada University (2014) ‘Four State Problem Have to Be Resolved Immediately’, Gadjah Mada University, 10 December, . Gebicki, Micahel (2017) ‘Australians: No Longer the Number One Source of Visitors to Bali’, Traveller, 10 March, . Global Commission on Drug Policies (2011) ‘Challenges for the Future’, Global Commission on Drug Policies Working Paper prepared for the First Meeting of the Commission, Geneva, 24–25 January, . Global Expat (2017) ‘2016 a Record Year for Bali Foreign Tourist Arrivals’, . Grattan, Michelle and Forbes, Mark (2005) ‘We Won’t Bail You Out, Howard Warns Users’, The Age, 24 August. Hanson, Fergus (2010) ‘Australia and the World: Public Opinion and Foreign Policy’ (Sydney, Lowy Institute). Hayes, Liz (2006) ‘The Price of Freedom’, 60 Minutes, 4 June. Heryanto, Ariel and Adi, Stanley Yoseph (2001) ‘The Industrialization of the Media in Democratizing Indonesia’ 23(2) Contemporary Southeast Asia 327, August. House of Representatives (2010) ‘Parliamentary Debates’, Julie Bishop, 3 February. Illawarra Mercury (2011) ‘Rudd in Bid to Free Boy, 14, after Bali Drugs Arrest’, 6 October, . Ironside, Robyn (2016) ‘The Most Dangerous Destinations for Australian Travellers’, Herald Sun, 13 June. Ismartono, Yuli (2008) ‘Challenges to Investigative Reporting in Post-Soeharto Indonesia’ in Cherian George (ed), Free Markets, Free Media: Reflections on the Political Economy of the Press in Asia (Nanyang, Asian Media Information and Communication Center (AMIC); Nanyang Technological University (NTU)). Jelsma, Martin (2011) ‘The Development of International Drug Control: Lessons Learned and Strategic Challenges for the Future’ Global Commission on Drug Policies Working Paper prepared for the First Meeting of the Commission, Geneva, 24–25 January, .

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Lee, SS; Jack, David; and Crofts, Nick (2013) ‘Harm Reduction is Good Public Health’ in Fifa Rahman and Nick Crofts (eds), Drugs Law Reform in East and Southeast Asia (Lanham, Lexington Books). Lindsey, Tim and Butt, Simon (2013) ‘Unfinished Business: Law Reform, Governance and the Courts in Post-Soeharto Indonesia’ in Mirjam Künkler and Alfred Stepan (eds), Indonesia, Islam and Democratic Consolidation (New York, Columbia University Press). Lindsey, Tim and Nicholson, Pip (2016) Drugs Law and Legal Practice in Southeast Asia: Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam (Oxford and Portland Oregon, Hart). Matt Brown (2012) ‘Corby Sentence Cut in Deal over People Smugglers: Indonesia’, ABC News, 23 May, . McGregor, Katharine E and Pennell, CR (2008) ‘Beyond a Clash of Cultures: Schapelle Corby’s My Story and Comparable High Profile Criminal Trials’ 10(1) Australian Journal of Asian Law 26. McMahon, Neil (2005). ‘Leslie “Was with Son of Indonesian minister”’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 6 November. Money, Lawrence and Ziffer, Daniel (2007) ‘Speed Cameras are Soft in the Head: Best wishes’, The Age, 15 August. Mukhlas (Aly Ghufron bin Nurhasyim) (2003) Jihad Bom Bali: Sebuah Pembelaan Peledakan Bom Legian dan Renon, 12 October 2002, Bali District Police Jail, Denpasar, Hand written manuscript, 25 March. Owen, Christopher (2016) ‘Langan Arrives Home after a Year behind Bars in Bali’, Townsville Bulletin, 22 January, . Passmore, Daryl (2014) ‘World’s Deadliest Destinations for Australian Tourists’, The Courier Mail, 19 September. Perera, Suvendrini (2009) Australia and the Insular Imagination: Beaches, Borders, Boats, and Bodies (New York, Palgrave McMillan). Rigney, Sam (2016) ‘Bali Boy’ Charged with Drug Possession Again’, Newcastle Herald, 20 May, . Rondonuwu, Olivia (2006) ‘ASIA: Indon Rejects Aust Draft fror [sic] Prisoner Exchange’, The Australian Associated Press, 29 December. Roy Morgan Research (2016) ‘Has Terrorism Affected ­Australian Tourism to Bali? Finding No 6775’, 28 April, . Saragih, Bagus BT (2012) ‘Corby’s Clemency Slammed’, The Jakarta Post, 23 May, . Senate (2010) ‘Parliamentary Debates’, David Johnson, 22 February, 789. Shanahan, Dennis (2007) ‘Let Bali Bombers Die, says Kevin Rudd’, The Australian, 9 October.

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Sifris, Ronli (2007) ‘Balancing Absolutionism and Cooperation on the World’s Scale: The Case of the Bali Nine’ 35 Federal Law Review 81. Sobocinska, Agnieszka (2011) ‘Innocence Lost and Paradise Regained: Tourism to Bali and Australian Perceptions of Asia’ 8(2) History Australia 199. Sobocinska, Agnieszka (2012) ‘Reclaiming our Home away from Home: The Bali Bombings’, The Conversation, 12 October, . Spencer, Bill, ‘Drug Certification’ (1998) 3(24) Foreign Policy in Focus, 1 ­September, . Toeti Kakiailatu (2007) ‘Media in Indonesia: Forum for Political Change and ­Critical Assessment’ 48(1) Asia Pacific Viewpoint 60. Topsfield, Jewel (2015) ‘Seven Balinese Police Confess to Extorting Australian Buck’s Night Partygoers’, Sydney Morning Herald, 2 September, . Topsfield, Jewel (2017) ‘Bali prison Escapee Shaun Davidson Told Prisoners He Didn’t Want to Return to Australia’, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 June, . Vickers, Adrian (2004) ‘A Paradise Bombed’, Griffith Review, edition 1: Insecurity in the New World Order, September, cited in Perera, Suvendrini (2009) Australia and the Insular Imagination: Beaches, Borders, Boats, and Bodies (New York, Palgrave McMillan). Vickers, Adrian (2012) Bali: A Paradise Created (Singapore, Tuttle). Wockner, Cindy (2015). ‘Noor Ellis Jailed over Murder of Australian ­Husband Bob Tried to Bribe Sons at Trial’, The Courier Mail, 17 June, . Wockner, Cindy and Erviani, Komang (2016) ‘Paradise lost: The Dark Side of Bali’, The Advertiser, 20 May. Wockner, Cindy and Erviani, Komang (2017) ‘Bali escape: Joshua James Baker says guards ‘watching television’ enabled him to slip out toilet window’, News. Com.au, 11 October, (Accessed 20 October 2017). Wodak, A (2011) ‘Demand Reduction and Harm Reduction’, Global Commission on Drug Policies Working Paper prepared for the First Meeting of the ­Commission, Geneva, 24–25 January, .

7 Prospects for the Australia-Indonesia Defence Relationship PETER JENNINGS

2016 started on a more promising footing for Australia-Indonesia relations than had been the case for some years. Interviewed in late December 2015 by The Australian newspaper, Indonesia’s then ambassador to Canberra, Nadjib Riphat Kesoema, said that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s first meeting with Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) had ‘created an atmosphere of hope and optimism in the relationship between the two nations.’ ‘In just a few hours the two leaders built a very good relationship,’ Mr Nadjib said. ‘It is full of expectations for the future’ (Nicholson 2015). The Ambassador was referring to Malcolm Turnbull’s first visit to Jakarta as Prime Minister where, after brief discussions with Widodo on 11 and 12 November, Turnbull told the Australian media: We’ve enjoyed very frank and exciting discussions about the great future for our two countries. A future that has really the widest opportunities in the history of human development. We’ve never seen technological change as rapid, economic growth as rapid as we do today and it is nowhere more exciting than it is in our region so our two countries are brilliantly poised for a very exciting future. (Turnbull 2015b)

Widodo’s comment to the media was more pragmatic and ambiguous about prospects for the relationship: ‘The close proximity of our two countries is a fact’ was his only observation (Turnbull 2015a). Turnbull’s hyperbole and Widodo’s tight-lipped realism define the boundaries of what might be achieved bilaterally in coming years. The benchmark to judge success will be whether real progress is made to build the closer strategic relationship that has, for so long, been the stated objective of Australian policy. Only two years separate Turnbull’s visit from his predecessor Tony Abbott’s preSeptember 2013 election aspiration to shape Australian foreign policy around the mantra of ‘more Jakarta, less Geneva.’ Tony Abbott’s experience showed just how difficult it is to give substance to building closer Australian ties with Indonesia. This chapter assesses the outlook for defence and relations between Canberra and Jakarta. Understanding the likely shape of future bilateral relations requires looking at some recent history, particularly of Australian approaches to shaping

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a strategic relationship. It often has been the case that Australia is cast in the role of an enthusiastic suitor and Indonesia is the somewhat distracted object of attention. Whether Malcom Turnbull’s enthusiastic wooing has any more prospects of success than his predecessor’s will, in large part, depend on the strength of ties between the defence, intelligence and police services of the two countries. History shows that these ties are the bedrock of the relationship. When they work well, there is the potential to grow economic and other ties. Conversely, when Australia and Indonesia are at defence and strategic loggerheads, cooperation in the wider relationship is at risk.

A Transformation in Australian Strategic Thinking Two years, and the involvement of three Defence Ministers (David Johnston, Kevin Andrews and Marise Payne), went into the production of the 2016 Defence White Paper. The document sets out a 20-year plan for the design of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) based on an assessment of Australia’s long-term strategic outlook. White Papers tend to focus on military equipment acquisition. While that remains the core of the 2016 strategy, there is also a commendable focus on how the current Australian Defence Force (ADF) can shape regional security by cooperating with counterpart military forces in the so-called ‘Indo-Pacific’ region. The White Paper’s judgements about Indonesia are, in key respects, some of the most important in the strategy. Indonesia is presented as a country on a dramatic growth path, likely to become a dominating power in Southeast Asia and with the potential to become a partner with Australia in promoting regional security: With continued economic growth Indonesia has the potential to increase its regional and global influence. Over the same period, and commensurate with its economic growth, Indonesia will probably become the largest defence spender in South East Asia. Australia and Indonesia share many common security interests, including a shared maritime border, a commitment to combatting terrorism, promoting peace and stability in our region and working to strengthen the regional security architecture. (Government of Australia 2016: para 2.82)

Absent from this document is any sense of a perceived threat emanating from Indonesia. This can be contrasted with Australian defence statements from earlier years. Perhaps the bluntest public assessment was made in 1986 by Paul Dibb in his Review of Australia’s Defence Capabilities, commissioned by then Defence Minister Kim Beazley. Dibb coined the phrase that any large-scale threat to Australia would have to operate ‘from or through’ the Indonesian archipelago. It is important to understand the broader context in which Dibb used that phrase: In defence terms, Indonesia is our most important neighbour. The Indonesian archipelago forms a protective barrier to Australia’s northern approaches. We have a common interest in regional stability, free from interference by potentially hostile external powers. At the same time, we must recognise that, because of its proximity, the archipelago to our

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north is the area from or through which a military threat to Australia could most easily be posed. This would require a fundamental change in present circumstances, which are characterised by a stable government in Indonesia. (Dibb 1986)

While Dibb dismissed Indonesia’s intent and military capability to present a threat to Australia, the essence of his proposed defence strategy, subsequently adopted in the 1987 Defence White Paper, was to structure the ADF for operations in the ‘air-sea gap’ between Australia and Indonesia. In the 1980s and early 1990s, priority was put on planning to defeat incursions into northern Australia, involving scenarios of militia or paramilitary groups infiltrating the north. Planning against a more assertive Indonesia was a substantial defence preoccupation. By contrast, concern about a threat emanating from Indonesia is not even hinted at in the 2016 Defence White Paper. This document sets out three ‘strategic defence interests’ to shape priorities for defence planning. These are: first, ‘a secure, resilient Australia’; second, ‘a secure nearer region, encompassing maritime South East Asia and the South Pacific’; and, third, ‘a stable Indo-Pacific region and rules-based global order which supports our interests.’ A senior defence official has been quoted in the media as dismissing the first priority of a ‘secure resilient Australia’ as ‘bog standard’ language (Walker 2016) and it is clear that the defence of Australia, narrowly defined, does not drive key equipment decision making in 2016 as it did several decades ago. While the Dibb Review and 1987 Defence White Paper focussed on the first of these objectives almost to the exclusion of the others, the most substantial focus of the 2016 White Paper is on shaping the ADF to operate in maritime Southeast Asia. This priority is behind the White Paper’s big investment decisions on new submarines, replacement frigates, maritime patrol aircraft and drones, and on enhancing an amphibious lift capability for the Army. The 2016 Defence White Paper’s focus on maritime Southeast Asia also creates scope for Australia and Indonesia to develop a shared approach to regional security: Australia and Indonesia share maritime borders and enduring interests in the security and stability of South East Asia. We are neighbours in a dynamic region. We have a mutual and abiding interest in the security and stability of the maritime domains that we share, the free movement of trade and investment through these domains, and countering terrorism and people smuggling in our region. Australia welcomes Indonesia’s increased focus on maritime affairs and Australia will seek greater cooperation on maritime security activities that contribute to a stable and prosperous region. (Government of Australia 2016: para 5.34)

Thus, in a generation, Australian defence thinking has undergone nothing less than a revolution in its approach to Indonesia. From a point in the 1980s when Indonesia was conceived of as a threat, now cooperation with Jakarta is regarded as integral to a broader concept of Australian defence interest. In a more classified environment, Defence and the Australian intelligence community still keeps a close eye on Indonesian political and military developments but it would be accurate to say that Canberra is less concerned now about the risks of a serious deterioration in Australia-Indonesian relations than at any time since the East Timor crisis of 1999.

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Positive and Negative Factors in the Relationship A number of factors lend confidence to the Australian assessment that the longerterm trajectory is positive for the bilateral relationship. Indonesia’s rapid transition to a relatively stable democracy makes it easier to pursue closer relations than could have been the case when Jakarta was effectively under quasi-military rule. Although Timor-Leste’s bumpy transition to independence created a deep divide in Australia-Indonesia relations, the reality is that Timor-Leste’s independence and arrival at a stable, if not positive, relationship with Indonesia has removed a deep irritant in the Canberra-Jakarta relationship. Like Australia, Indonesia’s strategic preoccupations are to the north of the archipelago. Both countries have similar worries about the rise of a more assertive China and are concerned about Beijing’s openly aggressive military posturing in the South China Sea. Finally, it remains the case that Indonesian military spending is modest and their limited acquisitions of modern ships and aircraft present no practical threat to Australia at any time in the foreseeable future. Indeed, relations between the ADF and TNI (Tentara Nasional Indonesia), the Indonesian military, have been a point of enduring stability at times when political relations have been soured, for example, because of spying allegations, the halting of the live cattle trade, and sharply different approaches to irregular maritime arrivals. While these factors point to at least the potential for increasing defence and security cooperation with Indonesia, a realistic assessment of the relationship should also take account of the factors that make cooperation more difficult. In mid-2015, a Lowy Institute opinion poll found that Australians’ feelings towards Indonesia had fallen to 46° on the ‘thermometer’—a rating of the degree of ‘warmth’ Australian feel to foreign countries. This was the lowest rating for Indonesia in a decade of Lowy polls, although over that period Indonesia’s highest rating was only 54°. In popular perception this puts Indonesia at levels similar to Russia (45°) and Egypt (48°). The 2015 Lowy poll also found that only 34% of Australians regard Indonesia as a democracy (Oliver 2015). The 2016 Lowy poll showed a rapid rebound in the ‘warmth’ rating towards Indonesia, which climbed to 54°, up eight degrees and the equal highest rating for Indonesia in Lowy’s polling. While a separate question found that 91% of people surveyed thought Indonesia was ‘important’ to Australia, the 2016 Lowy poll found that 33% of Australians did not think Indonesia was a democracy and 47% could not name the Indonesian president (Oliver 2015). It seems that Australian sentiment to Indonesia is tepid, malleable, depends on the media reporting of the day, and not deeply informed. This reflects a reality that people-to-people relationships between the two countries are regrettably limited and the same is true of the relatively anaemic economic and trade relationship. In 2014, Indonesia languished behind much smaller Malaysia as Australia’s 10th-ranked merchandise goods export destination. Export of Australian services to Indonesia actually fell in 2014–15 and, in any

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event, amount to only two per cent of Indonesia’s service imports (Australia. DFAT nd). Only a tiny number of Australians undertake Indonesian language training at senior school. When Malcolm Turnbull says Indonesia and Australia are ‘brilliantly poised’ he can only be referring to the potential, and not the reality of the economic and people-to-people relationships. Against this background, political, military and public service ties dominate Australia-Indonesia relations. These links have waxed and waned in an alarming pattern. Almost every decade since the 1950s a diplomatic or military crisis has put ties into a deep freeze, only to be followed by a slow return over years to closer cooperation. This cycle played out over Confrontation in the 1950s and 1960s, the annexation of East Timor in 1975, and the mid-1980s freezing of relations after Australian media reports of Soeharto’s corruption. Australian stewardship of TimorLeste’s independence in 2000 created a deep suspicion and a halt to most forms of military-to-military cooperation that were broken only by John Howard’s massive increase of aid to Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami. The signing of the Lombok Treaty on security cooperation in 2006 ended a negative period in relations when defence cooperation has been very limited. The Treaty created a basis for the two armed forces to resume engagement, a process that started quickly, albeit with caution from some TNI senior officers who still resented Australia’s intervention in Timor-Leste. President Yudhoyono’s personal support for good relations sustained ties during difficult years when Timor-Leste, drug smuggling, capital punishment, illegal people movements and the live cattle trade headed an unpleasant list of bilateral problems. His personal warmth towards Australia and a positive relationship with John Howard helped to anchor broader bilateral relations, limiting the capacity of those more hostile towards the relationship to hinder cooperation. Tony Abbott’s brief tenure as Prime Minister was marked by his 2013 election slogan to deliver ‘more Jakarta and less Geneva’ in Australia’s foreign policy, but spying allegations against senior Indonesian political figures, including President Yudhoyono’s wife, rapidly derailed the possibility of delivering closer relations. The Abbott government’s hard line ‘turn back the boats policy’ was also unpopular in Jakarta, particularly when it was known that a Royal Australian Navy ship had inadvertently violated Indonesian sovereignty by crossing into territorial waters on six occasions while conducting anti-people smuggling operations (Bourke 2014). President Widodo’s domestically driven policy priority to implement the death penalty against drug traffickers again created a serious, if temporary, break in the relationship when Australians Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan were executed by firing squad on 29 April 2015. In response to the executions, Australia temporarily withdrew its ambassador from Jakarta, a diplomatic step regarded as signalling deep unhappiness in relations. The move was criticised by some in Australia as being too openly critical of Jakarta and was driven, at least in part, by the Australian government wanting to acknowledge wide-spread domestic opposition to use of the death penalty in Indonesia. In effect, most of 2014 and 2015 were lost opportunities for closer bilateral cooperation. Aspirations to do more had to be put on hold until a political

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accommodation could be found to create a new basis for engagement. In August 2014, a Joint Understanding on intelligence cooperation, presented as an annex to the 2006 Lombok Treaty on security cooperation, created the basis for resetting defence and security cooperation. In the Joint Understanding, the Australian and Indonesian foreign ministers agreed to some quite remarkable conditions about their use of intelligence: 1. The Parties will not use any of their intelligence, including surveillance capacities, or other resources, in ways that would harm the interests of the Parties. 2. The Parties will promote intelligence cooperation between relevant institutions and agencies in accordance with their respective national laws and regulations.1 An agreement not to use intelligence assets in ways that harm each country might be considered a rather threadbare basis for resuming cooperation but it nevertheless is a significant step in a relationship that has, from time to time, lacked the basic level of trust necessary for close engagement. It can be said now that trust is in the process of being rebuilt. This is a potentially fragile artefact that can always be damaged by future actions, but the key point about the agreement is that both countries were prepared to use it as a way to end an unhappy political dispute and to move on. Although Indonesia did not welcome Australia’s ‘turn back the boats’ policy, it is a reality that the cessation of a steady flow of people through the archipelago seeking asylum in Australia has also benefited the relationship. The absence of boats removes a serious friction that had constantly been subject to negative media attention and prevented the leadership of both countries promoting more constructive engagement. By late 2015, good progress had been made, clearing away impediments to closer defence cooperation. In January 2017, however, then TNI commander General Gatot ­Nurmantyo announced that defence cooperation with Australia had been suspended for ­‘technical reasons’. These were later revealed to be complaints made late the previous year by an Indonesia Special Forces (Kopassus) member working as a language trainer in military courses in Perth. He had complained that certain materials dealing with Indonesia used by the ADF were offensive. It was not clear whether President Jokowi and his cabinet had been aware of, or supported, Nurmantyo’s move, and confusion followed until Wiranto, Indonesia’s powerful Coordinating Minister of Politics, Law and Security, intervened. He announced that the suspension was effective but was limited to just language training courses. An ADF internal investigation followed and in February, the Australian Chief of Army, Lieutenant-General Angus Campbell, travelled to Jakarta to formally apologise to Nurmantyo for offence caused. This was accepted and, tensions patched over, full military cooperation resumed once again. 1  Joint Understanding on a code of conduct between the Republic of Indonesia and Australia in implementation of the agreement between the Republic of Indonesia and Australia on the Framework for Security Cooperation (‘The Lombok Treaty’), 28 August 2014, .

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More than You Might Think: Recent Defence Cooperation For all the fluctuations in the political relationship, Australia-Indonesia defence cooperation has continued to grow steadily over the last few years. Key Australian objectives have been to rebuild personal connections with senior TNI commanders and to establish people-to-people links at more junior levels between the ADF and TNI. Such relationships will hopefully deepen as individuals become more senior and can play an essential role in managing bilateral tensions and jointly responding to regional disasters and contingencies. A second, increasingly important objective is to strengthen the TNI’s faltering capabilities for maritime sovereignty protection operations, airlifts, humanitarian assistance and disaster response, and counter terrorism skills. In each case the Australian view is that we benefit from stronger Indonesian capacities to perform these tasks. A third defence cooperation objective, particularly important at the political level, is to deepen understandings of each country’s strategic outlook. This will help to establish trust and build a foundation for closer and more effective cooperation. Finally, a key part of Australian defence cooperation investment has been directed towards encouraging a more Western model of civil-military cooperation in Indonesia, capacity building with Indonesia’s small civilian defence establishment, and promoting a better understanding of international and military law and respect for human rights within TNI. The 2013 Defence White Paper produced shortly before the 2013 election described cooperation as follows: In recent years, Australia’s defence relationship with Indonesia has developed significantly through a practical and effective engagement program. In 2012, Australian and Indonesian defence forces conducted the highest levels of training and exercising with each other since the mid-1990s. Personnel exchanges and combined training has generated people-to-people links, as has the Australia-Indonesia Defence Alumni Association. The Government is committed to further broadening and deepening our defence and security cooperation with Indonesia, including through greater engagement between areas of our defence organisations and our defence industries, and closer and more comprehensive strategic dialogue. (Government of Australia 2013 para: 6.29)

A surprisingly substantial amount of bilateral defence cooperation has developed over the last few years. A Defence Cooperation Agreement was signed in September 2012, providing a formal framework for practical defence cooperation under the Lombok Treaty. Practical cooperation included programs on maritime security, counterterrorism, peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance and disaster relief cooperation. Bilateral defence exercises were increasing in size and frequency, as were military personnel and unit exchanges (Smith and Yusgiantoro 2012). Also in September 2012, Australia agreed to increase to A$43 million spending on a program focussed on coordination between the countries’ civilian search and rescue organisations. An exchange program of search and rescue specialists was created, with Australia providing

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Indonesia access to ship-tracking information and satellite communications technology (Australia. Minister for Defence, Minister for Infrastructure and Transport and Minister for Home Affairs 2012). The two countries had been coordinating maritime patrols south of the Indonesian archipelago since 2010. In June 2013, Australia and Indonesia conducted a humanitarian assistance and disaster relief tabletop exercise in Darwin, designed to practise shared concepts of how the two countries would respond to a regional disaster (Smith and Snowdon 2013). In July 2013, the then Defence Minister Stephen Smith met his then Indonesian counterpart Defence Minister Purnomo Yusgiantoro in Perth and agreed to increase cooperation on United Nations peacekeeping, cyber security, preparing defence white papers, and lessons learned regarding submarine maintenance and safety. Minister Purnomo enthusiastically said at the joint press conference: I’ve been talking to Minister Smith, not only in meetings, by also by phone. If it’s something, then I just grab up the phone and talk to him and he calls me so really the peopleto-people contact here is very important, and we put that in our reality, not only for us, but our staff, it’s very strong. (Smith and Yusgiantoro 2013)

Close personal connections between ministers, military officers and senior o ­ fficials has, in fact, been a critical positive factor in sustaining the Australia-Indonesia ­relationship, particularly during otherwise challenging times when media ­outlets in both countries have tended to emphasise the negative in bilateral ­relations. A significant outcome of the July 2013 Defence Ministers’ meeting was the announcement that Australia would sell Indonesia five C-130H military transport aircraft, along with a simulator and spare parts, at well below market value. Four C-130H’s had earlier been sold on similar terms (Smith 2013). This sale was something of a threshold moment for Australian defence planners because it reflected a decision that it was in Australia’s strategic interests to help the TNI sustain effective military capabilities. The nine C-130H aircraft would become a critical component of the Indonesian Air Force, giving the TNI a better capability to address disaster relief functions across the archipelago. A sale of that type would in all probability have been impossible a decade earlier, not least because of human rights concerns in Australia. By 2013, a stronger TNI had become a desirable Australian strategic goal. By late 2013, Edward Snowden’s leaks concerning alleged Australian signals intelligence intercepts of phone calls involving senior Indonesian political figures had shaken the bilateral relationship. High-profile defence activities were put on hold. The Abbott government’s intent was to try to restore cooperation and indeed many officer-training exchanges continued. David Johnston, the then Defence Minister, visited Jakarta in March of 2014 to signal at a major TNI-sponsored conference that it was his intention to urge closer cooperation: Over recent years, we have seen high levels of training and exercising between our armed forces and strong cooperation in areas such as counter-terrorism, maritime security, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, peacekeeping and intelligence. I am confident that this kind of practical cooperation will again resume and indeed grow stronger. Our respective militaries are leading the way in strengthening people-to-people links between our countries. We now have an unprecedented level of Australian representation in­

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professional military education here in Indonesia. And likewise the number of Indonesian students in Australia has grown significantly. (Johnston 2014)

Following the signing of the August 2014 Joint Memorandum on intelligence matters, the then Indonesian Foreign Minister, Marty Natalegawa, declared that ‘we are back to where we should have been in terms of Indonesia-Australia relations’: … there will be a full restoration of communication between the armed forces of the two countries; for the two armed forces to be able to ascertain the kind of cooperation that’s needed in the future. Whether it be coordinated patrol or whether it be exercises. These are tactical matters that our armed forces will ascertain and decide in the immediate future. (Bishop and Natalegawa 2014)

The renewed cooperation has a strong maritime focus. For example, in November 2015, two Royal Australian Navy Ships, HMAS Arunta and HMAS Sirius, visited Surabaya for a port visit and to exercise with the Indonesian Navy. ‘Exercise New Horizon’ involved a series of combined training activities, including basic mariner and navigational skills designed to promote interoperability, professionalism and trust between navies (Australia. Department of Defence 2015). In March 2016, a similar maritime engagement, Exercise Cassowary, was held between Australian and Indonesian naval patrol boats in waters off Darwin. The four-day exercise focused on maritime surveillance, security and interdiction operations. Both exercises are annual events (Australia. Department of Defence 2016a). Illegal fishing was the focus of a joint operation known as AUSINDO CORPAT 2016, which concluded in Bali in April 2016. The operation included aircraft, ships and headquarters staff from both nations working in two ‘synchronised task groups’, seeking to better coordinate cooperation along shared maritime boundaries from ‘North of the Tiwi Islands to targeted areas near Indonesia’. This was the fifth such coordinated maritime patrol exercise and shows a slow but measurable improvement in the capacity of the two Navies to work together (Australia. Department of Defence 2016b). Similar coordinated exercises and other capacity building programs take place between the Australian Border Force and the Indonesian Coast Guard, BAKAMLA (Australia. Department of Immigration and Border Protection, Australian Border Force 2015). Army-to-Army training has also expanded, but tends to be treated in a lower-key way at least in media material emanating from the Australian Defence Organisation. Recent examples of bilateral cooperation include the holding of a JOCIT-I training exercise in Medan in March 2016, which focused on military operations in an urban environment. Some 96 Indonesian Army participants, from sergeant up to captain, were trained by instructors from the Australian Army. 35 of the Indonesian participants continued training in Australia later in 2016 (IKAHAN 2016b). There also continues to be a close relationship between the special forces of both countries, which has had a close focus on developing counter-terrorism and hostage rescue skills.2 2  This chapter does not address the comprehensive range of police, intelligence and other nondefence cooperation focussed on counter terrorism but it is important to note that this is a critical and growing part of the bilateral national security relationship. For police cooperation, see ch 12.

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The Indonesian Air Force (TNI-AU) participated in Exercise Pitch Black 12, in August 2012, sending a number of Sukhoi Su-30 Flanker aircraft to participate in the multilateral exercise operating out of Darwin. Up to 100 military aircraft from Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, New Zealand and the US participated (Australia. Department of Defence 2012). Although Indonesia did not join in the 2014 Pitch Black, it participated in the August 2016 Pitch Black with a number of combat aircraft. Indonesian Air Force officers also participated in the International Aviation Safety Officer Course hosted in Canberra by the RAAF in October 2015 (McDermott 2015: 17). There are many such examples of Indonesian involvement in programmes of this type, designed to enhance professional skills and establish people to people contacts in specialist Defence areas. The intensity of senior level military, defence civilian and political dialogues has also increased. In November 2015, a Chief of the Defence Force High Level Committee Meeting took place in Jakarta, followed by a Senior Officials Defence Strategic Dialogue in Canberra. The third ‘2 + 2’ meeting of Foreign and Defence Ministers took place in Sydney on 21 December 2015. Defence Minister Marise Payne said the discussions reviewed defence cooperation ‘in the area of counterterrorism, of maritime security, of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief and in capability development. That goes to illustrate the depth and breadth of our relationship’ (Bishop and Payne 2015). In the inevitably stilted language of the meeting’s Communiqué, Ministers ‘committed to strengthen further security cooperation, including in the fields of maritime security, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, capability development and procurement’ (Bishop and Payne 2015). In addition to formal bilateral dialogues there is a high tempo pattern of visits from senior military and defence civilians to each other’s countries. Some notable visits in recent years include: —— Major General (Mar) Achmad Faridz Washington, head of TNI intelligence, had a working visit to Australia on 23 to 27 November 2015 to discuss intelligence cooperation (IKAHAN 2015). —— Indonesian Special Forces (Kopassus) Commander, Brigadier General Santos Gunawan Matondang, visited Australia on 4 to 8 April 2016 to discuss Special Forces cooperation. IKAHAN assessed that the relationship was ‘robust, professional and can be strengthened in the future’ (IKAHAN 2016d). —— The Chief of the Royal Australian Air Force, Air Marshal Leo Davies, visited his counterpart in Jakarta in February 2016 (IKAHAN 2016a). In any one year, there will be tens of senior visits like these across many parts of defence, and at more junior levels around 100 Indonesian military officers participate in courses, short‑term visits and exchanges in Australia (Bateman, Bergin and Channer 2013). Indeed, one of the most successful initiatives in the Indonesia-Australian defence relationship was the formation in 2011 of the Indonesia-Australia Defence Alumni Association (IKAHAN). Membership is open to defence personnel of both countries who have previously been involved in bilateral training, exercises or other forms of engagement. In the words of

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Brigadier Gary Hogan, a former Australian defence attaché in Jakarta and a founding member of IKAHAN: Relations between the two countries will always be “up and down” and … as two ­powerful Defence Forces [we] need to establish “people to people links”. Links will strengthen our common future to be able to handle any problems that will be faced. (IKAHAN 2016c)

Hogan’s assessment of the stabilising value of people-to-people relations in defence has been demonstrated by the resilience of these connections when factors external to defence cooperation have made engagement more difficult. But Australia-Indonesia ties will also continue to face plenty of ups and downs, and some will be directly linked to defence relations, as the Nurmantyo affair showed. The challenge is therefore to build additional ballast in the defence and security relationship as a way of bringing the two countries closer and surviving these inevitable events.

The Agenda for Future Defence Cooperation Based on the aspirations of the 2016 Defence White Paper, there should be scope and financial support from the Australian Defence budget to allow a broad expansion of defence cooperation. The Defence White Paper has, moreover, received broad endorsement from senior Indonesian leaders. Speaking at an April 2016 Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) conference in Canberra, the former president of Indonesia, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said that he thought the white paper was constructive and that Indonesia would agree with many of its key strategic judgements. Yudhoyono reflected: Indonesia’s defence attaché told me yesterday that since arriving in Canberra five months ago, he has been kept busy with endless engagements throughout the country with his counterparts in the Australian Defence Force. The spirit of military-to-military cooperation is very high. This is the way it should be: politicians come and go. As the relationship between our leaders and politicians have their highs and lows, the relationship between our militaries should be kept constant and cooperative. (Yudhoyono 2016)

Given some of Australia and Indonesia’s shared experiences of the last few decades it is a remarkable thing to have such a strong endorsement of Australia’s defence strategy from a former president of Indonesia. Yudhoyono’s comments suggest that this is an opportune time for Canberra and Jakarta to propose some ambitious new steps for defence cooperation. Both countries acknowledge that neither is a threat to the other. A secure Indonesia able to defend itself is a major positive for Australia’s security and Australia, in turn, offers Indonesia the benefit of a stable southern flank. An ADF with the capability to operate with Indonesia to the north of the archipelago should be seen as a net positive to Jakarta. Beyond current levels of cooperation Australia could help President Widodo strengthen key Indonesian defence capabilities. The TNI Navy and Air Force is chronically underfunded and not capable of protecting Indonesian sovereignty.

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A first step would be to develop a joint surveillance regime in the ocean spaces between the two countries. Australia could share a wide range of intelligence information on ship and aircraft movements, train more military personnel, and increase common maritime patrols. The runway on Australia’s Indian Ocean territory of the Cocos Islands will soon be upgraded to support new Royal Australian Air Force maritime patrol aircraft. An offer could be extended to Jakarta to make use of the facility, in effect creating a shared maritime surveillance regime. Australia should also look to bolster Indonesian Navy capabilities by offering Jakarta two of our older ANZAC class frigates, launched in the early to mid-1990s. These ships are planned to be retired earlier than was originally expected to bring on new naval ship construction. Passing the ANZAC frigates to Indonesia would continue their productive use for a purpose that suits Australian interests: helping Jakarta police its own waters. The Australian government in April 2015 announced plans to construct up to 12 Offshore Patrol Vessels (OPV)—a new class of vessel for the Navy—with construction to begin in Adelaide from 2018. The government intends also to build up to 21 replacements for the Pacific Patrol Boats (PPB). These smaller vessels were given to a number of Pacific Island countries in the 1990s and are designed to police Exclusive Economic Zones (Australia. Prime Minister and Minister for Defence 2016). In both cases, these vessels may open some avenues for industrial cooperation with Indonesia. There is now bipartisan support in Australia for maintaining a continuous naval ship construction program. For this to work, Australia needs to look for export markets and, for its part, Indonesia needs access to ships that are relatively simple to operate and designed to support a sovereignty protection and constabulary role rather than high-end warfighting. This coincidence of interests ought to spark some exploration of how the two countries might work more closely together on ship construction and sustainment. Closer maritime cooperation would also assist a key policy objective of President Widodo to turn Indonesia into a ‘global maritime fulcrum’. That will certainly require deeper investment in the Indonesian navy. Australia can simply watch that plan unfold or else shape it to support our own interests. While operating a ship of the size and complexity of the ANZAC frigates will stretch Indonesia, this would be an ideal way to bring our defence forces closer, making Australia Jakarta’s first partner of security choice. There is, of course, an air power dimension to cooperation on maritime security. Joint air patrols, data sharing, and easier access to one another’s air bases could become a principle focus of cooperation between Air Forces. Turning to land forces, Indonesia’s army acquired over one hundred German Leopard 2 tanks in 2013. Again, a substantial step for the Turnbull Government would be to offer use of Australian Army tank training facilities at Darwin and Puckapunyal in Victoria. There is also the prospect that German industry based in Australia could be involved in sustaining the TNI tank fleet. It is difficult to imagine how our respective armoured capabilities could ever directly threaten each country but they do have the capacity to bring the two Armies closer in areas of practical military cooperation. The threshold decision for Australia is whether it is appropriate to significantly deepen cooperation with TNI on key

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elements of defence capability. This would create a more integrated relationship than the simple exercising and familiarisation visits that have been the staple of engagement until now. The 2016 Defence White Paper is ambiguous on this point. When considering closer cooperation it notes: Through our long-standing defence relationship Australia works with Indonesia to counter mutual security threats. Key areas for cooperation include counter-terrorism, maritime security, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, peacekeeping and intelligence. Our training and professional military education partnership includes staff college exchanges, mobile training teams and English language courses which build common approaches and mutual understanding. (Government of Australia 2016: para 5.36)

The key point about this list of engagement efforts is that it reflects a ‘business as usual’ approach rather than any more intense effort to develop closer cooperation. Such an approach will deliver a modest relationship where both countries engage but this will fall significantly short of the closer engagement that the ADF has with, for example, the Singapore Armed Forces and the New Zealand Defence Force. That may well be appropriate but if the ‘business as usual’ approach is taken no one should pretend that this can generate a step change in Australia-Indonesia ties. Finally, intelligence and other forms of cooperation on counter-terrorism will only grow as a necessity for Canberra and Jakarta. Both countries share a common interest in managing the threat of returning fighters from the Middle East and in sharing strategies around counter-radicalisation. As Australia gears for military operations in the Middle East that could last for years, we should not neglect the need to strengthen cooperation with our most important neighbour dealing with shared and immediate counter terrorism problems. While a good deal of this cooperation will involve police and intelligence agencies, a strong element of cooperation will be needed between the Special Forces of both countries. A solid foundation has been built in this area. Now the threshold decision for Australia is how far to take Special Forces cooperation.

Will any of this Really Happen? The key question is, will any of these initiatives actually come to fruition? If one takes the 2016 Defence White Paper at its word, Australia has a driving strategic priority to achieve a closer relationship with Indonesia. The document says: ‘A strong and productive relationship with Indonesia is critical to Australia’s national security’ (Government of Australia 2016 para 5.34). That language should leave no room for doubt that much greater priority is being placed on Jakarta. For all the positive intent, though, it is necessary to temper this new Australian enthusiasm for the defence relationship with some harder realities. The fact is that the Indonesian relationship remains complex and always faces the risk of being derailed by negative developments.

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Five factors in particular may slow or prevent the delivery of a ‘strong and productive’ defence relationship. First, the two countries differ quite markedly in how they think about strategic developments and how they should be managed. As Peter Varghese, then Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, noted in a thoughtful speech in July 2015: Our structural links are not deeply embedded. We come from different historical and cultural backgrounds which means the points of congruence in our world views are less than they might otherwise be. Our strategic reference points are different although more recently they have moved much closer together. (Varghese 2015)

One possibility for the relationship is simply that Jakarta will not be interested enough to pursue substantially enhanced defence ties. On the face of it, this is a reasonable interpretation of President Jokowi’s apparently lower priority for international engagement, and may be the best way to read his rather tight-lipped response in November 2015 to Malcolm Turnbull’s optimistic assessment about the future of the relationship. Australia still has a task in front of it to sell to Jakarta the value of closer bilateral ties. It is up to Australia to demonstrate that we offer sufficient in defence engagement to make TNI want to cooperate more extensively with the ADF. A second risk is that a range of factors largely separate from defence cooperation will continue to put the bilateral relationship in crisis. As suggested earlier in this chapter, this has essentially been the story of the relationship since Indonesia’s independence. If the cycle of crisis and estrangement followed by slow reconciliation continues, defence cooperation is unlikely to reach new heights. Moreover the list of potential crisis points is lengthy. There could be repeats of incidents relating to irregular boat arrivals, drug trafficking, capital punishment, the live animal trade, human rights abuses in Papua and elsewhere, and terrorism that may arise to complicate the smoother development of relations. Many Indonesians continue to harbour mistrust of Australia’s attitude to the Indonesian incorporation of Papua, for example. The campaigns of Australian non-government organisations and negative media attention can slow or complicate the business of defence engagement. In Peter Varghese’s assessment, ‘despite the efforts we have made in government on both sides, we have not yet built the broader constituencies that would give the relationship genuine resilience’ (Varghese 2015). A third risk to closer defence cooperation is that the TNI will simply not be able to absorb the amount of defence engagement Australia would be prepared to offer. In the pithy assessment of Benjamin Schreer: TNI’s defence procurement and capability development process remains ad hoc, incoherent and riddled by high levels of corruption. Indonesia’s institutional capacity to formulate and execute a coherent defence policy remains underdeveloped. (Schreer 2013: 8)

The relative incapacity of the TNI certainly puts a break on the speed with which a closer maritime cooperative effort can be delivered. Although there is significant promise in the possibility of industry cooperation and shared approaches to defence procurement, these will take years to develop.

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Fourth, it is possible that the Australian defence establishment may itself tire of the effort required to build closer ties. While the relationship has strong advocates it is a reality that the great majority of ADF officers and senior defence civilians have little direct experience of Indonesia. The ADF is vastly more familiar with Afghanistan and Iraq, and memories of the Timor-Leste experience are fading. The 2016 Defence White Paper promotes enhanced engagement with a significant number of countries in the Indo-Pacific region, many of which offer easier and more desirable engagement opportunities from the perspective of pursuing exacting training and exercising. The US, Japan, Singapore, New Zealand, South Korea and India all offer excellent defence engagement opportunities and, in some cases, the path to achieving closer cooperation is simpler. Finally, bureaucracies and military organisations everywhere are adept at managing steady-state engagement but are much less capable at making big changes to transform relationships. There is a hint of this problem in the 2016 Defence White Paper. On the one hand, the document talks in sweeping terms about the need for much deeper and closer ties with Indonesia. On the other hand, the White Paper only puts forward a modest list of cooperative activities that have been the staples of the relationship for years. One can appreciate the dilemma faced by the White Paper’s drafters. Of course, they would have considered options to make far grander promises of new options for cooperation. But what if these opportunities were not taken up by Jakarta? Far better to stay with what is known to work. Sticking to the current pattern of ties and activities is safe and can be delivered but it will not transform how Australia and Indonesia do business together. A substantially boosted defence and security cooperation agenda will certainly push Australian and Indonesian comfort zones but that is what must happen to break the cycle of crisis and mistrust in ties between Canberra and Jakarta—or at least build some foundations that will make it easier to manage occasional differences. It will require a major step forward in defence engagement and some imaginative thinking to deliver on Prime Minister Turnbull’s assessment that the ‘two countries are brilliantly poised for a very exciting future’.

References Australia. Department of Defence (2012) ‘Media Release: Exercise Pitch Black 12 Begins’, 27 July, . Australia. Department of Defence (2015) ‘Media Release: Royal Australian Navy Task Group Completes Visit to Malaysia and Indonesia’, 9 November, . Australia. Department of Defence (2016a) ‘Media Release: Australian-Indonesian Navies Hone Skills with Cassowary’, 24 March, .

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Australia. Department of Defence (2016b) ‘Media Release: Australia and Indonesia Unite to Patrol Fisheries’, 8 April, . Australia. DFAT (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) (nd) ‘Indonesia Fact Sheet’, . Australia. Department of Immigration and Border Protection, Australian Border Force (2015) ‘Media Release: Strengthening Maritime Security Cooperation with Indonesia’, 25 August, . Australia. Minister for Defence, Minister for Infrastructure and Transport and Minister for Home Affairs (2012) ‘Joint Media Release—Strengthening AustraliaIndonesia Search and Rescue Coordination’, 4 September, . This link was current at the time of writing but is now no longer available. A copy is on file with the author. Australia. Prime Minister and Minister for Defence (2016) ‘Media Statement: Continuous Naval Shipbuild’, 18 April, . Bateman, Sam; Bergin, Sam; and Channer, Hayley (2013) ‘Terms of Engagement: Australia’s Regional Defence Diplomacy’ (Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Canberra,July),. Bishop, Julie (Minister for Foreign Affairs) and Natalegawa, Marty (Indonesian Foreign Minister) (2014) ‘Joint Press Conference—Joint Understanding on a Code of Conduct between the Republic of Indonesia and Australia’, 28 August, . Bishop, Julie and Payne, Marise (2015) ‘Joint Press Conference by Australian Foreign Minister Bishop and Australian Minister for Defence Payne, Australia-Indonesia 2+2’, 21 December, . This link was current at the time of writing but is now no longer available. A copy is on file with the author. Bourke, Latika (2014) ‘Navy Breached Indonesian Waters Six Times under Operation Sovereign Borders, Review Finds’, ABC News, 20 February, . Dibb, Paul (1986) ‘Review of Australia’s Defence Capabilities: Report to the Minister for Defence by Mr Paul Dibb’ (Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra), .

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Government of Australia (2013) ‘Defence White Paper 2013’, . Government of Australia (2016) ‘2016 Defence White Paper’, . IKAHAN (Ikatan Alumi Pertahanan Indonesia—Australia [Alumni Association of Defence Indonesia—Australia]) (2015) ‘Kunjungan Asintel TNI Kedepankan Pertukaran Informasi dan Kemampuan Intelijen [TNI Asintel Visit Highlights the Exchange of Information and Intelligence Capabilities]’, December, . IKAHAN (2016a) ‘Kepala Angkatan Udara Australia Lakukan Kunjungan Resmi ke Indonesia [Head of the Royal Australian Air Force Makes Official Visit to Indonesia]’, February, . IKAHAN (2016b) ‘2016 JOCIT-I: Kekuatan Kerjasama TNI-AD dan Angkatan Darat Australia Dibuktikan di Medan Latihan Perang [JOCIT 2016-I: The Power of Cooperation of the Army and the Australian Army War Games Demonstrated in Medan]’, March, . IKAHAN (2016c) ‘Pendorong Utama IKAHAN, Profesor Hogan Kunjungan Seskoal [Main Driver of IKAHAN, Professor Hogan,Visits Seskoal]’, April, . IKAHAN (2016d) ‘Kunker Wadanjen Kopassus ke Australia—Latma yang Bertujuan Menghadapi Ancaman Baru [Kunker Wadanjen Kopassus to Australia—Latma Aimed Facing New Threats]’, April, http://ikahan.com/2016/04/kunker-wadanjenkopassus-ke-australia-latma-yang-bertujuan-menghadapi-ancaman-baru/. Johnston, David (Defence Minister) (2014) ‘Address to the Jakarta International Defence Dialogue’, 19 March, . McDermott, Tony (2015) ‘Course Puts Safety First’, Air Force News, 22 October, 17, . Nicholson, Brendan (2015) ‘Indonesia Vows New Age with Better Ties with ­Australia’, The Australian 29 December, . Oliver, Alex (2015) ‘The Lowy Institute Poll 2015’, . Schreer, Benjamin (2013) ‘Moving Beyond Ambitions? Indonesia’s military modernisation’ (Canberra, Australian Strategic Policy Institute), November, .

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Smith, Stephen (Australian Defence Minister) and Yusgiantoro, Purnomo (Indonesian Minister for Defence) (2012) ‘Joint Press Conference on the Signing of the Defence Cooperation Agreement’, September, . This link was current at the time of writing but is now no longer available. A copy is on file with the author. Smith, Stephen (Australian Minister for Defence) and Yusgiantoro, Purnomo (Indonesian Defence Minister) (2013) ‘Transcript—Second Annual AustraliaIndonesia Defence Ministers Meeting’, 26 July 2013, . This link was current at the time of writing but is now no longer available. A copy is on file with the author. Smith, Stephen (Minister for Defence) (2013) ‘Australia and Indonesia Sign Memorandum of Sale for C-130H Hercules’ 26 July, . This link was current at the time of writing but is now no longer available. A copy is on file with the author. Smith, Stephen (Minister for Defence) and Snowdon, Warren (Minister for Defence Science and Personnel) (2013) ‘Joint Media Release Australia and Indonesia Conduct Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Tabletop Exercise in Darwin’ 7 June, . This link was current at the time of writing but is now no longer available. A copy is on file with the author. Turnbull, Malcolm MP, Prime Minister of Australia (2015a) ‘Bilateral Meeting­ Indonesia: Media Statement’, 11 November, . Turnbull, Malcolm MP, Prime Minister of Australia (2015b) ‘Visit to Indonesia: Media Statement’, 12 November, . Varghese, Peter (2015) ‘The 50th Anniversary of the Indonesia Project’, 30 July, . Walker, Tony (2016) ‘It’s about a Rules-Based Order’, Australian Financial Review, 24 March: 58. Yudhoyono, Susilo Bambang (2016) ‘Australia’s Strategic Outlook: The View from Indonesia’ The ASPI Strategist, 8 April, .

8 Big Fears about Small Boats: How Asylum Seekers Keep Upsetting the Indonesia-Australia Relationship ANTJE MISSBACH1

Let me once again put on record that Indonesia rejects Australia’s policy to turn back the boats because such a policy is not actually conducive to a comprehensive solution. Marty Natalegawa (quoted in BBC 2014)

Relations between Indonesia and Australia have often seen extreme ups and downs (Mackie 2007). In the last 20 years, the pendulum has swung even more rapidly from one extreme to another. Although Australia has, at times, been ­Indonesia’s largest aid donor, rapid changes in political mood and underlying mutual mistrust keep affecting their relationship. The issues that have dominated the political agenda in particular over the last 15 years—and at times caused serious ­misunderstanding—are mostly connected to the irregular migration of ­asylum seekers, Islamic terrorism, and separatist threats to Indonesia’s sovereignty. This chapter seeks to reconstruct developments in regard to asylum seekers’ clandestine cross-border movements between Indonesia and Australia to explain the downward spiral that led to the withdrawal of the Indonesian ambassador from Canberra in November 2013 and the freezing of collaboration in the prevention of people-smuggling. Covering four Australian Prime Ministerships, it lays out the most significant Australian migration policies and discusses how Indonesian counterparts have positioned themselves in reaction. The discussion centres on, among others, the detention and maltreatment of under-aged I­ ndonesian peoplesmugglers in Australia, failed attempts to establish an off-shore processing centre for asylum seekers in Indonesia, and interference in Indonesian sovereignty— especially the violation of maritime borders during Australian tow-backs of ­asylum seeker boats. 1  A more encompassing discussion of this subject can be found in Missbach (2015). For this shortened and revised version I would like to thank Vannessa Hearman for her input on the East Timorese ‘boat people’, Julian Millie and Anne McNevin for their critical comments, and Rachel Salmond for her editorial work.

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Unlike Australia, Indonesia is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and does not have in place any administrative framework for processing the claims for protection of asylum seekers, or offering them permanent resettlement and ­integration. Instead, all asylum seekers coming to Indonesia are referred to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for their refugee ­status determination and resettlement (or voluntary repatriation). Leaving aside the ­Indochinese asylum seekers who came to Australia by boat via Indonesia between the late 1970s and early 1990s as a result of the end of the Vietnam War, the first so-called wave of maritime asylum seekers spanned the period between the late-1990s until 2001, when people predominantly from Afghanistan and the ­Middle East tried to reach the ‘lucky country’, that is, Australia. Altogether 180 boats with 12,176 asylum seekers on-board arrived in Australia between 1999 and 2001. The seven years of Prime Minister John Howard’s Pacific Solution (2001–08) saw the establishment of offshore immigration detention centres in the Pacific—on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea and in Nauru—to host unwanted asylum seekers outside Australia, and the asylum seeker boat traffic between I­ndonesia and ­Australia slowed down. It came back, however, on a larger scale once the Pacific Solution was brought to an end. The second wave, from 2009 to 2013, saw more than 50,000 asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat. This chapter also focuses on Indonesian asylum seekers (mostly from East Timor and West Papua) who arrived in Australia by boat, and who, while very small in ­number, had a ­significant impact on the bilateral relations. The chief objective of Australian politicians is to control who enters ­Australian territory and to prevent the arrival of asylum seekers by boats. Australia wishes to shield itself from unwanted asylum seekers. Just as the European Union has created containment and buffer zones at its external supranational borders, ­Australia’s increasingly restrictive migration and border policies are intended to process and resettle asylum seekers in transit countries. In doing so, Australia has spent very large amounts on reinforcing its border protection measures and hosting asylum seekers elsewhere. The costs of detaining asylum seekers in ­Indonesian immigration detention centres is largely funded by the Australian government channelled through the International Organization for Migration (IOM), for example. Aware that stopping the movement of asylum seekers mid- to long-term could not be achieved without the support of Indonesia, Australian politicians tried hard to win concessions from Indonesia by offering substantial incentives, while exerting constant political pressure. Although Indonesia agreed to join the ­Australia-driven anti-people-smuggling initiatives, extended its border control and detention facilities for irregular travellers, and changed laws regulating immigration issues, it has, at times, complied only reluctantly with Australia’s requests. While Australia was clearly putting its own national security and public safety first, it wrapped the financial incentives and co-operation it offered in the language of ‘burden-sharing’. Indonesia is, after all, no more willing to deal with transiting asylum seekers for any length of time than is Australia.

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Australia’s repeated overstepping of the boundaries of its authority has caused extreme frustration in Indonesian government circles. More generally, Australia’s failure to acknowledge Indonesia’s priorities in regard to internally displaced people and also the many problems with the regular and irregular labour migration of Indonesian workers overseas (especially cases of abuse in Malaysia and Saudi ­Arabia), created an impression in the eyes of many Indonesians officials and opinion makers that Australia was not a genuine partner when it came to migration issues.

The Howard Years: Megaphone Diplomacy and Cartoon Wars In order to fully comprehend the first asylum-seeker related diplomatic uproar between Indonesia and Australia, it is necessary to recall briefly the overall political situation between the two countries in the 1990s. In the last years of Soeharto’s presidency, the Indonesia-Australia relationship proceeded smoothly, as Australia refrained from open criticism and interference for the sake of trade and other relations. As early as 1991, I­ ndonesia and Australia had allowed their police forces to cooperate in the investigation and prosecution of transnational crime (Anwar 2002). Given that the Australian government had recognised Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor de jure, even an asylum seeker boat from Dili could not disturb good relations much. In May 1995, 15 men, two women and a six-month-old baby, set off on a five-day trip by boat to Darwin. Although most of them had suffered political persecution back home, the group sought not only safety for themselves but also the opportunity to draw attention to injustices occurring under the Indonesian occupation. They also wanted to criticise the fruitless UN-sponsored talks then searching for a solution to the East Timor ‘problem’ (MacDonald 1995). The entire planning for the trip, called Operasaun Tasi Diak (Operation Good Ocean), took two years. Their arrival in Australia was met with great publicity among the solidarity movement and caused the Australian government substantial embarrassment. Unlike other ‘boat people’, the East Timorese were released after two months of mandatory immigration detention and even before determination of their status. This caused uproar in Jakarta. Foreign Minister Ali Alatas dismissed the claims of torture and claimed that they did not deserve recognition as genuine refugees, as they were merely economic migrants trying to get a better life (Mares 2001: 216). While Foreign Minister Gareth Evans defended the grant of the bridging visas to the group from East Timor, other Australian public officials did their utmost to assuage the Indonesian government. For example, the then Australian ­ambassador in Jakarta, Allan Taylor, stated, correctly, that providing a bridging visa was not equivalent to granting refugee status (Hearman and Costa 2016). Despite the

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criticism from Jakarta, the relations between Indonesia and Australia were solid enough to foster an agreement in defence cooperation and the signature in 1995 of the Australia-Indonesia Agreement on Maintaining Security. In defence and strategic terms, this agreement was significant for Australia, as it had, until then, signed formal treaties only with its other two neighbours, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea (Brown, Frost and Sherlock 1996). Moreover, the Security Agreement allowed both governments to put their trust in their strong relationship on display. Only four years later, however, in the course of the crisis that f­ollowed the East Timorese independence referendum of 30 August 1999, Indonesia abrogated the Agreement on Maintaining Security (Wesley 2007: 84). The reason for this abrogation was the deployment of Australian troops as part of the International Force for East Timor (INTERFET) in Indonesian territory shortly after the referendum that led to East Timor’s secession from Indonesia. Although President Habibie, Soeharto’s successor, accepted the international peacekeeping force, the decision was unpopular among other members of the political elite. Indonesia was outraged by the Australian intervention, as it was not consistent with Australia’s previous stance towards East Timor, which been one of full support of the Indonesian annexation. It was only in December 1998 that Prime Minister Howard had sent a letter to President Habibie urging him to be more open to the independence of East Timor. One major outcome of the Timor crisis was that Indonesian elites developed a strong sense of suspicion that Australia wanted to see the Indonesian unitary state break apart into several lesser units, similar to what had happened in Yugoslavia. Thus, when separatist conflicts emerged in other parts of Indonesia, such as in Aceh and West Papua, some ­Indonesian opinion-makers alleged that Australia might have been involved in instigating these violent upheavals (Wesley 2007: 179). The state of the relationship between Indonesia and Australia deteriorated to the extent that both ­President Habibie and General Wiranto, then supreme Commander of the ­Indonesian Armed Forces and Minister of Defence and Security, refused to take phone calls from Prime Minister Howard. Once Indonesia had withdrawn from military cooperation with Australia after the East Timor crisis, including the exchange of intelligence data and the conduct of joint patrols, the resulting security vacuum allowed more Afghan and Iranian asylum seekers to enter and exit Indonesia undisturbed (Anwar 2002: 71). Despite the serious diplomatic crisis provoked by the secession of East Timor, bilateral relations improved surprisingly quickly. In 2001, both countries and the IOM finalised a Regional Cooperation Agreement, aimed at disrupting people-smuggling operations by providing basic accommodation, medical care, allowance for food, and counselling for refugees, asylum seekers and failed ­asylum seekers under the care of IOM. Indirectly, this agreement also promoted ­Indonesian toleration of Australia’s externalisation of its border-control practices and its disruption programs within Indonesian territory. Such activities on ­Indonesian soil or in its waters have included collecting intelligence on upcoming voyages, offering cash and other incentives to cooperative Indonesian officials

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to help prevent boats from leaving, and disrupting people-smuggling operations (Kevin 2012: 12). The Indonesian government, however, temporarily suspended this agreement on 12 September 2001, as a result of diplomatic tensions over the Tampa incident, when the Norwegian freighter, MV Tampa rescued 438 people, mainly Afghan Hazaras, from a sinking Indonesian fishing vessel en route to Australia. Although already close to Christmas Island, Prime Minister Howard did not allow the Tampa to bring the rescued asylum seekers to Christmas Island but insisted they should be returned to Indonesia. Given that return to Indonesia would have taken more time and caused greater risks, as the Tampa was unfit to hold such a large number of people, the captain of the Tampa, Arne Rinnan, refused to do so and so was threatened with criminal prosecution. After hasty political discussions, it was decided that all the asylum seekers on the Tampa would be shipped to, and processed in, Nauru and, later, Papua New Guinea (Marr and Wilkinson 2003). With the passing of the Migration Amendment (Excision from Migration Zone) Bill and the Migration Amendment (Excision from Migration Zone) (Consequential Provisions) Bill in September 2001, the Pacific Solution was born. Among many other provisions, the Pacific Solution authorised not only the establishment of Australian-funded detention centres on Manus Island (Papua New Guinea) and Nauru, but also the excision of more than 4,000 islands from Australia’s migration zone, which meant that asylum seekers could no longer launch an application for protection when they arrived there. The Tampa incident destroyed the newly-rebuilt bilateral relationship because Australia’s conservative government under Prime Minister Howard insisted that the Indonesian government take back the Tampa passengers, all the while ignoring Australia’s obligations as a signatory of the Refugee Convention. Howard even accused Indonesia of not fulfilling its international obligations by refusing to take back the rescued asylum seekers. Howard’s hypocrisy became even more obvious when asylum seeker boats were forcibly returned to Indonesia under Operation Relex I and II (2001–06), without prior notice to the Indonesian government. Altogether the Australian navy made attempts to turn ten of twelve boats back. Of those, only five were successfully returned to Indonesian waters. At least two passengers lost their lives in these turn-back attempts. Returning asylum seekers to places where their lives are not safe, such as to Indonesia—a country that does not offer formal protection to refugees—contravenes the International Refugee Convention. The returned asylum seekers were kept in limbo in Indonesia for many years (Missbach 2013). While Australians alleged that Indonesia was allowing asylum seekers who wished to reach Australia to use Indonesia as a place of transit, Indonesians felt that they had become Australia’s scapegoat. Their presence not only disturbed Indonesian-Australian relations but Indonesians started to perceive asylum seekers as a burden on their own country (Sitohang 2002: 41). Several visits to Jakarta made by Howard, Minister for Immigration Philip ­Ruddock and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer between 2000 and 2001 failed to convince Indonesia to accept more responsibility for transiting asylum seekers.

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Disappointed by the Australian government’s ‘megaphone diplomacy’, by which sensitive issues were always shared with the media before they were exchanged with Indonesian officials, Megawati Soekarnoputri, who became president of Indonesia in July 2001, also refused to talk to Howard over the phone or meet any visiting Australian political leaders (Wesley 2007). In particular, Indonesia rejected a plan for an Australian-funded refugee-processing centre within its territory. Given that in the early 2000s Indonesia was coping with more than 1.3 million internally displaced people because of political, secessionist or religious unrest in Poso (Sulawesi), Ambon (Moluccas) and Aceh, Indonesia had no interest at all in such proposals. Not only was there a stark absence of any shared position between the two governments on the asylum seeker issue but also it became obvious that the memories of hosting more than 100,000 transiting Indochinese refugees on Galang Island between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s were still fresh, and rather detrimental to any new attempt of establishing a processing centre in Indonesia (Missbach 2013). Although housing and processing the Indochinese in Galang was hailed a success internationally, Indonesia had always intended it to be a short-term transit point and had not agreed to more than 20 years of caretaking, even though most costs of the refugees were covered by the UNCHR. Relations between Australia and Indonesia under both President Abdurrahman Wahid and President Megawati remained difficult through 2001, and it was not until after the sinking of SIEV X near Java on 19 October 2001, when 353 people lost their lives, that Indonesia became more open to finding a multilateral solution for transiting asylum seekers in order to prevent future maritime disasters. In late February 2002, Indonesia and Australia agreed to be the co-chairs of a Regional Ministerial Conference on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime in Bali. This was followed by many similar meetings, workshops and annual conferences, and instituted what has become known as the Bali Process (Kneebone 2014), which both Indonesian and Australian senior bureaucrats have hailed as a significant success in transnational diplomacy (­Douglas and Schloenhardt 2012). The Bali Process aimed to increase regional awareness of the consequences of people-smuggling, trafficking in persons and transnational crime and to improve coordination and cooperation in these issues. The Australian participants planned the initial conference in ‘minute detail’, from the speaking order to supposedly spontaneous comments, leaving nothing to chance (Wesley 2007: 196). In June 2002, Indonesia signed an agreement with Australia that focused solely on combating people-smugglers and transnational crime and on developing police cooperation, but left out any consideration of the protection and human rights of asylum seekers. In particular, the People ­Smuggling Disruption Program, a very secretive joint initiative of the ­Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the Indonesian police, was viewed with scepticism because of its lack of transparency. Even an inquiry by the Australian senate could not clarify whether ‘illegal and inhumane disruption activities had occurred’ in ­Indonesia (CMI 2002: 458). Former diplomat Tony Kevin made a string of allegations about the involvement of newly-trained Indonesian police officers in the

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sinking of the SIEV X; they had just been taught disruption techniques by their Australian ­counterparts (Kevin 2004). Further dissonance occurred in the bilateral relationship in November 2003, when the Australian Navy forced the Mimosa Bone, with 14 Kurdish asylum s­ eekers on board, back into Indonesian waters after they landed on Melville Island. Despite the fact that they landed on Australian territory, their claims for ­asylum were not heard. Although Indonesia had not protested previous tow-backs when they had first occurred in 2001, mainly because the Indonesian government had not been given any information about the operations, this time Indonesian authorities were quick to protest. Yusril Ihza Mahendra, Indonesian Minister for Justice, stated that the deportation of these 14 Kurdish Turks was Indonesia’s preference but in the end this did not happen (Taylor 2013). Although the reactions of Australia and Indonesia to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 differed, with Indonesia condemning the US invasion of ­Afghanistan and Iraq and criticising Australia’s participation (McDougall 2006: 117), acts of religious terrorism in Indonesia affecting both Indonesian and ­Australian citizens brought the two countries closer together. In the aftermath of the Bali bombings on 12 October 2002 in the tourist district of Kuta, which killed 202 people including 88 Australians and 34 Indonesians, anti-terrorism police collaboration and intelligence was intensified in the investigation of the bombings and the prevention of future attacks. This forged closer ties between Australian and ­Indonesian agencies. For example, in February 2004 the Indonesian and ­Australian governments announced the establishment of the Jakarta Centre for Law Enforcement Cooperation (JCLEC) in Semarang. Inaugurated by President Megawati Soekarnoputri in July 2004, JCLEC offers training and workshops for police and law enforcement officers on transnational criminal activities, such as the narcotics trade, maritime crime, people-smuggling, child sex tourism and cybercrime. Indonesian-Australian relations further improved under the presidency of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, which began in October 2004. Not only was development aid to Indonesia boosted, but Australia also contributed generously to the post-tsunami reconstruction in Aceh and the post-earthquake recovery in ­Yogyakarta (together more than A$ 1 billion). In 2005, both countries adopted a Joint Declaration on Comprehensive Partnership, which stated their wish to ‘increase our cooperation in combating other forms of transnational crime and non-traditional security threats, especially in areas such as people smuggling, narcotics, outbreaks of disease and money laundering’ (Joint Declaration 2005). The shared intention of forging closer partnerships between police forces, immigration and customs officials, and security and intelligence agencies, was further cemented by the 2006 Agreement on the Framework for Security Cooperation (the Lombok Treaty). Before it could be signed, however, a few more sensitive political challenges had to be endured. Although the number of boats carrying Middle Eastern asylum seekers from Indonesia to Australia had sharply declined with the initiation of the Pacific ­Solution

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(Phillips and Spinks 2013), a different kind of boat people made their way to Australia in January 2006: 36 adults and 7 children from West Papua, I­ ndonesia’s easternmost province, where separatist conflict has long persisted. They landed on Cape York in a traditional outrigger boat after five days at sea. Their requests for asylum reignited diplomatic tensions. Although President ­Yudhoyono asked Prime Minister Howard not to grant them refugee status, 42 of the 43 applicants were issued temporary protection visas in March 2006.2 The Indonesian government interpreted this decision as Australian support for P ­ apua’s secession from Indonesia. Protesting the decision, the Indonesian government temporarily withdrew Ambassador Hamzah Thayeb from Canberra and placed all cooperative activities on hold (Neumann and Taylor 2010). The anger at Australia’s decision was shared by the Indonesian media. One popular newspaper, Rakyat Merdeka, published a cartoon depicting Prime Minister Howard mounting his Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer for a spot of buggery, saying ‘I want Papua!! Alex! Try to make it happen’. The reply to this cartoon came swiftly in the Weekend Australian, which published a cartoon depicting President Yudhoyono as a dog mounting a Papuan and declaring ‘Don’t take this the wrong way’, with the caption ‘no offence intended’. The cartoon war certainly had a bad effect on the relationship between Indonesia and Australia but less emotive politicians tried to smooth ruffled feathers behind the scenes. The Lombok Treaty, signed in November 2006, brought an end to this diplomatic spat (Mackie 2007). Not only did the Treaty state the two countries’ intention to intensify bilateral relations and to engage more in dialogue and consultation, but it also spelled out a closer ‘cooperation between relevant institutions and agencies, including prosecuting authorities, in preventing and combating transnational crimes, in particular crimes related to a) people smuggling and trafficking in persons …’ (Agreement between the Republic 2006). A year later, a change of government took place in Canberra.

Labor Governments in Search of ‘Solutions’ One of the first policy changes ushered in by newly-elected Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (December 2007–June 2010) was to end the expensive Pacific solution by closing down the camps in Manus and Nauru. The overall approach of the incoming Labor government towards maritime asylum seekers did not, however, differ fundamentally from that of its conservative predecessors. Policies, such as mandatory and indefinite detention of unauthorised arrivals continued. The capacity of the detention centre opened in 2008 to hold 800 newly-arrived asylum seekers on Christmas Island was soon found to be inadequate, and upgrading the centre to accommodate 1,400 proceeded too slowly. The Rudd government was strongly

2 

The 43rd member of the group subsequently also received a visa.

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committed to preventing asylum seekers from coming to Australia by finding ‘solutions’ for them elsewhere in the region. While Australia was able to implement successfully what Michael Grewcock (2014: 75) has labelled ‘a more direct neocolonial relationship’ with Nauru and Papua New Guinea by providing generous aid and cash contributions, ­Indonesia was less inclined to comply with Australia’s demands for the establishment of facilities for detaining and processing asylum seekers outside Australian territory. Soon the issue of transiting asylum seekers became a ‘pebble in the shoe’ of Australian-Indonesian relations (Kuncara 2010: 77).3 Two events of October 2009, in particular, affected Indonesian-Australian relations and marked the failure of Prime Minister Rudd’s search for an ‘Indonesian Solution’. On 10 October 2009, Prime Minister Rudd telephoned President Yudhoyono to request the Indonesian interception of the Jaya Lestari, a boat with 254 ­asylum seekers on board bound for Australia. With the support of the Australian navy the boat was returned to an industrial harbour in Merak, Banten province, where it was stuck for the next six months as its passengers refused to disembark. Although the Australian government pledged A$50 million to fund policing and the processing of the asylum seekers in Indonesia in the hope that this would induce I­ ndonesia to become more pro-active in restricting the mobility of transit migrants, Australia’s requests were rebuffed and Indonesia opted for laissez faire instead. In the same month, another boat with 78 asylum seekers on board was turned back to Indonesia after the Australian customs vessel Oceanic Viking had responded to distress calls and rescued the passengers. At first, these passengers were also supposed to be taken to Merak but to prevent the two groups of rescued a­ sylum seekers from forming an alliance they were eventually taken to an ­Australian-funded detention centre on Bintan in the Riau archipelago, where their arrival was strenuously resisted by the provincial government (Ford, Lyons and Palmer 2010). Once more, Indonesia raised objections to the passengers’ refusal to disembark, their hunger strike, and Australia’s broken promises to resettle all those passengers found to be genuine refugees within twelve weeks (­Grewcock 2013). Teuku Faizasyah, a senior Foreign Ministry spokesman, summarised these concerns in his question, ‘Why is there not an Australian solution’ instead of an Indonesian solution (Allard 2009)? For many years, subsequent Australian governments have sought to persuade Indonesia to establish a refugee processing centre, similar to that established on Galang in the late 1970s. Indonesia has, however, persistently resisted this idea for several reasons. ­ Faizasyah explained why: We are living in a different era … that was the Cold War. And opening a processing centre now would be like a pull factor for those coming to our region, expecting that they would be processed and find the best country as a final destination (Fitzpatrick 2009). 3  This expression harks back to the infamous comment of Ali Alatas, who, as Indonesian F ­ oreign Minister, said after the massacre of more than 200 East Timorese at the Santa Cruz cemetery on 12 November 1991 that the East Timor issue was just ‘a pebble in Indonesia’s shoe’, although as it turned out, the ‘pebble’ did, in fact, cause considerable inconvenience, as it led to the loss of a province of the Indonesian Republic.

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The irritation caused by the Oceanic Viking and Jaya Lestari incidents once more revealed the dilemma of asylum seekers in transit countries where they had neither formal right of residence nor effective protection. Nonetheless, the relationship between Australia and Indonesia soon improved again, in part because of the personal amity between Rudd and Yudhoyono but more so because of a series of high-level meetings and visits that culminated in the signing of the ‘­Implementation Framework for Cooperation to Combat People Smuggling and Trafficking in Persons’ in March 2010, when Yudhoyono visited Canberra. During his visit, ­Yudhoyono addressed a joint sitting of the House of Representatives and the Senate, the first Indonesian President ever to do so. In his address, he spoke of a ‘fair dinkum partnership’ between Australia and Indonesia, which had evolved into a model partnership that, although not without its challenges, was attracting the envy of other countries. Yudhoyono also noted that government-to-­government ties had never been better and announced that a new law would make people-smuggling a crime in Indonesia. It was not long, however, before the next mood-swing. Under the leadership of Julia Gillard, who replaced Rudd in June 2010 as Prime Minister, Australia renewed the search for ‘solutions’ anywhere but within its own territory. After approaching Papua New Guinea, the Australian government made advances in early July in an attempt to convince East Timor to establish a regional processing centre so that processing of maritime arrivals in Australia could be eliminated. For a variety of reasons, this proposal did not win the support of the East Timorese government. Throughout the terms of the governments of Rudd and Gillard, regional conferences, workshops and meetings under the Bali Process continued and the importance of reducing irregular migration in the Asia and Pacific region through greater bilateral and multilateral cooperation between source, transit and destination countries was repeatedly stressed. From the Bali Process emerged an inclusive and non-binding Regional Cooperation Framework (RCF), endorsed in 2011 (Regional Cooperation Framework 2011). It was hoped that the RCF would encourage Bali Process members to establish practical arrangements to ensure consistent processing of asylum claims, durable solutions for refugees, the sustainable repatriation of those not deemed to be in need of protection and the targeting of people-smuggling networks. Nevertheless, a further embarrassing episode was looming for Australia as the Bali Process proceeded. In July 2011, Australia convinced the Malaysian government to sign an agreement similar to the readmission agreements that the EU had forced upon its neighbours in order to remove unwanted asylum seekers. It allowed for the transfer of 800 unauthorised arrivals in Australian territory to Malaysia, in exchange for resettlement in Australia of 4,000 refugees who would go through ‘proper procedures’ in Malaysia over the next four years. On 31 August 2011, the Australian High Court declared the agreement unlawful on two separate grounds and put an end to the ‘Malaysian solution’. It found that Malaysia was not a signatory of the Refugee Convention and reports of inhumane treatment of asylum seekers, refugees and irregular labour migrants in Malaysia indicated that it was not a suitable

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destination country (Grewcock 2013). More importantly, under the agreement the Australian Immigration Minister, Chris Bowen, had intended to return unaccompanied minors, which would have been a fundamental violation of his duty as legal guardian of these children. Moreover, Indonesian officials complained that the Indonesian government, which, after all, was a co-chair of the Bali Process, had not been consulted in regard to the deal, causing substantial irritation in Jakarta. After two fatal incidents at sea, in which more than 90 asylum seekers lost their lives, the exasperated Labor government established the Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers in June 2012, led by retired Air Chief Marshal, Angus Houston, to advise the government on ‘how best to prevent asylum seekers risking their lives by travelling to Australia by boat’ (Expert Panel 2012: 9). This formulation was merely a euphemism for ‘stopping the boats’, a battle cry preferred by later Coalition ­governments. Relying on the advice provided by an Expert Panel made it possible for Labor to re-adopt a new version of the Pacific Solution, which it had previously dismantled, and reject the notion that Labor was simply giving in to the urging of the Coalition, which had been calling for re-adoption of the Pacific Solution for some time. In its recommendations, the Panel advised the government not only to increase the annual humanitarian intake to 20,000 refugees but also to reopen the detention camps for maritime arrivals on Nauru and in Papua New Guinea. The increase of the annual humanitarian resettlement quota was welcomed in Indonesia. Johnny Hutauruk, the deputy head of Indonesia’s Human Trafficking, Refugees and Asylum Seekers Desk, stated that ‘it would be good if Australia could take many of them [registered asylum seekers], all of them if possible’ (Bachelard 2012). Despite the policy changes and fierce warnings, the Australian government’s approach had little effect, and more asylum seekers arrived on Australian territory. Meanwhile, Australia kept making further demands for Indonesia to play a greater role in preventing people-smuggling but Indonesia’s concessions came at a price. In order to deter Indonesian boat crews from becoming engaged in transporting asylum seekers from Indonesia to Australia, Australian courts have been rigorous in their application of immigration law to detain those arrested, most of whom are impoverished Indonesian fishermen and farmers (Hunyor 2001; T ­ rotter and Garozzo 2012). Mandatory sentencing requirements under the Australian Migration Act have meant that many convicted smugglers, even those who have played only minor roles, as cooks or helpers on the vessels carrying asylum seekers, faced prison terms of at least five years. Public opinion in Indonesia soon pushed the understanding that, while asylum seekers benefitted from these illegal bordercrossings, it was Indonesian transporters who had to pay the price. For example, Teuku Faizasyah, spokesman of the Indonesian Foreign Ministry was quoted as saying: ‘We always keep stressing that the [Indonesian] fishermen are also victims of the people smuggling syndicates’ (Hitipeuw 2010). According to the Indonesian Foreign Ministry (2013: 17), between September 2008 and September 2013, 1,440 Indonesian boat crew had been released from jail and returned back to Indonesia. Of these, 1,124 were adults and 316 were under the age of 18 and should therefore have been entitled to more lenient sentences.

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It often proved difficult to determine the ages of those charged, as they did not possess birth certificates and wrist X-ray determination (then commonly used as a measure of age in Australia) is often inaccurate. The majority of minors were released without charge. Some were freed after their cases had been heard in ­Australian courts. Some minors were, however, only released after they had served their sentences and some had been detained in adult prisons. As the detention of Indonesian minors was raised repeatedly in bilateral talks, since July 2011, the ­Australian government commenced a policy of proactively giving the benefit of the doubt to alleged under-aged people smugglers and, from then on, many alleged minors were returned to Indonesia instead of imprisoned. Under constant pressure from Australia, Indonesia did not hesitate to make use of the opportunity for retaliation. In June 2012, when it became common knowledge that some people-smugglers were refugees who were now living in Australia and managing people-smuggling operations from there, Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa not only expressed his sincere disappointment but also asked: ‘How can such alleged major people smugglers receive permits to live in Australia while others, including children, are put in detention despite being victims themselves of the people-smuggling rings?’ (Saragih 2012). While more restrictions were being imposed on asylum seekers and refugees in Australia, such as in regard to their right to work and earn income (Grewcock 2013), on 27 June 2013, just a few weeks before the Australian federal election, Kevin Rudd was reinstated as Prime Minister. During Rudd’s visit to I­ndonesia nine days later, President Yudhoyono announced a multilateral summit on people-smuggling to be held in mid-August in order to find a regional solution that included countries beyond Indonesia and Australia. On 19 July 2013, and in advance of the summit, Rudd launched what is commonly referred to as the ‘Pacific Solution II’, largely in response to the federal Opposition’s proposals for dealing with asylum seekers, which included tow-backs and other extreme measures that won the approval of very large number of Australian voters. Under the Pacific Solution II, every asylum seeker who arrived in Australia by boat without a valid visa was refused settlement in Australia and taken to Papua New Guinea for their refugee status to be determined. If found to be genuine refugees, they were to be resettled permanently there or in any country other than Australia. On 3 August 2013, a similar agreement was signed with impoverished Nauru. While the Australian government kept pushing for more bilateral collaboration, the Indonesian government again expressed its preference for multilateral talks in order to find regional solutions. Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa stated that: In the history of the issue, we have seen Australia considering numerous options, such as the so-called Pacific solution, Malaysia solution, Timor-Leste solution and so on. But Indonesia will always be adamant that this issue should not only be a burden for certain countries. This needs cooperation between the destination countries, the countries of origin and transit countries such as Indonesia (Saragih 2013).

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The outcome of the summit held in Jakarta on 20 August 2013 was the Jakarta Declaration on Addressing Irregular Movement of Persons, a non-binding commitment by the 13 countries attending to change visa policies that were being abused for people-smuggling purposes. It also acknowledged the need to replace voluntary repatriation of those found not to need protection with involuntary repatriation. Indonesia’s concession was to end visa-on-arrival status for Iranian visitors, as more and more Iranians were found on the boats heading for Australia. Neither winning such a concession from Indonesia nor the revamped Pacific Solution could prevent Rudd’s Labor party from losing the federal elections on 7 ­September 2013. The Australian electorate did not see Labor as capable of dealing with the maritime asylum seekers. Nonetheless, Labor’s reinstatement of harsh measures against asylum seekers made things easier for the subsequent government under Tony Abbott to deter asylum seekers from coming to Australia.

The Abbott Regime: Hitting Rock Bottom Three weeks after his election win, Prime Minister Abbott made a trip to Indonesia to calm the rising tension between the two countries. As Leader of the Opposition, Abbott had repeatedly pledged that he would ‘stop the boats’ if he was elected. By this he meant that he would put in place a comprehensive regional deterrence framework to physically prevent asylum seekers from reaching Australia (­Grewcock 2014). To achieve this Abbott would have to rely on the goodwill of the Indonesian government, because a number of his plans involved direct action within Indonesian territory. Among other propositions, many of which were of dubious merit and effectiveness, Abbott pledged funds to buy old Indonesian fishing boats to reduce the number available for smugglers to transport their clients (Lane 2013). Another plan he announced was one that involved Australian intelligence agencies buying information from Indonesian informants in coastal areas where people-smugglers operated. A third proposal was for intercepted boats to be towed back to Indonesia. Although Abbott abandoned the first two plans, forced turn-backs as a policy were implemented under his Operation Sovereign Borders, launched in September 2013. None of Abbott’s plans were welcomed in Indonesia, whose politicians and commentators began to voice their concern before the Australian federal election and continued to do so afterwards. Mahfudz Siddiq, the head of Indonesia’s parliamentary commission for foreign affairs, said, for example, that the plan to buy unseaworthy fishing boats was ‘a crazy idea … degrading and offensive to the dignity of Indonesians’ and warned that these policies would have broader implications for the relationship between Indonesia and Australia (The ­Australian 2013). He criticised Abbott’s ‘cowboy style’ and the new Australian government’s chauvinism that threatened Indonesian sovereignty (Bachelard and Wroe 2013). In reply, Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop said: ‘We’re not seeking ­Indonesia’s

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­ ermission [to carry out our policies], we’re seeking their understanding’ (­Nicholson p and Maley 2013). Outraged by her lack of diplomatic tact, ­Indonesia responded in a similar fashion a few days later when Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa met Bishop in New York, shortly before Abbott visited Jakarta on 30 September. Natalegawa made it clear that Indonesia ‘cannot accept any ­Australian policy that would, in nature, violate Indonesia’s sovereignty’ (Connolly 2013). Although the meeting between Natalegawa and Bishop in New York was supposed to be a private conversation, contents of the discussion—in which Bishop tried to win ­Indonesia’s support for a ‘quiet’ approach—were leaked by the Indonesians to the press as ‘payback’ for Australia’s previous lack of decorum. While the diplomatic exchanges proceeded, two more boats with asylum seekers on board faced emergencies at sea. The first was escorted back to Indonesia, while the second waited so long for help that only 28 of more than 80 passengers could be rescued. Immigration Minister Scott Morrison denied allegations made by survivors that Australian authorities did not react quickly enough to distress calls from the vessel (Wilson 2013). Little was achieved by Abbott’s first visit to Jakarta as Australian Prime Minister. Aware of the offence caused by his plans to forcibly return boats to Indonesia, Abbott avoided raising the topic at all during his talks. The only concession he could elicit from President Yudhoyono was an agreement to begin looking for a bilateral solution, rather than relying on a multilateral approach, which Yudhoyono had already raised in previous talks. Technical details for a bilateral approach were left for ministers to sort out afterwards. Pressure increased to find timely solutions on what to do with asylum seeker boats, when in early November a boat with 56 asylum seekers on board issued a distress call. The call was first received by the Australian authorities, who intended to take the passengers back to Indonesia. The Indonesian refusal to receive this boat back in Indonesian territory resulted in a three-day stand-off in the ­middle of the ocean, at the end of which Australia took the asylum seekers. Despite this ‘failure’, Tony Abbott remained confident, saying: ‘We have good relations with Indonesia. But we will stop these boats’ (News.com 2013). Abbott’s optimistic confidence was soon to be undermined and the negotiation of more Indonesian concessions suspended when it became public knowledge, late in November 2013, that Australia had engaged in espionage in Indonesia, including wiretapping the phone of the President, his wife and a number of very eminent political figures. President Yudhoyono was outraged and announced: ‘For me personally, and for Indonesia, the wiretapping conducted by Australia toward some officials, including me, is really hard to comprehend … It’s not the Cold War-era anymore.’ (Jakarta Globe 2013). Once more, public opinion was inflamed by satirical cartoons. This time the cartoon on the front page of Rakyat Merdeka of 23 November depicted Prime Minister Abbott half-naked and masturbating while peeping into a room labelled ‘Indonesia’ and groaning ‘Ssst! Oh my God Indo … So Sexy’. Outraged by the revelations of espionage, Indonesia not only called its ­ambassador, Nadjib Riphat Kesoema, home from Canberra but also suspended

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all military and intelligence collaboration, including programs aimed at preventing asylum seekers from reaching Australia. While bilateral cooperation between the Indonesian and Australian governments had been put on hold, Indonesian police intercepted only very few Australia-bound asylum seekers. The chief of the National Police, General Sutarman, said ‘Surely we will investigate all violations that take place within Indonesia’s jurisdiction, but if anyone wants to head there [Australia]; it is not part of our authority. There is no more cooperation [in the area]’ (Arnaz 2013). Despite suspending all anti-people smuggling collaboration, Australian funding continued for the IOM to provide care and support (including housing, food and medical assistance) to asylum seekers and refugees intercepted in Indonesia. Some Indonesian politicians demanded that pressure on Australia be increased by the release of all asylum seekers from detention so that they could slip through to Australia, but this did not happen. A further major irritant in the relations between Australia and Indonesia were the forced returns and tow-backs of asylum seekers to Indonesia. Indonesian senior diplomats and opinion-makers were extremely infuriated by Australian arrogance, with Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa saying, ‘We cannot approve (benarkan) Australian action of returning refugees [sic.] to Indonesia’ (April 2014) and the breach of Indonesia’s territorial sovereignty became a serious m ­ atter. On at least five occasions (12, 22 and 25 December 2013 and 1 and 6 January 2014) the ­Australian Navy had violated Indonesia’s 12-nautical-mile territorial zone when pushing asylum seeker boats back. On 17 January 2014, Foreign M ­ inister Julie Bishop conveyed to her Indonesian counterpart, Marty Natalegawa, an apology from the Australian government for ‘inadvertently’ breaching its sovereignty several times during the tow-back operations. In reaction, Coordinating Political, Legal and Security Affairs Minister Djoko Suyanto announced on 22 ­January that Indonesia would increase maritime patrols to prevent the recurrence of such incidents (Jakarta Post 2014). One Australian newspaper reported that the ­Indonesian navy added three small warships to its southern patrols to intercept people-­smuggling boats but not to deter Australian incursions (Alford and ­Nathalia 2014). In the first year of Operation Sovereign Borders, the Australian government under Abbott returned more boats than the government of his mentor John ­Howard returned in just over two years between October 2001 and November 2003. Altogether, the Australian government successfully stopped a total of 45 ventures before they even set sail through disruption operations with Australia’s partner countries, and also turned, towed, or sent back, 12 asylum seeker boats with 383 asylum seekers, in most cases to Indonesia (Morrison 2014). Australia’s actions in forcing the return of asylum seekers are in grave violation of the Refugee Convention and other relevant conventions Australia has ratified, such as Convention on the Rights of the Child and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, although these alleged breaches have not been tested in court. Some of the asylum seekers who have been returned to ­Indonesia against their will have claimed they were duped by sailors who told

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them they were being taken to Darwin or Christmas Island in order to prevent potential rioting on board. Adding to Australia’s questionable record are serious allegations of verbal and physical mistreatment when the Australian navy returned 45 ­asylum ­seekers, including nine women, from Sudan, Eritrea, Somali, Ghana, Egypt, Yemen and Lebanon to Rote Island in early January 2014 (AFP 2014). According to the reports of the returned asylum seekers, which were not investigated further by the ­Indonesian police in Rote once it had been determined that they related to events that occurred outside Indonesian territory, ­Australian navy personnel forced some of them to put their hands on hot pipes, causing them to suffer burns (Bachelard 2014a). In the face of repeated denials by the Australian Prime M ­ inister, the Immigration Minister and the Australian Navy, demands for an ­Australian investigation were at first rejected, even though ­Australia is obliged under international law to impartially investigate allegations of torture or other cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment, to punish perpetrators, and to provide effective remedies (including compensation) to victims. The Australian government has also refused to release video recordings made during the interception. Only in August 2014 did the Australian Defence Force Investigative Service (ADFIS) conduct its own assessment of the allegations by interviewing the navy personal on board of that boat but not the asylum seekers who had made these allegations. It was therefore not surprising that the ADFIS found that the allegations could not be substantiated and that there was no requirement for further investigation (Farrell 2014). Relations between Indonesia and Australia suffered badly from the towbacks and the Vice Chairman of the Indonesian national legislature, the Dewan ­Perwakilan Rakyat (DPR), Priyo Budi Santoso, characterised Australia’s actions as ‘toying with Indonesia’ (Akuntono 2014). A further consequence of tow-backs and forced returns was that the numbers of asylum seekers in Indonesia and in other transit countries such as Malaysia started to accumulate. Unimpressed by the problems faced by the asylum seekers stuck in transit, Abbott celebrated the 100th day without any maritime arrivals of asylum seekers in late March 2014. Hassan Wirajuda, former Indonesian foreign minister dismissed the slowdown of maritime arrivals as ‘a temporary phenomenon’, saying that potential asylum seekers might postpone crossing-over to Australia for a limited period of time (Alford and Nicholson 2014). Despite Wirajuda’s forecast, asylum seeker boat traffic between Indonesia and Australia did remain low over the next three years. This was first and foremost the outcome of Operation Sovereign Borders, a militaryled maritime operation that commenced in September 2013. Between then and November 2016, 29 asylum seeker boats and 740 people have been intercepted and turned back to their country of departure, including Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Vietnam (Australian Government 2016). Despite such harsh measures of deterrence, ­asylum seekers continued to arrive in Indonesia, albeit in slightly smaller numbers—after all, the reasons why they had left their homelands, such as conflict, violence and poverty, persisted. The waiting times for these newcomers became longer and longer (Brown and Missbach 2016).

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Unlike President Barack Obama who gave an informal apology to the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, after it was found that her mobile phone had been tapped by the US, Abbott never issued an apology for the offence caused by the Australian espionage nor did he provide an assurance to refrain from espionage as Indonesia had demanded. Moreover, he initially showed little interest in the sixstep ‘road map’ drawn up by President Yudhoyono on 26 November 2013, which Indonesia saw as essential for restoring the bilateral relationship and which proposed the drafting of a new ‘code of ethical conduct’ and intelligence protocol for the two countries. New allegations emerged in February 2014 that an Australian intelligence agency had spied on an American law firm representing Indonesia in a trade dispute with the US during 2013 and had passed the information it gathered to the US. Further angered by these allegations, Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa stated that it was about time that Australia decided whether it sees Indonesia as friend or foe (Kompas 2014). Although relations between Australia and Indonesia continued to be tense, Abbott declined an invitation from the Indonesian government to attend the Open Government Partnership conference in Bali in May 2014, an event that might have offered an opportunity to start mending the strained relations. Nonetheless, after a six-month absence the Indonesian ambassador, Nadjib Riphat Kesoema, returned to Canberra later that month. Although Indonesia had not been able to elicit any meaningful concessions from Australia, his return was widely seen as a step towards the normalisation of the bilateral relations (McRae 2014: 12). Moreover, according to the budget released in the same month, Indonesia was going to receive A$86.8 million over the next three years as part of the regional cooperation agreement to manage asylum seekers living in the archipelago (Martin 2014). In June 2014, Prime Minister Abbott visited Indonesia for the first time since the break-down of bilateral relationship. During this visit Abbott declared that the boat issue that had troubled the Indonesian-Australian relationship had been resolved. Both President Yudhoyono and Foreign Minister Natalegawa refrained, however, from commenting on this claim. The main purpose of this meeting was to accelerate the signing of a code of conduct, as proposed earlier by ­Indonesia. Natalegawa stated that although the ‘resolution of a code of conduct was “not directly linked” to [the] tensions over [the asylum-seeker] boats, but […] “­addressing one issue will help the other as well”’ (Bachelard 2014b). Yudhoyono’s appeasing approach was not surprising, given that he had almost reached the end of his second (and constitutionally final) term as Indonesian president. While he endeavoured to achieve agreement on the code of conduct, his potential successors were more critical towards the Australian government. In the lead-up to the presidential elections in July 2014, the two main competitors, Prabowo Subianto and Joko Widodo, disclosed much less conciliatory views of the future relationship between the two countries. During a nationally broadcasted TV-debate, former army general Prabowo Subianto claimed that Australia had a ‘phobia’ about Indonesia and it was to blame for the poor relationship. ­During the

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debate Joko Widodo, who later won the presidential election, lamented the absence of trust between Indonesia and Australia and even proposed to take ­Australia to an international court over asylum seekers if future diplomacy should fail to solve the disagreement. On 28 August 2014, Foreign Ministers Julie Bishop and Marty Natalegawa eventually signed a joint understanding on a code of conduct, which, in essence, reaffirmed the 2006 Lombok Treaty. The main novelty of this agreement is a twopoint addendum: (1) The Parties [Indonesia and Australia] will not use any of their intelligence, including surveillance capacities, or other sources, in ways that would harm the interests of the Parties. (2) The Parties will promote intelligence cooperation between relevant institutions and agencies in accordance with their respective national laws and regulations. Although hailed by the Australian government as a great success, the joint understanding on a code of conduct was nothing more than a face-saving measure for Indonesia, as it conceded nothing to the previous clearly stated Indonesian demands. Australia can continue to spy on Indonesia, as long as Indonesia’s interests are not harmed. The agreement, however, did not spell out how to define ‘harm’ or, indeed, ‘interests’. More significantly, in retrospect it appears that the nine months deemed necessary to produce a mere two-point addendum, served Australia very well, as by then many ruffled feathers had been smoothed again and the overall diplomatic relationship had improved substantially. The diplomatic issues over asylum seeker boats and sovereignty are still far from being solved. To improve the relationship between Indonesia and Australia will require a lot of goodwill from Australia. An opportunity to make a new start and bring fresh air to the stalled relationship emerged when Joko Widodo took over the presidency in October 2014. He had promised on multiple occasions to restore Indonesia as a maritime power and to redefine the Indonesian-Australian relationship but the issue of asylum seekers did not gain priority. In fact, the longawaited presidential decree on the handling of asylum seekers and refugees transiting through Indonesia has still not yet come through. Overall, as at mid-2016, the numbers of asylum seekers and refugees in ­Indonesia continued to grow, but not dramatically. One reason for the longer periods of time that these people spend in Indonesia is that on 18 November 2014, Scott ­Morrison, the then Australian Migration Minister, announced that asylum seekers who registered with the UNHCR in Indonesia on, or after, 1 July 2014 would no longer be eligible for resettlement in Australia (Ratya 2014). Until then, Australia had resettled a large number of refugees from Indonesia, for example 808 in 2013. Under the new policy, Australia announced an annual quota of 450 refugees for 2014 and 2015, all chosen from the ranks of those who arrived before July 2014. In 2015, even this quota was undercut as only 425 refugees were resettled from Indonesia to Australia that year.

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In reaction to this announcement, three Indonesian ministers resurrected a previously mothballed plan to find an uninhabited island within the eastern part of the Indonesian archipelago to house the 10,500 asylum seekers and refugees currently registered with the UNHCR. The idea had circulated in Indonesia for several years beforehand but was set aside twice because of funding issues and disagreement from Canberra. According to Indonesian sources, the regional immigration authorities in Nusa Tenggara Timur have already acquired 5,000 square metres of land on Sumba for the potential development as a temporary shelter for asylum seekers (Kellen 2014). Australia viewed this plan with suspicion, given that Sumba, one of the poorest and most isolated parts of Indonesia, is less than 700 k­ ilometres from the Australian coast. The Australian government feared that Sumba would develop into a honey-pot for people-smugglers and preferred that a centre be established on an island on the other side of the archipelago. More significantly, relocating asylum seekers to a remote island somewhere in Indonesia’s poor east for an undetermined period of time, does not promise any effective protection for them. The ‘island solution’ reappeared briefly, when Vice-President Jusuf Kalla suggested accommodating more than 1,800 Rohingya who had been stranded in Aceh in May 2015 (Rastika 2015) but, again, the plan was never realised.

Conclusion In conclusion, while Australia has sealed its borders and ignored many of the fundamental rights of asylum seekers and refugees over the last decade, Indonesia has been trapped in passivity, holding on to the status quo in regard to refugee protection. The unwillingness to give more attention to transiting asylum seekers has benefited Australian policy-makers and impaired asylum seekers stuck in transit. This policy of burying one’s head in the sand might not be the right strategy to follow, given that global streams of asylum seekers and refugees have certainly not forgotten Indonesia and Australia. In fact, never since the WWII have there been so many displaced asylum seekers and refugees worldwide in need of a safe place to live and effective protection.

References ‘Regional Cooperation Framework’, Bali Process (2011) . AFP (Agence France-Presse) (2014) ‘Asylum Seekers Allege Mistreatment by ­Australian Navy’, 8 January. Agreement between the Republic of Indonesia and Australia on the Framework for Security Cooperation (commonly known as the Lombok Treaty) 2006 .

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Akuntono, Indra (2014) ‘Pencari Suaka Dikembalikan, Priyo Sebut Australia Ledek Indonesia’. Kompas, 7 February. Alford, Peter and Maley, Paul (2013) ‘Asylum Tide Swamping Solution’. The ­Australian, 21 August. Alford, Peter and Nathalia, Telly (2014) ‘Jakarta’s Warships to Target Refugees’. The Australian, 29 January. Alford, Peter and Nicholson, Brendan (2014) ‘Asylum Flow to Indonesia Slashed, Says UN’. The Australian, 20 February. Allard, Tom (2009) ‘Indonesia Wants to Find the “Australian Solution”’, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 November. Anwar, Dewi Fortuna (2002) ‘Aspek Imigran Illegal dalam Hubungan Indonesia– Australia’ in M Muna and M Riefqi (eds), Indonesia dalam Strategi Keamanan Australia: Persoalan Migrasi Illegal (Jakarta, Pusat Penelitian Politik). Arnaz, Farouk (2013) ‘Indonesia to Turn a Blind Eye to Australia-Bound Boats’, Jakarta Globe, 25 November. Asril, Sabrina (2014) ‘Menlu: Australia Langgar HAM Kembalikan Para Pencari Suaka’, Kompas, 28 February . Australian Government (2013) ‘Agency Resourcing: Attorney-General’s’ in Budget Paper no 4, . Australian Government (2016) ‘Australia’s Borders are Stronger than Ever’, Press Statement by Department of Immigration and Border Protection, 13 November, . Bachelard, Michael (2012) ‘Indonesia Welcomes Asylum-Seeker Report’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 August. Bachelard, Michael (2014) ‘Indonesians Think Prime Minister Tony Abbott is Inflaming Tensions for Political Gain over Asylum Seekers’, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 January. Bachelard, Michael (2014a) ‘Investigation: ‘Burned Hands’ on the High Seas’, ­Sydney Morning Herald, 6 February. Bachelard, Michael (2014b) ‘Indonesian Ambassador Quietly Returns to C ­ anberra’, Sydney Morning Herald, 26 May. Bachelard, Michael and Wroe, David (2013) ‘Abbott’s ‘Cowboy’ Tack Riles ­Indonesian MPs’, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 September. BBC (2014) ‘Indonesia Condemns Australian Navy Waters Violations’, 17 January. Brown, Gary; Frost, Frank; and Sherlock, Stephen (1996) ‘The Australian-­ Indonesian Security Agreement: Issues and Implications’, Research Paper 25, Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Group. Brown, Tom and Missbach, Antje (2016) ‘The Boats May Have “Stopped”, but More Refugees are Stuck in Limbo in Indonesia’, The Conversation, 22 March, .

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CMI (Senate Select Committee on a Certain Maritime Incident) (2002) A Certain Maritime Incident (Canberra, Commonwealth of Australia). Connolly, Ellen (2013) ‘Indonesia Voices Concerns about Coalition’s Boats Policy “Loud and Clear”’, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 September. Douglas, Joseph and Schloenhardt, Andreas (2012) ‘Combating Migrant Smuggling with Regional Diplomacy: An Examination of the Bali Process’, Research Paper (Brisbane, The University of Queensland). Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers (2012) Report (commonly known as ‘Houston Report’). (Canberra, Australian Government), . Farrell, Paul (2014) ‘Asylum Seeker Burned Hands in Attempt to Light Fire on Boat, Navy Officer Claims’, The Guardian, 6 August. Fitzpatrick, Stephen (2009) ‘Galang’s Refugee Hell’, The Australian, 5 November. Ford, Michele; Lyons, Lenore; and Palmer, Wayne (2010) ‘Stopping the Hordes: a Critical Account of the Labor Government’s Regional Approach to the Management of Asylum Seekers’, 8 Local-Global: Identity, Security, Community 28. Grewcock, Michael (2013) ‘Australia’s Ongoing Border Wars’ 5(3) Race and Class 10. Grewcock, Michael (2014) ‘Australian Border Policing: Regional “Solution” and Neocolonialism’ 55(3) Race and Class 71. Hearman, Vannessa and Costa, Jose Da (2016) ‘Rocking the Boat’ 124 Inside ­Indonesia, April-June, www.insideindonesia.org. Hitipeuw, Jimmy (2010) ‘150 Nelayan RI Terancam Hukuman’, Kompas, 1 ­September, http://internasional.kompas.com/read/2010/09/01/09595191/150.Nelayan. RI.Terancam.Hukuman. Hunyor, Jonathon (2001) ‘Don’t Jail the Ferryman: The Sentencing of Indonesian “People Movers”’ 26 Alternative Law Journal 223–28. Indonesian Foreign Ministry (2013) ‘Diplomasi Indonesia 2013: Fakta dan Angka’, . Jakarta Globe (2013) ‘Indonesia Suspends People Smuggling Cooperation following Australia Spy Scandal’, 20 November. Jakarta Post (2014) ‘Australia Must Understand RI Sovereignty: Minister’, 22 January. Joint Declaration on Comprehensive Partnership between Australia and the Republic of Indonesia (2005) . Kevin, Tony (2004) A Certain Maritime Accident: The Sinking of SIEV X (­Melbourne, Scribe Publications). Kevin, Tony (2012) Reluctant Rescuers: an Exploration of the Australian Border ­Protection System’s Safety Record in Detecting and Intercepting Asylum-Seeker Boats, 1998-2011 (Manuka, ACT: T Kevin). Kneebone, Susan (2014) ‘The Bali Process and Global Refugee Policy in the Asia– Pacific Region’ 27(4) Journal of Refugee Studies 596–618.

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Kompas (2014) ‘Menlu RI: Australia Harus Tentukan Jadi Teman atau Lawan Indonesia’, 17 February. Kuncara, Mochamad Tatra (2010) ‘Upaya-upaya Diplomasi Australia Terhadap Indonesia Dalam Menghadapi Imigrasi Illegal dan Penyelundupan Imigran ke Australia’ 6(2) Jurnal Ilmiah Hubungan Internasional 72–97. Lane, Sabra (2013) ‘Coalition to Announce New Planks of Asylum Policy, including Scheme to Buy Unsafe Asylum Boats’, ABC News, 23 August. MacDonald, Lisa (1995) ‘Let the East Timorese Boat People Stay!’, Green Left Weekly, 7 June. Mackie, Jamie (2007) Australia and Indonesia: Current Problems, Future Prospects, Lowy Institute Paper No 19 (Sydney, Lowy Institute for International Policy). Mares, Peter (2002) Borderline: Australia’s Response to Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the Wake of the Tampa (Kensington, UNSW Press). Marr, David and Wilkinson, Marian (2003) Dark Victory: How a Government Lied its Way to Political Triumph (Crows Nest, NSW, Allen and Unwin). Martin, Lisa (2014) ‘Indonesia to Get Asylum Seeker Cash’, The Australian, 13 May. McDougall, Derek (2006) ‘Australia and the “War on Terrorism”: A Preliminary Assessment’ in Derek McDougall and Peter Shearman (eds) Australian Security after 9/11: New and Old Agendas (Burlington, VT, Ashgate). McRae, Dave (2014) More Talk than Walk: Indonesia as a Foreign Policy Actor (­Sydney, Lowy Institute). Missbach, Antje (2013) ‘Waiting on the Islands of ‘Stuckedness’: Managing ­Asylum Seekers in Island Detention Camps in Indonesia: Late 1970s to the early 2000s’ 6(2) Austrian Journal of South-East Asian Studies 281–306. Missbach, Antje (2015) Troubled Transit: Asylum Seekers Stuck in Indonesia (­Singapore, ISEAS). Morrison, Scott (2014) ‘A Year of Stronger Borders’, Press Statement, 18 September . Neumann, Klaus and Taylor, Savitri (2009) ‘Australia, Indonesia, and West Papuan Refugees, 1962–2009’ 10(1) International Relations of the Asia-Pacific 1–31. News.com (2013) ‘Australia Accepts Boat People in Stand-off with Indonesia’, 9 November, . Nicholson, Brendan and Maley, Paul (2013) ‘Julie Bishop Says Coalition’s Policies Would Not Breach Indonesia’s Sovereignty’, The Australian, 17 September. Phillips, Janet and Spinks, Harriet (2013) Boat Arrivals in ­Australia since 1976 (Canberra, Parliamentary Library), . Rastika, Icha (2015) ‘Wapres: Pengungsi Rohingya Ditempatkan di Pulau Jika ­Banyak’, Kompas, 22 May .

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Ratya, Mega Putra (2014) ‘Menlu Didesak Protes Keras atas Kebijakan Australia Terkait Pencari Suaka’, detikNews, 20 November. Saragih, Bagus BT (2012) ‘RI Disappointed Over People Smuggling Report’, Jakarta Post, 7 June. Saragih, Bagus BT (2013) ‘SBY Braces for Asylum, Cattle Talks with Rudd’, Jakarta Post, 4 July. Sitohang, Japanton (2002) ‘Masalah Imigrasi Illegal: Dari dan Melalui Indonesia’ in M Riefqi Muna (ed), Indonesia Dalam Strategi Keamanan Australia: Persoalan Migrasi Illegal (Jakarta, Pusat Penelitian Politik). Taylor, Savitri (2013) ‘Towing Back the Boats: Bad Policy Whatever Way You Look at It’, The Conversation, 12 June. The Australian (2013) ‘Tony Abbott’s Boat Buy-Back Plan an “Insult to ­Indonesia”’, 26 August. Trotter, Andrew and Garozzo, Matt (2012) ‘Mandatory Sentencing for People Smuggling: Issues of Law and Policy’ 36(2) Melbourne University Law Review 553–617. Wesley, Michael (2007) The Howard Paradox: Australian Diplomacy in Asia, 1996–2006 (Sydney, ABC Books). Wilson, Lauren (2013) ‘We Responded Appropriately to Asylum-Seeker Distress: Scott Morrison’, The Australian, 29 September.

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9 Islam in Australia-Indonesia Relations: Fear, Stereotypes and Opportunity1 GREG FEALY

In a 2016 survey of Australian and Indonesian attitudes to each other’s countries, respondents were asked to select which words best described the other country. By far the most frequently chosen word for Australian respondents was ‘religious’ (68%). Accompanying focus group discussions established that by ‘religious’, what was really being referred to was Islam, and overwhelmingly the impression was negative, with many discussants mentioning associations with the Middle East and terrorism (Australia-Indonesia Centre and Sweeney 2016).2 Another report on historical survey data regarding Australian-Indonesian relations similarly found that, Islam, along with communism, has often generated unfavourable opinions of Indonesia among Australians (Sobocinska 2016). Australia-Indonesia relations, it is often said, are more defined by differences than by similarities. If this is true (and there are grounds for debating it), then the greatest difference of all between the two countries is that of religion. Indonesia has the largest number of Muslims of any country—about 240 million Muslims or 88% of the population—whereas Australia is majority Christian, with only about 604,200 of its 24 million citizens, just 2.6%, claiming to be Muslim (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2017). The total number of Indonesian-born Muslim Australians in 2011 was just 12,241, 19% of the total of 63,000 Australians of Indonesian extraction (Department of Immigration and Citizenship 2014). Moreover, there are few links between the Muslim communities of both countries,

1  I would like to thank Robert Kingham, Benita Chudleigh, Sara Moriarty, Ken Ward and Tim ­Lindsey for their kind assistance in helping me prepare this chapter. All the views presented are my own. 2  The initial version of the report contained information about the Focus Group Discussions relating to religion, but this was omitted from the published version. Only 37% of Indonesian respondents chose ‘religious’ to describe Australia, the 24th-ranked word on the list, but it should be noted that the Indonesian part of this survey was conducted using a different, and, in my opinion, far less satisfactory, methodology, so this data is less reliable than that from the Australian survey. For further discussion of polling of Australia- Indonesia attitudes, see ch 5.

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and consequently little mutual understanding between Australian and Indonesian Muslims. Only a small number of Indonesian Islamic organisations have representation in Australia and their orientation is primarily towards Indonesia rather than being genuinely bilateral.3 Islam has increasingly loomed as a threat in the minds of many Australians, particularly in the past two decades. This suspicion of, and sometimes antipathy towards, Islam has influenced government policies and the types of statements that Australian leaders make about Indonesia’s Muslim community. While some government policies have been aimed directly at security concerns, especially extremism, numerous initiatives in the diplomatic and aid fields have pursued a wider remit and have done so with creativity and sensitivity. This chapter will examine the role that Islam has played in Australia-Indonesia relations, historically and especially since the mid-1980s. It will analyse the discourse of Australian political leaders on Islamic issues before considering how the Islamic sector has been dealt with in the aid program. The nature of this aid program reveals much about perceptions in Australia of Indonesian Islamic issues and also the ways in which politicians sought to respond. A central argument of this chapter is that Islam has been a neglected element of Australia’s Indonesia engagement, save for a relatively short period in the 2000s when it commanded high priority in policies towards, and public discussion of, Indonesia. Among the features of that period was the preparedness of the government, for the only time during the long-standing bilateral relationship, to commit large sums of development money to specifically Islamic purposes. Though predominantly driven by counter-terrorism concerns, these programs nonetheless had significant impact on the recipient communities and indicated the potential benefits of greater engagement on Islamic issues.

Historical Attitudes to Indonesian Islam For much of the 72-year relationship between Australia and Indonesia, Islam was a marginal element. Successive Australian governments were aware that Indonesia’s population was predominantly Muslim but Islamic issues intruded little into policy deliberations compared to other matters, such as strategic considerations, human rights abuses and political stability. Certainly, until the fall of Soeharto’s New Order regime in 1998, Islam was not regarded as a ‘problem’ by Australian governments. From the late 1940s, Indonesia’s right to self-determination and the challenges of stabilising and developing the new Republic after 1949 dominated Australian concerns. As the 1950s unfolded, tensions between the two nations grew, as the

3  The two main Indonesian Islamic organisations with branches in Australia are Nahdlatul Ulama and the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS).

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Menzies government supported continued Dutch control of Papua and opposed Indonesia’s campaign for re-integration of the territory. The leftwards drift of Indonesian politics and foreign policy under Soekarno’s Guided Democracy further added to Australian concerns. The Menzies government’s own staunch anti-communism coloured its view of Indonesia, particularly as Soekarno launched an undeclared war against the newly formed state of Malaysia, which he labelled a British neo-imperialist plot, and increasingly aligned his country with Communist Bloc nations, notably China, which Australia did not recognise. The coming to power of Soeharto’s right-wing, military-based regime following the 1965 coup ‘attempt’, was welcomed by Menzies and his successors, given its virtual eradication of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and the regime’s generally pro-Western orientation. Two issues should have given Australian governments during this period cause to pay attention to Indonesian Islam. The first was the Darul Islam movement, which established an Indonesia Islamic State in 1949, based on sharia law. Darul Islam would become the most protracted and serious of all Indonesia’s rebellions during the 1950s and early 1960s. Although the Australian embassy probably wrote cables on the rebellion, no politicians or diplomats expressed concern about this early expression of Islamic ‘radicalism’ in their neighbouring country. The second instance was the role of Islamic groups in assisting the Indonesian army to destroy the PKI and exterminate hundreds of thousands of communists and alleged PKI sympathisers during 1965–1966. The government knew of the participation of major Islamic organisations in anti-communist purges but there is no record of any Muslim leaders being invited to Australia or even being asked to meet Australian dignitaries who went to Indonesia. Retired diplomats and intelligence analysts who served during this period attest that their political masters seldom thought of Indonesia’s Islamic community. One former diplomat who worked in the Jakarta embassy in the 1960s said: We didn’t say much about Islam at all. We just told visiting politicians that the majority of Indonesians were Muslim but that most weren’t very serious about their faith. “Muslim in name only!” That sort of thing. Completely different to the Middle East. That was all they [politicians] needed to know!4

Another former diplomat specialising in Indonesia from the 1970s flatly stated: ‘I don’t recall Australian politicians ever being interested in Islamic issues. It just didn’t seem important to Australia’s interests.’5 Survey data from the Soekarno and Soeharto periods tends to bear out this impression. In Agneiszka Sobocinska’s analysis of historical surveys on Australian attitudes to Indonesia, Islam is barely mentioned between the 1940s and the 1990s. For most Australians, the chief concern with Indonesia was about the military threat that it posed, as well as its political and social instability (Sobocinska 2016). 4  5 

Confidential interview with retired diplomat at Monash University, Melbourne, 1994. Confidential interview with retired diplomat, Canberra, May 2017.

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Similarly, references to Indonesian Muslims in the Australian media are scarce. Conservative magazines, such as The Bulletin, occasionally featured cartoons caricaturing Indonesian leaders as exotic Muslims. One notorious example during the union black ban on Dutch ships during Indonesia’s independence struggle in the late 1940s portrayed a burly waterside worker bowing in genuflection to a boyish, almost simian, Sutan Syahrir (then Indonesia’s Prime Minister), who is portrayed as Aladdin with a lamp.6 That the urbane, Dutch-educated and diplomatically gifted Syahrir would be portrayed as an uncomprehending figure from The Arabian Nights is probably indicative of stereotypes common in Australia at that time.

Terrorism and the Reframing of Islam as a Threat The position of Islam in the bilateral relationship changed suddenly late on the evening of 12 October 2002, when bombs exploded in Paddy’s Bar and the Sari Club in Legian, Bali, killing 202 people, including 88 Australians. It soon became apparent that these were acts of terrorism perpetrated by Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), an Indonesia-centred jihadist organisation aligned to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. As soon as news of the attack reached Australia, the Islamic issue, and especially counter-terrorism, were propelled into the centre of the relationship and indeed would dominate bilateral ties for the next decade, before being overtaken by issues of boat people, Indonesia’s execution of Australians, and Australia’s intelligence surveillance of Indonesian political leaders. For Australian intelligence officers and diplomats, the threat of Indonesian terrorism, and quite possibly JI, had been on their minds for more than a year. Soon after the 11 September 2001 (9/11) attacks on New York and Washington DC, investigators found that some of the plotters had been based and trained in Malaysia and Singapore, and that both Indonesians and Malaysians had been involved in the preparations. Two important figures in the regional preparations were the Indonesian veteran of the Afghan War, Riduan Isamuddin (better known as Hambali), and a Malaysian chemical engineer, Yazid Sufaat, who had helped organise training for several of the 9/11 perpetrators. Both were JI members. It is likely that Australian intelligence knew of JI’s activities prior to this, but probably not the extent of the threat posed. The 9/11 plot showed that sophisticated terrorism operations could be carried out in Southeast Asia. As a result, the Australian government, as well as other Western governments, stepped up their monitoring of Indonesian jihadists and sought greater information from their Indonesian counterparts on possible threats.

6 

See ‘Slave of the Lamp’ from The Bulletin, reproduced in George (1974).

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Some of this growing terrorism threat became public with a report on JI by Sidney Jones of the International Crisis Group (ICG) in August 2002, uncovering the organisation’s activities and the possibly lethal intent of Indonesian jihadists (ICG 2002). Also, Time magazine published a front-cover story the following month about a Kuwaiti al-Qaeda operative, Omar al-Faruq, who had gone to Indonesia to liaise with JI in planning operations, but had been captured and sent to Afghanistan for interrogation (Ratnesar 2002). While experts in regional Islamic and security issues were aware of this reporting, most of the public suspected little and certainly government travel warnings gave no specific indication of a possible terrorist attack. Thus, when the October 2002 Bali bombing took place, the Australian public (and, indeed, the Indonesian public) were deeply shocked. This was the first time that a large number of Australian citizens had been victims of terrorism. The fact that they came from across a broad range of Australian society only served to heighten the impact of the attack. There was an immediate outpouring of grief and anger, including by the political elite. The pressure on the government was intense. Talkback radio rang out with callers denouncing Islam for, as they saw it, fostering such extremism, as well as criticising Australian and Indonesian authorities for not detecting and thwarting the plot. Some asked what prior information the government may have had regarding possible attacks. The Howard government faced two pressing issues in responding to the Bali bombing. The first was to win Indonesian government approval for the largescale involvement of Australian police and intelligence agencies in the Indonesian investigation into the bombing and in support of wider counter-terrorism operations. The Megawati government, equally as appalled by the attack as the Australian government, quickly agreed, opening a period of unprecedented cooperation between Indonesian and Australian police and intelligence agencies (as discussed in chapter twelve). This also led to a crackdown on JI networks in Australia, including a series of arrests of Indonesians and Malaysians in Sydney and Melbourne who were suspected of JI involvement. The second, and in some ways more difficult, problem, was developing strategies to manage public reactions to the bombing to ensure that relations with Indonesia were not harmed and that Muslim communities in general in Australia and Indonesia were not vilified or blamed for the violence. The Howard government realised it had to navigate between, on the one hand, acknowledging community anger and the need for swift and thorough policing responses, and, on the other, assuring the Indonesian government and mainstream Muslims that it was not hostile to them and indeed sought to work cooperatively to address the threat of terrorism. What initially must have appeared a politically and diplomatically highly delicate matter would soon become the means to dramatically improved bilateral relations.

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Moderate Friends, Radical Enemies The Howard government’s crafting of its post-Bali bombing narratives bore close resemblance to, and indeed, was probably modelled on, the Bush Administration’s response to 9/11. Emphasis was placed upon distinguishing between terrorists and the broad mass of ‘moderate’ Muslims. While the terrorists were said to want to destroy democracy and western values, moderate Muslims were cast as lawabiding, peaceful, and as revolted by terrorist violence as most other sections of the community. Moreover, Islam was described as a religion of peace and it was argued terrorists were perverting and traducing the true teachings of their faith. Last of all, moderate Muslims were portrayed as crucial in the fight against terrorism, as they could counter the false doctrines of the militants and also inform authorities of suspicious or violent activity in their communities. The reasoning behind this kind of ‘bad versus good Muslim’ strategy had several elements: first, there was a genuine desire to prevent a backlash against law-abiding Muslims: second, the government sought to religiously delegitimise terrorism; and third, security agencies had indeed advised governments that effective counter-terrorism depended on maintaining the trust and cooperation of Muslim communities. The Howard government sought to apply this strategy both at home and in its statements regarding Indonesian Islam. Just as the Australian government sought to work with moderate Australian Muslims in combatting terrorism, so did it urge moderate Indonesian Muslims to join it against militancy. This approach to Indonesian terrorism has been continued with only small variations by all five post-Howard governments.7 John Howard and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer set the tone for much of the Australian government’s responses for the next decade. Howard told the Australian parliament ‘The great fight for the soul of Islam is being fought between moderate leaders … and the fanatics’ (Uhlmann 2006), describing extremism as ‘dangerous and evil’ (Grattan 2006). On other occasions he told journalists that ‘It is a blasphemy on Islam for the name of Islam to be invoked to justify terrorism’ (Harvey 2006) and opined that ‘terrorism is not part of orthodox Islam’ (Harvey 2006). He assured Muslims that Australia bore no ill will to them: ‘Islam is one of the great world religions. Decent members, which are 99.9% of the Islamic faith, are as appalled as we are. We have not and will not behave with any belligerence toward any countries in our neighbourhood or, indeed, toward any Islamic countries’ (Kyodo News International 2002).

He stressed the common ground and challenges that exist between Indonesia and Australia on terrorism, saying: ‘We should understand that, just as Australians, as Westerners, are targets of terrorism, so is moderate, stable democratic Indonesia. 7 That is, the two Kevin Rudd governments (2007–2010 and 2013), and those of Julia Gillard (2010–2013), Tony Abbott (2013–2015) and Malcolm Turnbull (2015–present).

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We must work as closely as possible with our friends in Indonesia’ (Grattan 2005). ‘The terrorists who murdered our fellow Australians in Bali’, he declared, ‘are no friends of true Islam’ (Stevens 2002). When asked to define what he meant by ‘moderate Islam’, Howard answered ‘true Islam’ (Anadolu Agency 2005). Downer went even further in his doctrinal commentary saying that ‘Terrorism has nothing to do with Islam’ (AFP 2003), and denounced ‘extremist groups which seek to pervert and hijack Islam’ (Taylor 2003). He asserted that Australia ‘must work closely with moderate friends in Indonesia’ if terrorism is to be defeated. This broad approach won endorsement from then Opposition Leader, Kim Beazley, though he criticised the Howard government for not being as effective as it should be: ‘We have got to be a clever ally of moderate Muslims who are our friends, not a stumble footed ally’ (SBS 2004). The election of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono as president of Indonesia in 2004 led to a more effusive and ambitious turn in Australia’s rhetoric about Indonesian Islam. Unlike his rather reserved and diplomatically cautious predecessor, Megawati Soekarnoputri, Yudhoyono was well versed in international relations and sought a much larger role for himself and Indonesia on the global stage. He spoke eloquently in English and was assured in the company of other world leaders. Almost as soon as Yudhoyono assumed office, Howard began extolling the president’s virtues as a model Muslim leader, both to Australians and also the international community. He declaimed: ‘The leaders of the Islamic community both here [in Australia] and around the world should do what President Yudhoyono does—and he’s a great moderate Islamic leader—and that is condemn terrorism’ (Grattan 2006). He also lauded Yudhoyono as a ‘moderate, outwardlooking Islamic leader who’s trying very hard to bring progress and security to his country’ (Maiden 2005). Beyond their praise of Yudhoyono, Howard and Downer went so far as to contend that Indonesia stood as a beacon to the international community in embracing democracy at the same time as effectively combating extremism. Howard declared: What happens there [Indonesia] is crucial to the view the world has of moderate Islam and Islamic fanaticism. If moderate mainstream Islam succeeds and democracy remains strong, as it appears to be in Indonesia, well that is a huge rebuff to the terrorists because the terrorists do not want a stable, successful Indonesia. … A modern successful country in Indonesia is anathema to the terrorists’ objectives. (Mulvey 2005)

At the World Economic Forum in 2005, he bemoaned the fact that Indonesia was ‘too little in the mind of the international community’ and urged major nations to invest in Indonesia in order to ensure its continuing progress and success (Kitney 2005). Similarly, Downer told US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that: Indonesia is a very important example of not only Islam embracing democracy, but in doing so where you have seen a decline in support for extremism. When you think of extremism you think of the Middle East … but you can easily forget that Indonesia

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has the largest Muslim population in the world and India the second largest and those countries are both democracies. (US Department of State 2007)

Indeed, Downer was fond of generalising ex cathedra about Islamic issues and especially the superiority of Indonesian and Southeast Asian Islam over its Middle Eastern forms. He saw radicalism as a rejection of modernity and moderation as an embracing of it. One of his numerous disquisitions on the subject went thus: The most extreme form of Islam is practised on the Arabian Peninsula and in particular in Saudi Arabia. It is known as Wahhabism and … it wants the Muslim world to live much as it did 1000 years ago. That kind of religion may have suited nomads of the Arabian desert but it has never had much appeal in … Southeast Asia where there is quite overt enthusiasm about modernisation and the accoutrements of modern living. (Downer 2010)

The Howard government’s handling of the discursive and diplomatic aspects of the Indonesian terrorism issue was, in many ways, astute. After several years of bilateral tension and resentment over Australia’s role in precipitating East Timor’s separation from Indonesia in 1999–2000, the Bali bombing allowed a resetting of relations, one that would permit Australia to demonstrate its goodwill and helpfulness towards its neighbour, as well as underscore commonalities. Thus Australia emphasised that it was at one with Indonesia in fighting extremism and in supporting moderate expressions of Islam. Moreover, Australia could bolster Yudhoyono’s and Indonesia’s international profile by proclaiming its neighbour as an exemplar of friendly, progressive, democratic Islam in a Muslim world where such qualities were scarce. Yudhoyono was especially pleased at Australia’s praise, as it accorded with his own sense of his growing international stature and his wish for Indonesia to feature prominently in improving Islam’s global image. In this sense, the tragedy of the Bali bombing and emergent terrorism presented a diplomatic opportunity to Australia, in which the promotion of Indonesia’s Islamic credentials both strengthened its bilateral relationship and gave Australia a distinctive message in major international forums on security and democratisation. To some degree, the more Australia could cast Indonesia as presenting solutions to extremism and political instability, the more it could itself claim to be contributing to solving global problems. Australia’s strategy, however, was not without major flaws. The stark dichotomising of the Islamic community into moderate and radical, friendly and hostile, led many Australian leaders into simplistic and often condescending statements to their Indonesian counterparts. Visiting Australian officials would dutifully pay calls on the leaders of the main Islamic organisations, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah, but rarely deviated from well-worn messages about Indonesia’s Islamic moderation and the need to fight radicalism. One Australian ambassador was fond of telling NU leaders that they were ‘the real Muslims’, much to their chagrin given the diplomat’s evident lack of knowledge about Islam. Downer, ­likewise, often irritated his Muslim interlocutors by lecturing them on Islamic issues. At one forum in Jakarta in 2005 chaired by the head of Muhammadiyah,

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Professor Syafii Maarif, Downer exasperated his largely Muslim audience by ­telling them that ‘I know what a good Muslim is, and I hope you do as well.’8 Visiting Indonesian Muslim delegations to Australia became used to their hosts tiresomely repeating mantras about moderate and radical Indonesian Islam. One delegation member complained: ‘I don’t mind some talk of terrorism, but that’s all the government people wanted to discuss. And they all say the same thing. There’s so many other things about Islam that I’d like to talk about but they’re not ­interested.’9 Indeed, it was a common view among Indonesian Muslims who regularly interacted with Australians that their preoccupation with Islam was chiefly to do with security. Even praise of moderate Islam was often seen as driven by an anxiety about radicalism. Talking-up Yudhoyono’s credibility in the Muslim world and the virtues of Indonesia’s moderate Islam was also largely fruitless and arguably harmful for Indonesian diplomacy. To begin with, Yudhoyono did not enjoy high standing in international Islamic circles. He did not speak Arabic, had only shallow knowledge of Islam, and came from a part of the world that most Middle Eastern and South Asian Muslim leaders regarded as peripheral to global Islamic culture and politics. Much as Australia and other western nations advocated for a greater role for Indonesia, most of the Islamic world paid scant attention. Moreover, at Western urging, Yudhoyono and Indonesian diplomats often embarked on ambitious international initiatives designed to promote moderation and democratisation in other parts of the Muslim world. Despite considerable expense and effort, their impact was negligible. One such initiative was a 2007 summit chaired by Yudhoyono to bring together prominent Shia and Sunni leaders from around the world for dialogue to ease tensions between the two variants. Many Shia leaders boycotted the event after Indonesia supported tighter United Nations sanctions against Iran, and the summit produced nothing of substance (Fealy 2014: 233–48).

Moderating Aid The biggest change that the Bali bombing wrought to Australia-Indonesia relations was that of development assistance. Prior to 2002, the ‘Islamic sector’ received only a tiny percentage of Australia’s aid allocation to Indonesia—less than a few hundred thousand dollars per annum. Following the Bali bombing, this would increase many-fold as AusAID, Australia’s international development organisation, embarked on an ambitious program of aid, particularly to the Islamic education sector. Over the next fourteen years, more than A$167 million was spent on Islamic schools. By the mid-2010s, however, most of these educational initiatives 8 

Personal observation. from a young Islamic politician who visited Australia as part of a parliamentary exchange program in 2008. 9 Comment

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had been discontinued and the specifically Islamic aspect of Australia’s Indonesian aid returned to being a minor element in the broader program. This trajectory over some 40 years reveals much about Australian government attitudes towards Indonesian Islam. Indonesian Muslims have always been among the beneficiaries of Australian aid programs, perhaps not surprisingly, given that they constitute almost nine out of every ten Indonesians. A small number of Muslims came to Australian universities as part of the Colombo Plan during the 1960s and 1970s, for example, and a great many Muslims benefitted from Australia’s general aid work to relieve poverty and improve living standards in Indonesia. But it was not until the mid1980s that AusAID began funding activities specifically targeting the Islamic sector. A handful of volunteers from the AusAID-funded Australian Volunteers International program were sent to Islamic boarding schools (pesantren) and Islamic NGOs, such LP3ES and P3M, as English language teachers. Two alumni of this program, Peter Britton and Robert Kingham, would go on to play important roles in the subsequent Australian engagement with Indonesian Islam, Britton as a senior AVI official and Kingham as director and consultant to major AusAID Islamic education projects in the 2000s.10 During the 1980s, growing numbers of Islamic scholars came to Australian universities on Australia Academia (now called Australian Awards) scholarships, as part of a program to strengthen Islamic tertiary institutions. This program included collaboration with Indonesia’s Ministry of Religious Affairs (MoRA) to provide intensive pre-departure academic English training for scholarship recipients to ensure they were able to perform at a high level. Some 40 junior lecturers from State Islamic Institutions (IAIN) and State Islamic Teachers’ Colleges (STAIN) undertook masters and doctoral training in Australia between 1989 and 1997. Many alumni from this program have gone on to become senior academics and MoRA officials. Australia’s higher degree training program for Islamic scholars was, arguably, the second most influential within Indonesia’s Islamic tertiary sector, after that of Canada’s McGill University, which also received considerable government development assistance. Despite the success of these programs to support Islamic higher education, Australia’s overall aid strategies in Indonesia during this later Soeharto period lacked the innovation and boldness of those of many other western nations. USAID, for example, responded to requests from pro-reform forces within the Islamic community to support their activities so that Indonesia might be better prepared for the looming transition from Soeharto’s authoritarian regime to a democratic system. As a result, from 1997 it funded a ground-breaking ‘Islam and Civil Society’ program run by The Asia Foundation, which directly assisted Islamic organisations to promote democratic values, human rights, community empowerment and progressive Islamic scholarship. Similarly, the Ford Foundation from the mid-1990s 10  Much of the information for this section is drawn from Kingham (2015), and extensive interviews with current and former AusAID and DFAT Australian Aid officials, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity.

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funded Islamic NGOs, such as P3M, working on gender equality, women’s and children’s rights and community advocacy. European foundations and government aid agencies were also active in these fields.11 These kinds of projects were based on the principle that Islamic groups and concepts were important in shaping Indonesia’s future. If the Muslim community was strongly committed to civic rights and reform, then Indonesia’s capacity for democratisation would be enhanced. AusAID, throughout the last years of Soeharto’s presidency, consistently rejected proposals to involve itself in reform activities, particularly in the Islamic community. This reflected the conservative, risk-averse approach of its leadership during this period, which eschewed politically sensitive or socially and religiously progressive programs in favour of ‘traditional’ aid work, such as village health, agricultural development and infrastructure. Key AusAID officials believed that the Soeharto regime was likely to endure for many years and that it was safer to avoid projects that might incur its displeasure. They felt that Islam was an especially problematic area. The collapse of the New Order in 1998 and the regeneration of AusAID’s own leadership from around this time, brought fresh thinking and initiative to Australia’s aid program. Two officials, in particular, were to play a leading role in this: Robin Davies and Allison Sudrajat. Both had a passion for Indonesia and a strong desire to explore new ways of delivering assistance, and each would, in turn, lead AusAID’s program in Indonesia during the early Reformasi years.12 They were convinced that Islam could be playing a much bigger role in their Agency’s programs. Much of Australia’s immediate post-Soeharto aid was economic, in response to Indonesia’s dire predicament following the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997–98, but the 2002 terrorist attack produced a sharp change in the government’s aid priorities.

Increased Education Aid In the aftermath of the 2002 Bali bombing, Alexander Downer resolved that Australia would make much greater use of development money to address ‘Islamic issues’ in Indonesia. The primary aim was counter-terrorism, specifically to give tangible form to the government’s promises to support moderate Islam while combatting radicalism. There were numerous elements to this program but the main component was education, particularly support for schooling and universities. An early initiative, in 2003, was the Islamic Schools English Language Program (ISELP), by which AVI provided Australian English teachers to ten pesantren throughout East Java for two years. In 2004, Downer announced a much more ambitious

11 

For a good account of this growing progressive movement within Islam, see Hefner (2000). Alison Sudrajat was to tragically die in a plane crash in Yogyakarta in 2007 when she was serving as AusAID minister-counsellor in Indonesia. She was one of AusAID’s most experienced Indonesia hands. Robin Davies’ account of Australian aid in Indonesia appears in ch 22. 12 

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A$30 million-plus, five-year assistance package for Islamic schools (Downer 2004). This included provision of teaching materials, teacher upgrading training, further English-language teaching support and improved school management. The lion’s share of the funding went to primary and junior secondary madrasah, schools which taught the national curriculum and were supervised by MoRA. Many of the madrasah were within pesantren. The most novel aspect of this Islamic education program was the Learning Assistance Program for Islamic Schools (LAPIS), which ran from 2004 to 2011, with a total budget of A$34.9 million. Davies and Sudrajat ensured that LAPIS took a different form to most of AusAID’s other programs: it was not devised and fully managed by a contractor, as with most other programs, but rather was conceptualised and run from within the Agency under the direction of Robert Kingham. LAPIS was intended as a ‘flexible mechanism’ with which to raise the quality of basic Islamic schools in Indonesia, to build the credibility of the Australian government in the Islamic sector as a precursor to more extensive future engagement, and also to ‘mitigate extremism’. It gave over 100 innovation grants to Islamic institutions as part of its mission to develop new curriculum options, improve teacher performance, raise administrative standards in madrasah and strengthen school leadership and management. Although the program received a mixed final report, it was well regarded within the Islamic education sector and many of those who had benefitted from its grants and training bemoaned AusAID’s decision to not extend it beyond 2011.13 In addition to these specific Islamic educational programs, the government also decided that the Islamic sector would be included in its Australia-Indonesia Basic Education Program (AIBEP), which ran from 2005 to 2011 and had a budget of A$387 million. School building was the main objective and some 2,000 schools were built during the six years of the program. Most of the AIBEP operation was based within the Ministry of Education and Culture but a separate unit was also set up within MoRA to construct new madrasah facilities and provide a range of technical and managerial support. About a quarter of the AIBEP budget was devoted to Islamic schools and 504 madrasah were built by 2010, creating more than 12,000 new places for students (AIBEP ICR 2011). To the public, the Howard government justified this expenditure on Islamic schooling as principally a counter-extremism measure. It argued that most of the terrorists involved in the Bali bombing and subsequent attacks had been pesantreneducated and that impressionable Muslim students were being drawn into radical Islamic schools because they could not afford to attend better quality mainstream Islamic schools or non-religious state schools. Thus, investing in MoRAsupervised pesantren and madrasah was a way of keeping students in a moderate Islamic environment and away from extremist influences. Downer, for example, justified Australia’s building of 2,000 schools by saying: ‘Why [do we do this]?

13 

See Crawford (2010) and LAPIS (2012).

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Because Islam is a fact. Moderate Islam, by the way, is a fact as well. And if you can energise moderate Islam, then you will gradually but only gradually, solve this problem [ie radicalism].’ (Flitton 2007). On another occasion, he linked deradicalisation to support for moderate Islamic institutions. ‘We’ve tried to put money into … moderate religious educational institutions, to try to divert people from the more extremist madrasahs into those [moderate] institutions.’ He added that funding the building of religious schools was ‘a way of maintaining, if you like, an element of religious education but mainstreaming it and keeping radicalism out of that sort of education’ (ABC 2009). Kevin Rudd, when he was prime minister in 2007, used similar arguments: If we are to deal effectively with the rise of militant Islamism in Indonesia, we must also deal with the challenges facing the mainstream Indonesian education system. Economic underdevelopment in parts of Indonesia has meant that many impoverished families have had little alternative other than to send their children to militant Islamist [madrasah] and pesantren. This in turn provides a real recruiting ground for terrorist organisations such as Jema’ah Islamiyah. Any effective long-term strategy has to have … a hearts and minds strategy focussed on the education system (Rudd 2007)

This justification for assisting Indonesia’s Islamic sector was dubious. To begin with, there was little evidence that students going to radical pesantren were doing so for economic reasons. Most scholars believed that parents and students chose radical schools because they were drawn to their ideology and their militant leadership.14 So, giving aid to moderate, state-supervised pesantren would likely have negligible effect on the production of new terrorists. Downer, as well as many senior officials, were apparently aware of this but he persisted with the counter-terrorism argument because it served the purpose of showing the public that the government was taking action against extremism.15 The government genuinely believed that investing in Islamic education would strengthen Indonesian democracy and pluralism, and that these were important to the longer-term resisting of extremism, but that case was seldom made publicly because it was felt that few in the community would be much interested. Nonetheless, Downer’s comments to the media often betrayed great ignorance of Islamic education. For example, he once told journalists that: The problem with [madrasah] is that they teach them nothing except religion, which is OK although it’s a very extremist form of religion, but they have no capacity to get jobs on the back of that. I mean they’re not taught arithmetic and literature and all the normal things people are taught in schools. They’re just taught about the Qur’an and other sorts of religious derivations of the Qur’an and nothing much else. (ABC 2009)

What Downer seemed not to realise was that, by law and in fact, 70% of the madrasah curriculum was made up of general or secular subjects.16

14 

See, eg, ICG (2005). Confidential information from senior diplomats who worked with Downer through this period. 16  A very small proportion of madrasah within the MoRA system teach an alternative national ­curriculum which allows for 70% of religious subjects and only 30% of general subjects. 15 

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Despite his misleading and ill-informed public remarks, Downer deserves credit for insisting that Islamic education assistance proceed, often over the objections of AusAID’s wary management. Their preference was that aid did not go to religious institutions and they were especially worried that the agency might be accused of meddling in sensitive Islamic issues or, worse, end up funding Muslims who later turned out to be extremist. There were, in fact, several isolated cases where funding was withdrawn from madrasah due to militant activity but Downer remained firm in his support for the program. One last educational initiative in the wake of the Bali bombing that warrants mention was the provision of post-graduate ‘sandwich’ programs for academics in the Islamic tertiary sector, in partnership with MoRA. Designed by Professor Virginia Hooker, then a member of the Advisory Board of DFAT’s Australia-Indonesia Institute,17 these programs enabled lecturers who were taking higher degrees to spend a year at an Australian university under the supervision of senior Indonesians.18 A unique aspect of the program was the absence of a minimum English-language competency requirement, in contrast to all other Australian scholarship programs. The primary aim was to improve academic standards at Islamic universities and institutes, which, at that time, lagged far behind the major state universities. The first of these programs was the Partnership in Education and Training of Regional Islamic Institutions (PETRII) for masters’ students, which ran from 2004 to 2006. The second was the Partnership in Islamic Education Scholarships (PIES) for doctoral students, which was introduced in 2008 and continues until the present. At the time of writing a total of 49 academics have participated in these programs, with many going on to senior positions within their home institutions. By the late 2000s, momentum was ebbing away from the Islamic sector aid program. The Howard government lost office in 2007 and Downer’s Labor successors as foreign minister lacked his enthusiasm for Islamic sector support. In 2011, AIBEP and LAPIS ended and were replaced by the A$500 million (cut to A$369 million in 2014) Education Partnership with Indonesia, which ran until 2016. Less than 10% of this Partnership program was allocated specifically to Islamic schools. The broad range of LAPIS activities was narrowed down initially to a A$47 million Private Islamic School Accreditation program designed to raise the quality of madrasah education, but this was reduced to A$37 million shortly after the program began (Palladium Group 2016).19 This meant that total funding for the period from 2011 to 2016 was just 28% of the A$130 million allocated to LAPIS and the Islamic sector in the AIBEP between 2005 and 2011. AusAID leadership felt that focusing on the technical aspects of madrasah improvement was ‘safer’ than persisting with the cutting-edge aspects of the LAPIS program. It was also 17  The Australia-Indonesia Institute is one of a number of councils set up in DFAT to fund projects to support stronger people to people relations with selected countries. It has an advisory board made of members selected from the wider community by the Minister for Foreign Affairs. 18  Most PETRII and PIES students were trained at the Australian National University but a small number were also enrolled at the University of Melbourne. 19  The Education Partnership was reduced to A$369 m in the 2014–15 budget cuts. The Islamic School Accreditation program was cut from an initial A$47 million, down to A$37 million.

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the case that with the dramatic expansion of Indonesian aid funding under the Rudd government in 2010, AusAID found it easiest to disburse large sums quickly through big programs such as Education Partnership, and turned away from smaller, discreet programs such as LAPIS. Nonetheless, the Accreditation Program was able to assist some 1,500 madrasah directly to meet national standards and, in collaboration with MoRA, local communities and private donors, generated some A$6 million in additional funding to help another 3,000 madrasah nationally gain accreditation. When viewed in its totality, Australia’s Islamic sector programs did succeed in strengthening Indonesia’s Islamic education system, particularly in terms of infrastructure and facilities, but also in teacher competency, improved curricula and more capable and transparent school administration. The ‘golden period’ of Australian Islamic aid in which bold and creative thinking was matched with generous financial support lasted for a decade and arguably its high point spanned just six years. At the time of writing, Australia’s development program continues to include Islamic elements, particularly schooling, but there are no special projects under an Islamic sector aid rubric. As a result, direct contact between the Islamic community and Australian assistance programs is much reduced and the tangible benefits accruing from Islamic sector aid are less in evidence to Muslim groups than was the case with the LAPIS and Accreditation programs. Given that both programs had succeeded in building Australia’s reputation in supporting Islamic schooling, their termination prevented any substantial longerterm benefit for Australia from this initiative. However, large sums of development funding are still used for counter-terrorism activities, although usually under other titles, such as the Australian-Indonesia Partnership for Justice (AIPJ), now in its second phase. The emphasis on AIPJ suggests a renewed focus on traditional, indeed narrow, security objectives such as prison management, counter-terrorism campaigns and justice, rather than the earlier concern for broad-ranging and ‘softer’ diplomatic and aid approaches to resisting radicalisation.

Community Attitudes One final Islamic aspect of Australia’s aid program that deserves mention is that directed towards bringing about attitudinal change, both within the Indonesian Islamic community, and also between the Muslim communities of both countries. The first element of this was AusAID’s belated willingness in the mid-2000s to involve itself in broader, non-educational Islamic agendas. When USAID did not renew the Asia Foundation’s funding for the Islam and Civil Society program in the mid-2000s, AusAID stepped in to provide financial support for advocacy of progressive Islam. One of the most high-profile and controversial parts of Islam and Civil Society was the Liberal Islamic Network (JIL). The young intellectuals and activists in JIL prided themselves on being in the vanguard of Islamic discourse, pushing new ideas about religion and society into the public domain with the objective of bolstering pluralism, tolerance and critical thinking. By 2005, JIL was coming under sustained attack not only from conservative Islamist groups but also

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mainstream organisations for what was seen as its ‘excessively’ liberal ideas. Under pressure from NU and Muhammadiyah, the Australian embassy eventually decided to cut financial support to JIL, even though many officials admired the intellectual freshness and rigour of the Network’s ideas. As one senior diplomat told me: ‘NU and Muhammadiyah will always be the twin pillars of Australia’s relations with the Islamic community. If they are unhappy about something, then we will always respond to that.’ AusAID did, however, finance a new, narrower iteration of the Islam and Civil Society program, which used Islamic NGOs to monitor transparency and budgeting in regional governments, although this too came to an end in 2011. This period of AusAID funding for reformist discourses had an even briefer life than its funding of Islamic education. One experienced aid executive who had worked for the Islam and Civil Society program remarked that both USAID and AusAID had believed that ‘Islam was not a problem to be solved but rather a force for good in Indonesian society that could contribute to positive development outcomes using inclusive Islamic concepts and language.’20 By the late 2000s, however, this optimistic view had given way to security-driven thinking within AusAID, and indeed, most other Western aid agencies. The second, and more enduring, element was the Muslim Exchange Program (MEP). This was devised by the Board of the Australia-Indonesia Institute in early 2002, shortly before the Bali bombing, as a way of improving understanding between Muslims in Australia and Indonesia. The government had been concerned about widespread negative coverage of mosque attacks in Australia, including the attempted burning of a mosque in Brisbane. The Institute initiated the program that brought up to ten young Indonesian Muslims to Australia for a two-week visit each year and also sent a smaller group of Australian Muslims to Indonesia for a similar period. The program has continued to run each year and has now had almost 250 alumni. Like the scholarship programs for Islamic scholars, MEP alumni have helped to explain about Australian society and particularly Islamic issues to Indonesian audiences and they have also formed a valuable network of contacts for Australian diplomacy in Indonesia for more than 15 years. For relatively modest expenditure, such exchange programs have served an important function in the bilateral relationship and provided improved networking among Australian and Indonesian Muslims where previously there was little.

Conclusion In the broad historical arc of Australia-Indonesia relations, Islam has only figured significantly for the past fifteen or so years. This recent prominence is due almost

20 Confidential interview with former senior Asia Foundation staff member in Jakarta, November 2016.

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entirely to the spectre of threat attached to Indonesian Islam since the 2002 Bali bombing and subsequent terrorist attacks. These attacks, which have in total taken the lives of 91 Australians and left dozens of others psychologically and physically scarred, forced the government and the public to seek some understanding of Indonesian Islam and to ponder how Australia might respond. Perhaps not surprisingly, much of the ensuing discussion of Indonesian Islam has been reductionist and determined by the security implications for Australia of different dynamics within the faith. Consequently, the ultimate issue for the public and many officials has been what type of Islam, and which Muslims, pose a threat. There are, indeed, a tiny proportion of Indonesia’s vast Muslim community who pose a manifest threat—perhaps a few thousand out of more than 200 million. Viewing such a large and complex community primarily through a security lens distorts the perceptions we receive and does little justice to the richness and diversity of Indonesian Islam. It is also a skewed view for Australia to have, given it makes so much of its supposed understanding of its neighbour. This is not to say that security issues are not important but rather they should not have driven so much of Australia’s relations with Indonesian Islam over the past decade and a half. Some good things have come, almost collaterally, from our security preoccupations. During the second half of the first decade of the new century, Australia implemented an ambitious and innovative range of Islamic engagement and educational programs in Indonesia, programs that placed us, for a short period, as the foremost international aid provider in that nation’s Islamic community. Given Australia’s rhetoric about its closeness to Indonesia and its Muslim community, that is a position that it should have maintained. The LAPIS and AIBEP programs, and, to a lesser extent, the Islamic School Accreditation Program, established a firm basis for long-term cooperation but their curtailment has attenuated any lasting advantage that Australia may have gained. While it may be the case that bilateral ties with Indonesia do not hinge upon Muslim engagement, extensive interaction with, and assistance to, the Islamic community can add depth and solidity to the relationship. The lessons from Australia’s aid program with Indonesia are clear. For a relatively modest investment, Australia has contributed significantly to the development of Islamic education capacity and quality, and it has created a sizeable pool of alumni from scholarship and exchange programs who bear Australia considerable goodwill and assist in our diplomacy with Indonesia. Even looking back to the limited assistance programs of the 1980s, we see that their participants, both Australians and Indonesians, have gone on to play major roles in the bilateral relations. The regrettable conclusion is that it took a terrorist attack for Australian policy makers to realise the potential of Islamic engagement for deepening relations with Indonesia. Particularly as Islam in Indonesia becomes more conservative and quite possibly less inclusive and less democratic, Australia may rue its failure to build upon its developmental initiatives of the 2000s and its inability to articulate a more nuanced and sophisticated narrative regarding Indonesia’s Muslim community.

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References ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission) (2009) ‘Downer says Radicalism in Indonesia has no Quick Fix’, interview on AM program, ABC Transcripts, 22 July. AFP (Agence France-Presse) (2003) ‘Downer Praises Indonesia’s Cooperation against Terrorism’, 10 March. AIBEP ICR (2011) ‘Australia-Indonesia Basic Education Program: Independent Completion Report’, . Anadolu Agency (2005) ‘Erdogan: The Term “Moderate” Islam is being Spoken in Many Circles after September 11’, 16 April. Australian Bureau of Statistics (2017), ‘Religion in Australia: 2016 C ­ ensus Data ­Summary’, . Australia-Indonesia Centre and Sweeney, EY (2016) Indonesia and Australia: A Research Report on Perceptions of Indonesians and Australians (Melbourne: Australia-Indonesia Centre). Crawford, Paul (2010) ‘Learning Assistance Program for Islamic Schools (LAPIS): Independent Completion Report’, July, . Department of Immigration and Citizenship (2014) ‘Community Information Summary: Indonesia-born’, . Downer, Alexander (2004) ‘Islamic Perspectives on State, Society and ­Governance in Southeast Asia’, Speech to Aus-CSCAP conference, Canberra, ANU, 30 August. Downer, Alexander (2010) ‘Religion’s False Divide’, The Advertiser, 11 October. Fealy, Greg (2014) ‘“Look over Here!”: Indonesian Responses to the Arab Spring’ in Amin Saikal and Amitav Acharya (eds), Democracy and Reform in the ­Middle East and Asia: Social Protest and Authoritarian Rule after the Arab Spring (­London, IB Taurus). Flitton, Daniel (2007) ‘Global Warning’, The Age, 25 August. George, Margaret (1974) Australia and the Indonesian Revolution (Melbourne, Melbourne University Press). Grattan, Michelle (2005) ‘Terror in Bali’, The Age, 3 October. Grattan, Michelle (2006) ‘Howard Praises SBY’s Example’, The Age, 12 September. Harvey, Michael (2006) ‘Muslims, We Need You’, Herald Sun, 12 September. Hefner, Robert (2000) Civil Islam (Princeton, Princeton University Press). ICG (International Crisis Group) (2002) ‘Al-Qaeda in Southeast Asia: the Case of the “Ngruki Network” in Indonesia’, Asia Report, 8 August. ICG (2005) ‘Weakening Indonesia’s Mujahidin Networks’, Asia Report No 103, 13 October. Kingham, Robert (2015) Australian Engagement with Islamic Education in ­Indonesia (Canberra, DFAT Australian Aid). Kitney, Geoff (2005) ‘Rich Put Poverty on Global Agenda’, Financial Review, 31 January.

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Kyodo News International (2002) ‘Indonesian Cleric Warns Australia over ­Howard’s Strike Remarks’, Asian Political News, 16 December. LAPIS (2012) ‘Independent Evaluation of Learning Assistance Program for Islamic Schools: Management Response’, 3 July, . Maiden, Samantha (2005) ‘Democracy a Prime Target, says Howard’, The ­Australian, 3 October. Mulvey, Paul (2005) ‘Howard Urges World to Support Indonesia’, AAP, 30 January. Palladium Group (2016) ‘Education Partnership—Independent Completion Report’, DFAT Australian Aid, . Ratnesar, Romesh (2002) ‘Confessions of an al-Qaeda Terrorist’, Time, 15 September. Rudd, Kevin (2007) ‘Kevin Rudd’s Speech at the Lowy Institute’, Lowy Institute website, 5 July. SBS (2004) ‘Target Australia’, SBS Current Affairs Transcripts, 14 September. Sobocinska, Agnieszka (2016) Australia-Indonesia Attitudes Impact Study— Historical, August (Melbourne: The Australia-Indonesia Centre, Monash University). Stevens, Melissa (2002) ‘Spirit Goes On’, The Western Australian, 13 December. Taylor, Ross (2003) ‘Govt Downplays Terrorism Threat as War gets Underway’, Australian Associated Press, 20 March. Uhlmann, Chris (2006) ‘Democracy in Iraq no longer Howard’s Aim’, ABC ­Transcripts, 19 October. US Department of State (2007) ‘Remarks with Australian Foreign Minister ­Alexander Downer’, State Department Press Releases and Documents, 23 May.

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10 Indonesia, Australia and ASEAN CATHERINE RENSHAW

Indonesia’s relationship with Australia takes place in a broader regional context that is complex and shifting. This context, which includes the increasing power and assertiveness of China, India’s ‘Look East’ policy, and the pervasive but inconstant influence of the US, profoundly affects the nature and strength of bilateral relations between Indonesia and Australia. In several respects, Indonesia and Australia share the same regional vision for Asia: a concert of powers in which the interests of very powerful states are constrained by mutual tolerance, respect, accommodation and compromise. The two countries do not, however, necessarily share the same understanding of how best to realise this vision. Indonesia has sought to position the ten-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), of which it is the largest, and arguably most influential, member, at the centre of regional architecture in the Asia Pacific. Australia is acutely aware of the importance of ASEAN succeeding in its efforts to generate economic growth and political stability for the region. Successive Australian governments have viewed ASEAN (and its many extended groupings) as a key vehicle for promoting and nurturing the principles of cooperative regionalism. As the importance of trade and security relations with Southeast Asian nations has increased, Australia has sought to deepen its engagement with ASEAN, viewing productive engagement with ASEAN as one of the means by which Australian political leaders and diplomats can dispel the view that Australia is ‘in the region but not of it’. At the same time, however, Australia has also pursued the parallel project of forging a broader and more inclusive regional agenda, which accords greater recognition to Australia’s interests and those of its allies. In this regard, Indonesia shares the view of its fellow ASEAN members that ASEAN must remain at the centre of Asia’s regional architecture and that Australia’s proper place is on the periphery of the regional organisation. Understanding the regional context helps to explain several important features of the relationship between Indonesia and Australia. Among these are: the extent to which Indonesia’s adherence to ‘the ASEAN Way’ affects its relationship with Australia; how Indonesia and Australia deal with ‘pariahs’ within the region, such as the military regime that held power in Myanmar until 2010; and the degree to which Indonesia is capable of shaping ASEAN’s response to problems such as China’s claims in the South China Sea, and how this plays out for Australia. This

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chapter explores these themes through the lens of two core questions: (1) Who belongs in Southeast Asia? and (2) How does ASEAN work?

Indonesia, ASEAN and Australia In 1967, as the US was waging its disastrous war in Vietnam and Britain was announcing its intention to withdraw from bases east of the Suez, five small and medium-sized states in Southeast Asia came together to form a new regional body. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations was established by Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand with the political objective of increasing the security of member states. The threats these states perceived were many and various: communist insurgencies within their borders; unsettled ethnic populations; unresolved territorial disputes; a rising China; and an economically voracious Japan. The perception of vulnerability, coupled with the fierce desire to remain independent of great power spheres of influence, were the impetus for the creation of ASEAN. Its founding document, the 1967 Bangkok Declaration, refers to ‘mutual interests and common problems among countries of South-East Asia’ and asserts that: in an increasingly interdependent world, the cherished ideals of peace, freedom, social justice and economic well-being are best attained by fostering good understanding, good neighbourliness and meaningful cooperation among the countries of the region already bound together by ties of history and culture.

Australia, strongly supportive of ASEAN’s objective of preventing domination of the region by any major power, watched these developments with interest. From the perspective of the Australian government, ASEAN was primarily a bulwark against the Communist threat to Southeast Asia and a means of ensuring, in the words of the then Australian Minister for External Affairs, Richard G. Casey, that the Communists would not ‘dominate the northern approaches to Australia and even cut our life-lines with Europe’ (quoted in Millar 1991: 218). Yet at the time of ASEAN’s formation, there was little reason to be optimistic about its prospects for survival (Indorf 1978: 35, 44). ASEAN was not the first attempt at regional institution building in Southeast Asia. The Association of Southeast Asia (ASA) had been launched in 1961, promoted primarily by Malaya and joined by Thailand and the Philippines. Indonesia, under the presidency of Soekarno, refused to join ASA, perceiving it to be little more than a front for the Western-oriented South East Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO). Soekarno favoured a different organisation: Maphilindo, a confederation of the three Malayspeaking nations (Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia). However, Indonesia’s aggression towards Malaysia during the period of Konfrontasi, which only ended with Soekarno’s overthrow in 1966, doomed Maphilindo to failure. It was far from clear in 1967 that ASEAN would succeed in: allaying Malaysian suspicions about

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Indonesia’s declared peaceful intentions; defusing the serious dispute between Malaysia and the Philippines over the latter’s claims on the territory of Sabah; or reassuring the tiny city-state of Singapore, which had been violently ejected from Malaysia in 1965. In fact, for the first nine years of its existence, ASEAN did little (Acharya 2001: 59). Indonesia was heavily invested in the success of ASEAN, viewing it as means of reassuring its neighbours that, as the region’s potential hegemon, it intended to pursue a path of collaboration rather than confrontation. Originally, ASEAN was made possible by the Soeharto New Order regime’s determination to end Konfrontasi and build alliances with regional neighbours through peaceful relations (Leifer 1970). During ASEAN’s early years, when the dispute between Malaysia and the Philippines over Sabah threatened to derail the regional project, Indonesia defused the conflict by urging restraint and bringing the parties together under the auspices of ASEAN. After the fall of Soeharto, Indonesia’s democratic transition and the progressive consolidation of its fledgling democracy became a regional model for states such as Myanmar (Lindsey 2014). In 2007, ASEAN states signed the ASEAN Charter, which confirms ASEAN’s legal personality and establishes a range of new regional institutions, including, notably, a regional human rights commission (Tay 2007). During the slow progress towards the 2007 ASEAN Charter and the creation of a regional human rights commission, Indonesia led ASEAN’s more liberal and progressive states, such as the Philippines and Thailand, in arguing for a normative order that included principles of democracy and human rights (Dosch 2008). Since the mid-1970’s, ASEAN has not only managed to survive, it has grown and flourished, spawning an array of affiliated regional organisations, associations, groupings and forums, of which ASEAN remains at the centre: the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF); the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA); ASEAN +3 (with Japan, South Korea and China); ASEAN +6 (with Japan, South Korea, China, India, Australia and New Zealand); ASEAN-Europe Meeting (ASEM); the East Asia Summit (EAS); and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). ASEAN has expanded its membership to include Brunei (1984), Vietnam (1995), Laos (1997), Myanmar (1997), and Cambodia (1999). In a period that witnessed the end of the Cold War, the Asian Financial Crisis, ‘9/11’ and the ‘War on Terror’, environmental catastrophes and natural disasters, coup d’états and revolutions among its member states, and serious conflict in the South China Sea, ASEAN has maintained regional peace in a politically, religiously and ethnically diverse region, and remained a forum for regional engagement and the formulation of regional policy. Relations between members have taken place on the basis of ‘the ASEAN way’, which dictates a modus operandi of consultation and consensus, and non-interference in the affairs of member states. Many observers laud ASEAN’s attention to norms and its efforts to build a community from the disparate interests of politically and ethnically diverse states, and they attribute to ASEAN the fact there has been regional peace in Southeast Asia since Vietnam’s withdrawal from Cambodia in 1989 (Acharya 2001; Kraft 2001).

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In 1974, Australia and New Zealand attended the ASEAN Summit as the Association’s first Dialogue Partners. Their presence was the result of an altered international environment that included China’s entry into the community of nations and American disengagement from the Vietnamese and Cambodian conflicts. In Australia, 1972 bought to power the new Labor government of Gough Whitlam. Whitlam’s declared intention was to make Australia more independent of British and US foreign policy, to improve the regard in which the country was held by its Asian neighbours, and to take what he called ‘an ideological holiday’ in diplomatic relations. In January 1973, the Whitlam government pursued two different regional policy goals: membership of ASEAN; and the creation of a new Asian and Pacific Forum to enable the countries of the region ‘to come together to discuss common interests in an atmosphere free of crisis, free of pomp, free of drama, and free of excessive expectations of any spectacular results’ (Wicks 1976). Both ideas were to fall into abeyance in the chaos that marked the end of the Whitlam government in 1975. The question of membership in ASEAN, however, and the possibility of creating new and more inclusive regional organisations, continues to hang over the Association. Part of the explanation for this lies in the vast and heterogeneous nature of Asia and the Pacific; and Southeast Asia’s relatively new status as a defined sub-region within the larger region. Nathaniel Pfeffer, writing in the 1954 issue of International Organisation, described Southeast Asia as ‘a place on the globe where certain groups of people, holding little in common, live contiguous to one another (Peiffer 1954: 311–315). In other words, at the time, Southeast Asia did not exist as a coherent region. In the early years of ASEAN’s existence, although ASEAN’s members seemed fairly certain that they did, in fact, occupy a discernible region, they were less clear about what constituted the region (Emmerson 1984; Ortuoste 2011). The Bangkok Declaration of 1967, which established ASEAN, states that membership is open to ‘all States in the Southeast Asian region subscribing to the aims, principles and purposes’ of ASEAN. At the time, curiously, the ‘Southeast Asian region’ was held to include Ceylon, which was invited—perhaps because of its former role as the headquarters of the Southeast Asian Treaty Organisation— to take up membership in the fledgling Association (Acharya 2001: 62). Ceylon refused, partly because of the perception that ASEAN was an alliance of proWestern states. Burma was offered membership and also declined. From Burma’s perspective, ASEAN was an anti-communist organisation, comprised wholly of anti-communist regimes, the heir to the explicitly anti-communist Colombo Plan (1951). China had declared ASEAN to be a tool of US imperialists (Brodine and Selden 1972). Burma had no wish to antagonise her powerful neighbour to the North by joining ASEAN. India, on the other hand, which did express an interest in joining ASEAN, was rebuffed—most particularly by Indonesia. Indonesia saw itself, as indeed its neighbours saw it, as the region’s most powerful actor. Indonesia had no wish to be dwarfed within ASEAN by India (Wah 2008: 3). During the Cold War years, the question of what constituted the region of Southeast Asia was inevitably coloured with ideological overtones. The fall of

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Indo-China in 1975 and Vietnam’s subsequent treaties of friendship and cooperation with Cambodia and Laos created a divide between the continental, communist-aligned countries and the other maritime, ASEAN-focused countries (Way: 7). ASEAN’s proposal for a Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality for Southeast Asia was countered in 1978 by Vietnam’s proposal of its own regional vision. Vietnam called for the declaration of Southeast Asia as a ‘Zone of Peace, Independence and Genuine Neutrality’ (emphasis added). During the Cold War, the only expansion of ASEAN’s membership was the inclusion of Brunei Darussalam in 1984, after the tiny oil-rich sultanate was granted independence from Britain. Nonetheless, in the period from ASEAN’s creation until the end of the Cold War, ASEAN’s view of what constituted the region became progressively clearer. When Sri Lanka submitted an application for membership in 1981, the application was refused on the grounds that Sri Lanka belonged to South Asia, not Southeast Asia. In 1989, Papua New Guinea acceded to the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation as a state that is ‘outside Southeast Asia’, even though Papua New Guinea shares a common border with the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya (since renamed Papua). Periodic murmurings about Australia’s potential membership in ASEAN have been quickly shut down. In 1968, for example, various press reports contained details of Australia’s interest in ASEAN membership. Indonesia’s Foreign Minister, Adam Malik, stated in short order that Australia was simply not part of the region (Straits Times 1968). When Australia again raised the possibility of membership of ASEAN, in the wake of the 1984 Australian Parliamentary report ‘Australian and ASEAN: Challenges and Opportunities’ (Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence 1984), the Malaysian Foreign Minister, Tengku Rithauddeen, responded that this was out of the question: ‘ASEAN was created for and by Southeast Asia’ (Indorf 1987: 96). A decade later, when Malaysian Foreign Minister Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi was asked about the potential of Australian membership of ASEAN, his response was curt: ‘we have to draw the line somewhere’ (Straits Times 1996). After the end of the Cold War, ASEAN became increasingly vocal about the idea that ‘Southeast Asia’ included continental Southeast Asia: Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam (the ‘CLMV states’) and that its ambition was to have these states become ASEAN members and part of ‘one Southeast Asia’ by the time of ASEAN’s 30th birthday (Kraft 2000). The path to ASEAN membership was smoother for some states than others. Vietnam’s accession to ASEAN took place in December 1995 and was, in the words of President Soeharto, ‘an important step towards that day when an ASEAN embracing all the 10 Southeast Asian countries is finally realised’ (ASEAN Secretariat 1996: 8). From this point, ASEAN’s rhetoric of ‘one Southeast Asia’ became more pronounced. Vietnam’s political character—the state remained determinedly communist—did not constitute a barrier to admission. Laos, also a single party communist state, was admitted to ASEAN in 1997. Myanmar was admitted to ASEAN in 1997, despite being under the repressive rule of a military junta, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC). ASEAN faced strong pressure from the US and the European Union to refuse

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Myanmar’s admission until the regime had fulfilled certain conditions towards the restoration of democracy (Wah 1997; Lee 2008). It is likely that this pressure, and the desire of Southeast Asian leaders to be seen to resist it, in fact encouraged ASEAN’s admission of Myanmar (Katanyuu 2006). In his opening keynote address to the ASEAN Annual Ministerial Meeting (AMM) in 1997, welcoming new ASEAN members Myanmar and Laos, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir referred directly to the pressure that had been put on ASEAN to ‘pass judgement, deny membership and apply pressure on a potential candidate so as to force that country to remain poor and therefore unstable.’ He said that ‘ASEAN must resist and reject such attempts at coercion’, which are ‘not a part of the ASEAN way’, and that ‘No one, but no one, should assume that only they know the solutions to all problems. They have failed far too often for us to be convinced that only they know what is right and what is wrong’ (Mohamad 1997). Cambodia’s membership, however, was a different matter. In 1978, with the support of the Soviet Union, the Vietnamese army overran the Khmer Rouge, replacing the genocidal Pol Pot regime with the pro-Vietnamese Kampuchean People’s Revolutionary Party (Jones and Smith 2006: 53). ASEAN responded with uncharacteristic decisiveness, calling an emergency meeting to denounce ‘changes of government bought about by military intervention across internationally recognised borders’ (Leifer 1989: 90–91). It convened a United Nations conference at which it: demanded ‘the withdrawal of all foreign military forces from the country and the restoration of the right of self-determination to its people’ (Jones and Smith 2006: 53); supported the government in exile of Prince Sihanouk; and eventually played a prominent role in the UN-brokered political settlement that ended the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia under the Paris Peace Accords. Although it was, in truth, the great powers, not ASEAN, that resolved the Cambodian crisis (Ruland and Jetschke 2008: 404), the Cambodian conflict ‘was the critical episode over and during which the Association attained and demonstrated the quality of a diplomatic community able to conduct itself, up to a point, as a unitary actor’ (Leifer 2000: 6984–85; see also Jones and Smith 2006). After UN-sponsored elections, Cambodia was governed by Prince Ranarridh and Hun Sen in an uneasy coalition. In July 1997, Hun Sen executed a coup d’état, ousting Prince Ranarridh. Malaysia’s Foreign Minister, Abdullah Badawi, described it as an ‘unfortunate turn of events’ (Duxbury 2013: 197). ASEAN had intended to admit Cambodia in 1997, together with Laos and Myanmar. The Association delayed Cambodia’s admission until 1999, after new elections were held. In its Articles on the admission of new members, the ASEAN Charter states that admission shall be based on the criteria of: (a) location in the recognised geographical region of Southeast Asia; (b) recognition by all ASEAN member states; (c) agreement to be bound and to abide by the Charter; and (d) ability and willingness to carry out the obligations of membership (ASEAN Charter 2007: Chapter III). In recent years, ‘the ability and willingness to carry out the obligations of membership’ has been a barrier to the admission of states such as TimorLeste. Timor-Leste expressed its eagerness to join ASEAN as early as 1975, when

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Fretilin, the party that had successfully fought for East Timor’s independence from Portugal, published a press release stating that ASEAN was ‘a factor of stability and a driving force of regional cooperation. East Timor would greatly benefit from integration into ASEAN after independence’ (Ortuoste 2011: 8). This statement was, however, quickly followed by Indonesia’s invasion of Timor in December 1975. ASEAN’s members largely supported Indonesia’s actions in relation to East Timor and voted against all UN resolutions condemning Indonesia’s behaviour. Initially, Singapore abstained from these votes, cautious not to be seen supporting the crushing of a small, newly independent state (such as itself) by a larger neighbour (Singh 1996). It did, however, eventually vote against UN resolutions condemning Indonesia. In 1999, when East Timor voted overwhelmingly for independence from Indonesia, ASEAN played no part in the UN-led peace-keeping forces that intervened to keep peace during East Timor’s transition to independence from Indonesia.1 This was despite the preference of Indonesian President BJ Habibie for an ASEAN peace-keeping force rather than one led by Western forces. Habibie said that he wanted the forces led ‘by anyone but an Australian’ (Acharya 2001: 180), a sentiment endorsed by Malaysia (Haacke 2003). Timor-Leste submitted its formal application for membership to the ASEAN Secretariat on 4 March 2011, with the support of Indonesia, which was, at that time, Chair of ASEAN. Several states, such as Cambodia and the Philippines, were in favour of Timor-Leste’s application. Singapore, however, was strongly opposed, arguing that Timor-Leste would provide little to the group and would instead be an economic impediment to ASEAN’s creation of an Economic Community. In the face of Singapore’s opposition, consensus could not be achieved. The Statement that emanated from the 26th ASEAN Summit, which took place in Malaysia in April 2015, said curtly that ASEAN was continuing to review the Timorese application to join ASEAN and Indonesia continuing to reiterate its support for TimorLeste. On 30 July 2015, the Indonesian foreign ministry released a statement saying that ‘the Indonesian government would persistently attempt to include the new nation into the ASEAN membership’ (ASEAN Ministerial Meeting, 30 July 2015). ASEAN’s members are largely determined that the ‘ASEAN family’ should remain a small, cohesive group, to which new members are not lightly admitted. With the exception of Indonesia’s championing of Timor-Leste’s admission to ASEAN, Indonesia is in step with its fellow ASEAN members in its determination to restrict membership to a geographically-confined notion of Southeast Asia and to states whose level of economic development contributes to the ASEAN Economic Community, which was established on 31 December 2015. Yet in Asia and the Pacific, shifting interests and alliances, and the waxing and waning of domestic foreign policy imperatives, frequently spawn new ideas for regional institutions, such as South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun’s proposal for a

1  Although several ASEAN countries (notably Thailand and the Philippines) participated in the intervention, they did so as individual states supporting the Australian-led multi-national force.

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Northeast Asia Security Dialogue (1994), and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s proposal for an ‘Asia Pacific Community’ (2008). In 1999, cooperation between ASEAN and three East Asian States, China, South Korea and Japan, was institutionalised as ‘ASEAN + Three’. In 2005, India, Australia and New Zealand joined with ASEAN and the ‘+ Three’ to form the East Asia Summit (EAS). In 2011, the EAS was expanded to include Russia and the US. ASEAN’s intention was to centre itself as the fulcrum balancing a new regional order that included India to the West, China, Japan and South Korea to the East and Australasia to the South. The chaotic circumstances that marred Australia’s initial participation in the East Asia Summit in 2005 are instructive. In 2004, Australia (together with New Zealand) attended the ASEAN Summit held in Vientiane, marking the first time since 1977 that Australia and New Zealand had been permitted to attend. A confluence of events made the time appear auspicious for greater ASEANAustralia engagement: Australia had proven itself a good neighbour by promptly coming to the aid of Indonesia after the December 2004 tsunami; Australian Prime Minister John Howard was the only non-ASEAN head of State to attend the inauguration of Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono; and Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, a supporter of exclusively Asian regionalism, had retired from office. At the Vientiane Summit, with the creation of the East Asia Summit in the offing, ASEAN Heads of State requested that Australia, together with New Zealand, sign the ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC). The TAC binds contracting parties to renounce the use or threat of force and prescribes a process for settling disputes peacefully. India acceded to the TAC in 2003, at the same time as China. New Zealand signed the TAC in July 2005. Australia, however, under the government of Prime Minister John Howard, professed reservations about signing the TAC. Among these reservations were the potential effect the TAC might have on Australia’s obligations as a US ally; the potential for the TAC to constrain the ability of the Australian government to criticise ASEAN members such as Myanmar; and concerns that the TAC’s dispute resolution processes established a two-tier system that favoured ASEAN members. None of these reasons made sense to ASEAN member states. Although Australia eventually, grudgingly, signed the TAC and became a foundation member of the East Asia Summit, the Australian government’s initial refusal to sign the TAC was perceived by many Southeast Asian leaders as slighting the Association. The refusal was a particular embarrassment to Indonesian President Yudhoyono, who very publicly supported an Australian seat at the East Asia Summit during a visit to Canberra in April 2005. According to former ASEAN SecretaryGeneral Rudolf Severino, Australia’s perceived denigration of the TAC affected Southeast Asian views about Australia’s intentions and motives (Severino 2015). For Severino, Australia’s equivocation over signing the TAC confirmed the view of many Southeast Asians that part of the Australian psyche was still European; that Australia was ambivalent about its place in Asia; and that Australia lacked the confidence to say ‘We are in Southeast Asia and we deserve to be in ASEAN’ (Severino 2005).

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The ASEAN Way In July 1966, the Philippine’s President Ferdinand Marcos exhorted Asians to ‘work together as brothers, not at cross-purposes but for each other’s prosperity and happiness’ (Bangkok Post, 31 July 1966). ‘Working together’ meant suspending suspicion and hostility, respecting the internal governance of other states, and subordinating ‘dogmatic theories to practical issues’ (Stockwin 1967). The so-called ‘ASEAN Way’ thus emerged, of consensualism, informality, confidentiality, gradualism, and the ‘front state principle’ (accepting the lead of the member most exposed to specific external developments) (Moller 1988). These principles remain the modus operandi of international relations within the region and are enshrined in the ASEAN Charter, which provides that decision-making in ASEAN shall be based on consultation and consensus (art 20(1)).2 As Narine points out, these principles and the form of diplomacy that bears this character are not unique to Southeast Asia. What is unique is the emphasis placed upon this form of interaction as the preferred method of diplomatic conduct in Southeast Asia (Narine 2002: 32; Funston 2000). The ASEAN way is said to draw on Malay traditional cultural practices of mufakat and musyawarah. Mufakat is consensus, which is reached by the parties adjusting their respective viewpoints or integrating contrasting standpoints into a new conceptual synthesis (Koentjaraningrat 1967: 397; Narine 2002: 31). Musyawarah means that: a leader should not act arbitrarily or impose his will, but rather make gentle suggestions of the path a community should follow, being careful always to consult all other participants fully and to take their views and feelings into consideration before delivering his synthesis conclusions (Jorgenson-Dahl 1982: 166).

In theory, mufakat and musyawarah exclude the possibility of the majority imposing its views on the minorities. They do not, however, exclude the influence of particular personalities or strong leaders, who ‘by virtue of their leadership are able to bring together the contrasting viewpoints or who have enough imagination to arrive at a synthesis integrating the contrasting viewpoints into a new conception’ (Koentjaraningrat 1967: 397). Indonesia has often played this kind of leadership role within ASEAN. For the most part, it has sought to engage with ASEAN on the basis of tut wuri handayani (leading from behind); nglurug tanpa bala (marching forward without an army); and menang tanpa ngasorake (winning without defeating) (Anwar 1994: 222). Yet the Indonesian voice within ASEAN has still often been decisive. Dewi Fortuna Anwar writes that although Indonesian delegates might not dominate ASEAN forums, other members of the Association are well aware that Indonesia’s wishes 2  Art 20(2) states that where consensus cannot be achieved, the ASEAN Summit (the heads of State of all ASEAN member states) may decide how a specific decision can be made.

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are not to be ignored or slighted (Anwar 1994: 223). Anwar quotes a Singaporean official: ‘Singapore has to shout for an hour before anyone will listen. Indonesia only has to remain silent and she will get what she wants’ (Anwar 1994: 223). There are, of course, exceptions to this. In the second year of ASEAN’s existence, the Singaporean Government executed two Indonesian marines accused of sabotage and terrorism during the period of Konfrontasi. President Soeharto’s entreaty to Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew to commute the death sentence in light of the end of the conflict and the co-membership of both states in ASEAN, was ignored. Relations between Indonesia and Singapore remained strained until May 1973, when the two leaders paid a joint visit to the burial site of the marines in Kalibata.3 More recently, as chair of ASEAN in 2011, Indonesia conspicuously failed to mediate a successful resolution to the long-running Thai-Cambodia border dispute.4 From one perspective, musjawarah and mufakat are well-suited to attaining the primary historical goal of ASEAN—maintaining intramural peace among small and disparate states, and thus preserving and nurturing national and regional stability (Emmerson 2008; Ravenhill 1998; Narine 2002). Yet as critics have observed, the ASEAN Way is less adept at resolving problems. Difficult issues are often ignored or are discussed in highly ambiguous terms. ASEAN’s unified policies tend to reflect the lowest common denominator among member states, because states are not forced to compromise to a higher level of cooperation, as they might be under binding, strongly institutionalised structures. The Association therefore arguably achieves far less in terms of outcomes than it otherwise might. In the aftermath of the 2004 ASEAN Summit, the former British governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, observed that: ‘foreign policy isn’t just about being nice to people and getting on. It’s about trying to secure objectives’ (Manila Times 2004). Several examples could be selected to demonstrate both the strengths and the weakness of the ASEAN way. Strengths might include ASEAN’s unified stance against Australia in support of Singapore, during the civil aviation dispute of 1978–79; or ASEAN’s effective and successful response to Cyclone Nargis, which wrought chaos and destruction in Myanmar in 2008. Weaknesses might include ASEAN’s un-coordinated, inadequate response to the Asian Financial

3  In February 2014, there were fresh tensions between Indonesia and Singapore when Indonesia announced its intention to name one of its naval frigates in honour of the two marines. Eventually, despite Indonesia persisting in naming the frigate after the marines, Singapore accepted an apology offered to Singapore by Indonesia’s General Moeldoko. 4 In 1962, the International Court of Justice upheld Cambodian sovereignty over the historic ­temple of Preah Vihear. Sovereignty over the area around the temple, however, remained in dispute, with armed conflict breaking out between Thai and Khmer forces in 2009 and 2011. In 2011, the UN Security Council deferred to ASEAN, and to Indonesia as the chair of ASEAN, to facilitate a resolution between Thailand and Cambodia. Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa described ­Indonesia’s efforts at negotiation as ‘a seminal development in ASEAN’s capacity to deal with a conflict situation’ (McCoy 2011). It was an effort that ultimately floundered in the face of the Thai ­military’s determination not to cede territory.

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­ risis of 1997, which devastated the ‘tiger’ economies of the East and toppled the C Soeharto regime (Emmerson 2008). Two particular issues, however, are particularly illustrative of the limitations of the ASEAN Way: ASEAN’s protracted and largely abortive attempts to encourage liberal reform within the region’s pariah state, Myanmar; and ASEAN’s failure to deal with conflict in the South China Sea.

The ASEAN Way and Myanmar In 2005, Condaleeza Rice described Burma (Myanmar) as an ‘outpost of tyranny’, along with Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Zimbabwe and Belarus. Because of its pariah status, Myanmar was something of an embarrassment to ASEAN. Between 1990 and 1997, ASEAN employed a strategy of ‘constructive engagement’ with Myanmar, meaning a mode of dialogue and persuasion, and the pursuit of strategic and economic interests, with concomitant encouragement of moderate reform along the lines of liberal democracy (Jones 2009: 275). ‘Constructive engagement’ stood in marked contrast to the outright disapprobation, threats and sanctions employed by the US and the European Union (Kraft 2000). Underpinning the policy was ASEAN’s uncertainty about China’s growing power and regional ambitions and the imperative of bringing Myanmar within ASEAN’s sphere of influence, rather than leaving her to China (The Straits Times 26 August 1992). Myanmar’s membership of ASEAN was intended to enhance constructive engagement. The results of constructive engagement were difficult to discern (Haacke 2006). In 2006, ASEAN’s envoy to Myanmar, Syed Hamid, returned from a visit to Myanmar and publicly vented ASEAN’s frustration with Myanmar’s government. In a Wall Street Journal editorial entitled ‘It is Not Possible to Defend Myanmar’, Hamid outlined the conditional nature of ASEAN’s support for Myanmar and the practice of non-interference, explaining that ASEAN had only ‘stood together with Myanmar to endure international criticism because we were assured that a “step-bystep” transition process was in place.’ Hamid explained that ‘the majority of ASEAN members’ now felt that Myanmar’s intransigence was ‘putting into question ASEAN’s credibility and image,’ denying it the ‘maximum benefits’ of cooperation with partners by holding external relations ‘hostage’. Hamid concluded that ‘Myanmar does not want us to stand with them … it is best that it is handled by the UN.’ He said that ASEAN expected Myanmar to ‘be more responsive to the damage done to ASEAN by the Myanmar issue,’ rather than ‘digging in and maintaining that they should not be subjected to pressure from ASEAN or anybody else.’ According to Hamid, ASEAN Foreign Ministers felt that they had ‘been taken for a ride … they are not getting what they want, and they are really losing their patience’ (Hamid 2006). Myanmar had been scheduled to take the 2006–07 chairmanship of ASEAN but ASEAN states faced intense pressure to prevent this from happening, from two quarters. The first was the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Caucus on Myanmar (AIPMC), which lobbied to prevent Myanmar from assuming the chairmanship.

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The second was the European Union and the US, who made clear that they would boycott a Myanmar-chaired ASEAN. Although Laos and Cambodia provided some muted support for Myanmar, all the ASEAN states were largely in agreement that irrevocable damage would be done to the prestige and credibility of the Association if Myanmar took the chair. These views were made clear to Myanmar in the lead-up to and at the 2005 ASEAN Foreign Ministers meeting in Vientiane. The official statement issued at that meeting announced that Myanmar had decided to relinquish its turn to be the Chair of ASEAN, because it wanted to focus its attention on the ongoing national reconciliation and democratisation process in what was a critical year for the country. The statement expressed ASEAN’s ‘sincere appreciation’ to Myanmar’s government ‘for not allowing its national preoccupation to affect ASEAN’s solidarity and cohesiveness’ and assured Myanmar that once ‘it is ready to take its turn to be the ASEAN Chair, it can do so’ (ASEAN, 2005). In Myanmar, preparations and construction for assuming the chairmanship of ASEAN, and hosting the hundreds of ASEAN-related diplomatic meetings that were associated with the chairmanship, were already underway. The response of Myanmar’s government to ASEAN’s announcement was a week-long news blackout of the decision (Ungphakorn 2005). In September 2007, an uprising on the streets of Yangon—known as the Saffron Revolution—was suppressed at gun-point by Myanmar’s government. In the immediate wake of the Saffron Revolution, ASEAN’s Foreign Ministers gathered in New York for the UN General Assembly. There, they had a ‘full and frank discussion on the situation in Myanmar’ (Yeo 2007). Afterwards, the Foreign Ministers issued a joint statement expressing their revulsion over reports that demonstrations in Myanmar were being suppressed by violent force and there had been a number of fatalities. The statement, delivered by Singapore’s Foreign Minister, George Yeo, made it clear that the Ministers were appalled at reports of automatic weapons being used against demonstrators, and demanded that Myanmar’s government immediately desist from the use of violence. The statement strongly urged Myanmar to exercise utmost restraint and seek a political solution, resume its efforts at national reconciliation with all parties concerned, work towards a peaceful transition to democracy, and release all political detainees, including opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi (Yeo 2007). George Yeo discussed ASEAN’s September 2007 statement in an interview with The Straits Times the following month (Yeo 2007). Yeo described the common feeling among ASEAN Foreign Ministers that they had no choice but to express ASEAN’s condemnation of events in Myanmar: ‘If here at the UN we had no common response, how could we face the Secretary-General? Or what do we say to the other countries? We would have lost all credibility’ (Yeo 2007). Yeo explained that when he read out the statement, all the Foreign Ministers were with him ‘to show everyone that they associated themselves with the statement.’ He referred to the gathering as: a family meeting where we had to confront one member who had behaved badly. It was unpleasant but unavoidable. Whatever others may say, it remains for us that Myanmar

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is a member of the ASEAN family and, good or bad, we can’t avoid a certain association, a certain responsibility, a certain connection with the fate of that country. But we have very little leverage over the internal developments there. What we have is moral influence as members of the ASEAN family. (Yeo 2007)

Yeo admitted that the turmoil in Myanmar had tested the group’s cohesion and unity, and that if ASEAN avoided the issue of Myanmar: it stood to lose all credibility and respect … When we talked about ASEAN integration in the future, the international community would ignore us. We would feel ashamed when we looked ourselves in the mirror. So, the ministers were determined to look the challenge in the eyes and respond. We had to hold our heads up high. (Yeo 2007)

The strength of ASEAN’s September 2007 statement took many by surprise (Emmerson 2008). Writing at the time of ASEAN’s denunciation of Myanmar, Emmerson wondered whether the statement might signal an unravelling of the ‘ASEAN Way’, and its foundational commitment to sovereignty, non-interference and consensus as the basis for decision-making (Emmerson 2008). Emmerson’s hope was that: Even if Yeo’s statement had more to do with diplomatic damage control than with any principled commitment to democracy, it raised a question for ASEAN and suggested a hope for the future. The question was whether regionalism in Southeast Asia should remain indifferent to democracy’ (Emmerson 2008)

The 2007 statement remains, however, the only time that ASEAN has officially censured one of its members. In May 2014, when Thailand experienced another coup d’état, ASEAN remained silent, despite the ASEAN Charter’s commitment to strengthening democracy and enhancing good government and the rule of law (ASEAN Charter, art 1(7)), and despite Indonesia’s urging that the situation demanded a response from ASEAN (Radtke 2014). Myanmar’s transition to democracy did not begin (in earnest) until 2012 and the election of democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi to Myanmar’s parliament. ASEAN played a marginal role (if any) in encouraging Myanmar towards democracy. Indonesia, however, by itself, played a significant role in Myanmar’s democratic transition. Because of historical parallels between Myanmar and Indonesia, the path of Indonesia’s democratisation provided Myanmar’s leaders with a plausible precedent for Myanmar’s own democratisation (Lindsey 2014). Myanmar’s leaders used the Indonesian example as evidence about Myanmar’s potential to achieve successful reform, and to convince sceptics that the government’s goals in relation to development and liberalisation were achievable. The historical similarities between the two countries are notable: after the Second World War, both nations freed themselves from colonialism and cleaved to extreme forms of nationalism; both adopted variants of socialism at different stages of their development; in both, the army became a key factor in the fields of politics, administration, and the economy; in both, early efforts to establish parliamentary democracy collapsed in the face of rebellion in outlying ethnic areas, in both, martial law was introduced and re-introduced; and in both, opposition movements coalesced around the

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daughters of the heroes of the post-World War II independence movements (in Indonesia, Megawati Soekarnoputri, daughter of President Soekarno; in Myanmar, Aung San Su Kyi, daughter of General Aung San). Throughout the 1990s, Myanmar’s government-run newspaper, The New Light of Myanmar, praised economic and political developments in Indonesia, and declared that Indonesia and Myanmar were ‘two nations with common identity’ (Irrawaddy 1998). In the 1990s, the 1945 Constitution of Indonesia was published in Burmese, and Myanmar’s generals asked delegates to the National Convention on the drafting of Myanmar’s Constitution to learn from the Indonesian example. Members of the SLORC visited Jakarta on many occasions for briefings about the Indonesian constitutional order. In September 1995, The New Light of Myanmar quoted Michael Dobbs-Higginson (1995): In this new Constitution, the military wish to follow the Indonesian Constitutional model … While there has been little global, public outcry about Indonesia’s system, no doubt Myanmar’s current military government will continue to be bashed for their temerity in thinking that they too should continue to be involved in their country’s ­government ….

The New Light of Myanmar, however, published almost nothing about the tumultuous overthrow of President Soeharto and his resignation in 1998. In short, Indonesia’s historical problems of entrenched militarism, economic underdevelopment, endemic corruption, ethnic and religious tensions, and demands for secession in Aceh and Papua, provided Myanmar with a useful illustration of how Southeast Asian states might evolve beyond their post-colonial authoritarian origins, towards liberal democracy. In contrast, Australia’s approach to influencing Myanmar during the long years of dictatorship was to follow the example set by the US, and to impose a raft of increasingly stringent sanctions on Myanmar and its generals (Renshaw 2017). Neither the efforts of ASEAN, nor the combined efforts of Western powers such as Australia, the US and Britain, equalled the influence that Indonesia was able to exert at the bilateral level. Bilateral relations between states in the region do not, however, always complement efforts to encourage adherence to regional norms. Nowhere is this more patent than in the South China Sea, where China’s bilateral relations with individual ASEAN members undercut the potential for ASEAN to present a coherent unified response to China’s claims in contested maritime areas.

The ASEAN Way and the South China Sea Four of ASEAN’s members—Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam—are involved in serious disputes with China over China’s claims in the South China Sea. Indonesia and China also have overlapping claims over maritime boundaries around the Natuna Islands. China has resisted ASEAN’s attempt to negotiate a

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binding Code of Conduct (COC) for the South China Sea, arguing that disputes should be settled bilaterally with the countries directly concerned. In 2002, China and ASEAN signed a non-binding political statement, the Declaration on Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC). Other non-binding statements followed: the 2003 Declaration of the ASEAN-China Strategic Partnership for Peace and Prosperity; and the 2006 Joint Declaration on Strategic Partnership for Peace and Towards an Enhanced ASEAN-China Strategic Partnership. While senior officials from China and ASEAN laboured over negotiations on the drafting of Guidelines to Implement the DOC—a process that was to last until 2011—China became progressively more assertive in its claims. Tensions increased and prospects for peaceful resolution deteriorated. In 2012, China and the Philippines engaged in a two-month long military stand-off over Chinese intrusions in the Scarborough Shoal. That same year, anti-Chinese protests erupted in the streets of Hanoi over claims that the Chinese navy sabotaged two Vietnamese oil exploration operations in the South China Sea. In 2013, the Philippines initiated proceedings against China in the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA). In July 2016, the Court ruled in favour of the Philippines, holding that China had violated the sovereign rights of the Philippines or had breached its obligations under the Convention on the Law of the Sea. China rejected the PCA decision. Surin Pitsuwan, secretary-general of ASEAN in 2012, referred to the South China Sea dispute as ‘Asia’s Palestine’ (Bland 2012: 1). The 2007 ASEAN Charter was heralded as the beginning of a new era for ASEAN, presaging the strengthening of existing bonds of regional solidarity and the creation of an ASEAN Community that was ‘politically cohesive, economically integrated and socially responsible in order to effectively respond to current and future challenges and opportunities’ (ASEAN Charter 2008: Preamble). In 2007, ASEAN had declared its intention to establish an ASEAN Political-Security Community by 2015. The 2009 ASEAN Blueprint for executing this intention aimed to reinforce ‘ASEAN’s centrality and role as the driving force in charting the evolving regional architecture’ (ASEAN 2009: 1(3)). The Blueprint specifically referred to the crisis in the South China Sea, exhorting ASEAN to work towards the adoption of a regional Code of Conduct in the South China Sea (COC) (ASEAN 2009: (A.2.3(iv)). In the face of China’s actions, and its reluctance to develop a Code of Conduct to manage the conflict, the question for ASEAN was whether it intended to remain a convocation of weak states or a genuine security community (Jones and Smith 2006). As early as 2001, ASEAN scholar Amitav Acharya had warned that ‘a nascent security community may decay into anarchy if it fails to cope with the burdens brought about by increased or new forms of interactions’ (Acharya 2001: 297). In relation to the South China Sea, ASEAN has demonstrated a ‘failure to cope’ in spectacular style. In 2012, under the Chairmanship of Cambodia, ASEAN for the first time in its history failed to issue a Joint Communiqué. This is a key ASEAN document, summarising events that have occurred in Southeast Asia in the course of the previous year and setting a platform for joint activity. It is

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ASEAN’s ‘State of the Union’. The drafting of the communiqué is assigned to a sub-set of ASEAN foreign ministers. In 2012, preparation of the draft was assigned to Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam. As with communiqués in many previous years, the draft referred to issues in the South China Sea. More specifically, the 2012 draft dealt with the stand-off at the Scarborough Shoal between China and the Philippines, and Vietnam’s concerns about China’s award of oil exploration leases within Vietnam’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) to the China National Offshore Oil Company (Thayer 2012). Scholar Carlyle Thayer, who viewed a leaked record of the discussion by ASEAN foreign ministers during the course of the AMM, describes how during the meeting the Philippines Foreign Secretary, Albert del Rosario, raised examples of Chinese expansion and aggression since the 1990s (the occupation of Mischief Reef; intrusions into the Philippines EEZ; and intrusions into Scarborough Shoal) as violations of the principles of the DOC and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) (Thayer 2012). Del Rosario argued that it was ‘important that ASEAN make a collective commitment to uphold the DOC and that this be reflected in the joint communiqué of the AMM’ (Thayer 2012: 3). Vietnam’s Foreign Minister, Pham Binh Minh, agreed: … we have discussed the South China Sea many times [and] agreed that territorial disputes should be solved by the parties [directly] involved. But this issue has a much broader implication for maritime security, peace, stability and security in the region. It is important for ASEAN to show a central role in regional peace and security and promote dialogue and cooperation. ASEAN should speak with one voice, maintain unity … with agreed common points (Thayer 2012, 3).

The foreign ministers of Malaysia and Indonesia also agreed. In the words of Indonesia’s foreign minister, Dr Marty Natalegawa, ‘it is self-evident whenever ASEAN speaks with one voice we are able to maintain our centrality and ensure that we deliver results’ (Thayer 2012, 4). Malaysia’s Foreign Minister Anifah Aman, argued that ‘we must refer to the situation in the South China Sea, particularly any acts that contravene the international law on EEZ and continental shelves. It is totally unacceptable that we can’t have it in the joint communiqué’ (Thayer 2012, 4). Singapore’s foreign minister, K Shanmugan, concurred: ‘it will be damaging to us if we don’t say anything. If ASEAN is not united, our negotiations with China will be more difficult and protracted’ (Thayer 2012). Laos and Brunei indicated their willingness to agree with the consensus. Only one state, Cambodia, objected to the proposed text. Cambodia’s ­Foreign Minister, Hor Namhong, chair of ASEAN, argued that specifying the sites of ­conflict would escalate tension and work against peace, security and stability in the region. Hor Namhong said that the contentious paragraphs should be ­bracketed; or, if no compromise text could be agreed on, there should be no text at all: ‘For the Joint Communiqué, countries should not try to impose their national position, but the common view in the spirit of compromise’ (Thayer 2012). Hor Namong suggested that claimant states deal directly with China themselves. I­ ndonesia, with

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no direct interest at stake, suggested a compromise position: the sites of c­ onflict should not be referred to by name but should be called ‘the disputed areas’. ­Vietnam was incensed, however, by the suggestion that the Vietnamese EEZ was a ‘disputed area’. Cambodia did not change its view that the concerns of the Philippines and ­Vietnam over the Scarborough Shoal and the EEZs were bilateral issues and should not be mentioned in the joint statement (Bower 2012). The original draft of the communiqué was revised 18 times but no compromise was reached (Torode 2012). In the end, according to Jane Perlez, Hor Namhong ‘picked up his papers and stormed out of the room’ (Perlez 2012). In the days that followed, animosity between Cambodia and ASEAN’s other members was played out in the press. There were charges that Cambodia was under the patronage of China and that Cambodia shared the draft version of the joint statement with the ­Chinese, who then vetoed it. Mahubani wrote that: ‘the whole world, including most ASEAN countries, perceived Cambodia’s stance as the result of enormous Chinese pressure’ (Mahubani 2012). Thayer quotes a Chinese scholar close to the Ministry of State: ‘[w]e co-ordinated very well with Cambodia in that case [blocking objectionable wording in the 45th AMM joint communiqué] and … prevented an incident which would have been detrimental to China’ (Thayer 2012: 8). Energetic diplomacy by Indonesia in the weeks following the 2012 AMM eventually produced ‘ASEAN’s 6-Point Principles on the South China Sea’, which urges all parties to exercise restraint and act according to law. The 46th ASEAN Foreign Ministers Meeting in 2013, chaired by Brunei, did manage to produce a joint communiqué. This referred to the South China Sea in vague terms. It noted initiatives and approaches to enhance trust, confidence and dialogue, and suggestions for a hotline for communication, as well as search and rescue of persons and vessels in distress. It also anticipated continued engagement with China in the full and effective implementation of the DOC and consultations between ASEAN and China on the COC. There was no mention of a time frame for the development of the COC. In 2014, Myanmar took up the Chairmanship of ASEAN. There were fears that there might be a repeat of the debacle of 2012, where (it seemed) the influence of an external power had corrupted intra-ASEAN negotiations. Myanmar shares a long border with China and is heavily reliant on China for development funds. Yet if influence was exerted, then Myanmar was impervious to it. The 47th ASEAN Ministerial Meeting adopted a stand-alone statement on the South China Sea, the first in the Association’s history. The Final Statement of the ASEAN Summit also included a statement on the South China Sea, at the very time China was deploying the oil rig Haiyang Shiyou 981 in Vietnam’s EEZ. ASEAN’s response to the July 2016 ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in favour of the Philippines, holding that China had violated its sovereign rights or breached its obligations under the Convention on the Law of the Sea, again evidenced the Association’s lack of solidarity in the face of Chinese power. In the month prior to the decision of the PCA, ASEAN and Chinese Foreign Ministers

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met in Yunnan province, China, to discuss a joint response to the forthcoming decision. In the end, however, ASEAN’s Foreign Ministers issued their own independent joint statement, which noted ‘serious concerns over recent and ongoing developments, which have eroded trust and confidence, increased tensions and which may have the potential to undermine peace, security and stability in the South China Sea’ (ASEAN, June 2016). Less than three hours after the statement was released by the Malaysian Foreign Ministry, after intense lobbying by China, particularly of the ASEAN Chair, Laos, the statement was retracted for urgent amendments. A different joint statement with China was released some days later. The later statement included language urging all parties to exercise self-restraint and resolve territorial and jurisdictional disputes by peaceful means. ‘When the dragon roars’, said one senior regional diplomat, ‘the little countries need to stay away from the fire coming out of its mouth. We have no choice but to acknowledge this political reality’ (Beech 2016). Part of this reality is the strength of China’s bilateral relations with ASEAN members such as Cambodia and increasingly, with Indonesia. China is now Indonesia’s most important bilateral relationship after the US. To China, Indonesia represents a growing consumer market and access to waterways that are vital to Chinese strategic defence, security and energy interests, including the Malacca, Sunda and Lombok Straits. To Indonesia, China is its second largest trading partner and a source of massive infrastructure investment (Nabbs-Keller 2011). Indonesia was unwilling to jeopardise its relations with China by attempting to forge a strong ASEAN response to the PCA ruling. The statement emanating from the July 2016 ASEAN Summit did not mention the PCA ruling at all. On the South China Sea issue, Indonesia has proven itself unable or unwilling to forge a strong and unified ASEAN position.

Conclusion ASEAN leaders are wont to characterise the association as a family. The trope is an accurate descriptor for relations within the regional organisation. For ASEAN, the value of having the family strong and cohesive has always been very clear, because of the region’s difficult place in the global order. ASEAN is a group of small and medium-sized states, flanked by China, Russia and Japan to the North, India to the West and the US to the East. The imperative of maintaining independence has, with very few exceptions, taken precedence over matters of principle in intra-ASEAN relations. Yet as the ongoing crisis in the South China Sea demonstrates, ASEAN states are often willing to forgo presenting a unified position on contentious issues in order to prioritise their own interests and preserve bilateral relations with their powerful neighbours. There are limits to the strength of the ASEAN family feeling. Within ASEAN, neither Indonesia nor any other state projects itself as an authoritative parent-figure. At times, Myanmar has referred to Indonesia as Myanmar’s ‘big brother’ within ASEAN. Yet ASEAN’s other members—most

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particularly Malaysia—would bridle at the suggestion that Indonesia’s authority is superior to that of any other ASEAN state. Indonesia nonetheless does assume a particular and distinctive role within ASEAN. For example, whereas for many years Myanmar was ASEAN’s errant adolescent child (wayward, obstinate, immune to influence or censure, and something of a blight on the reputation of the family), Indonesia has been the opposite: a steadying influence on complex and sometimes fractious relations between siblings, and increasingly, a moral voice on issues of human rights and democracy. In recent times, however, there has been a growing sense of frustration within civil society organisations within Indonesia, particularly evident in the drafting of the ASEAN Charter, that Indonesia may be being held back by the inertia of the ASEAN Way (Sukma 2008). Australia is in truth not even a distant cousin of the ASEAN family. Australia might be a viewed as a friend but its interests are seen as too different to ASEAN’s own, and Australia’s alliance with the US too strong, to warrant ties of ‘kinship’. Australia will continue to value ASEAN as an economic partner and a force for regional stability, and to value the relationship it has with Indonesia partly because of the influence Indonesia carries within ASEAN. Yet both nations are aware of the limitations of ASEAN as the foundation for a new ‘concert of Asia’ (Bell 2005; White 2010).

References Acharya, Amitav (2001) Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia (London, Routledge). Anwar, Dewi Fortuna (1994) Indonesia in ASEAN: Foreign Policy and Regionalism (Singapore, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies). Arnold, Wayne (2006) ‘Malaysia, in Reversal, Condemns Myanmar’, International Herald Tribune, 21 July. ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) (2005) ‘Statement of the ASEAN Foreign Ministers’, Vientiane, 26 July. ASEAN Secretariat (1996) ‘Fifth ASEAN Summit: Meeting of the ASEAN Heads of Government, Bangkok’, 14–15 December 1995 (Jakarta, ASEAN Secretariat). Association of Southeast Asian Nations (2009) ‘ASEAN Political-Security Community Blueprint’. Australian Parliamentary Report (1984) ‘Australian and ASEAN: Challenges and Opportunities’ (Canberra, Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence). Beech, Hannah (2016) ‘What a Retracted Statement Says about China’s Growing Power in the South China Sea’, Time, 15 June. Bland, Ben (2012) ‘Diplomat Warns over Asia’s “Palestine”’, Financial Times, 28 November: 1. Bower, Ernest Z (2012) ‘China Reveals its Hand on ASEAN in Phnom Penh’, Centre for Strategic & International Studies, 20 July, csis.org.

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Brodine, Virginia and Selden, Mark (1972) Open Secret: The Kissinger-Nixon ­Doctrine in Asia (New York, Harper & Row). Chiou, Yi-hung (2010) ‘Unraveling the Logic of ASEAN’s Decision-Making: ­Theoretical Analysis and Case Examination’ 2(3) Asian Politics and Policy 371. Crouch, Harold (1979) ‘Patrimonialism and Military Rule in Indonesia’ 31(4) World Politics 571. Davies, Mathew (2013) ‘ASEAN and Human Rights Norms: Constructivism, Rational Choice, and the Action-identity Gap’ 13(2) International Relations of the Asia-Pacific 207. Dobbs-Higginson, Michael S (1995) ‘Is it Time for a More Objective Assessment’, The New Light of Myanmar, 9–13 September. Dosch, John (2008) ‘ASEAN’s Reluctant Liberal Turn and the Thorny Road to Democracy Promotion’ 21(4) Pacific Review 527. Duxbury, Alison (2011) The Participation of States in International Organisations (New York, Cambridge University Press). Eaton, Sarah and Stubbs, Richard (2006) ‘Is ASEAN Powerful? Neo-realist ­versus Constructivist Approaches to Power in Southeast Asia’ 19(2) The Pacific Review 135. Emmerson, Donald K (1984) ‘“Southeast Asia”: What’s in a Name?’ 15(1) Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 1. Emmerson, Donald K (1986) ‘Continuity and Rationality in Indonesian Foreign Policy: A Reappraisal’ in Karl D Jackson, Sukhumbhand Paribatra, J Soedjati Djiwandono (eds), ASEAN in Regional and Global Context (Berkeley, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California). Emmerson, Donald K (2005) ‘Will the Real ASEAN Please Stand Up? Security, Community, and Democracy in Southeast Asia’. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Centre, Stanford University. Emmerson, Donald K (2008) ‘Hard Choices: Security, Democracy, and Regionalism in Southeast Asia’ (Stanford, The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Centre/Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University). Funston, John (2000) ASEAN and the Principle of Non-Intervention—Practice and Prospects (Singapore, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies). Haacke, Jurgen (2003) ‘ASEAN’s Diplomatic and Security Culture: A C ­ onstructivist Assessment’ 3 International Relations of the Asia Pacific 57. Haacke, Jürgen (2006a) ‘Myanmar and ASEAN’ 46(381) Adelphi Papers 41. Haacke, Jürgen (2006b) ‘Myanmar’s Foreign Policy’ 381(381) Adelphi Papers 58. Hamid, Syed (2006) ‘It Is Not Possible to Defend Myanmar’, Wall Street Journal, 24 July. Harsono, Andreas (1997) ‘Love at First Sight: SLORC meets ABRI’, Inside ­Indonesia, October-December, www.insideindonesia.org. Indorf, Hans H (1987a) ‘ASEAN in Extra-regional Perspective’ 9(2) Contemporary Southeast Asia 86.

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Indorf, Hans (1978b) The Kuala Lumpur Summit (A Second for ASEAN) Southeast Asian Affairs 1978 (Singapore, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies), 35. The Irrawaddy (1997) ‘SLORC’s Big Brother in ASEAN’, January, www2.irra waddy.org. The Irrawaddy (1998) ‘Rangoon to Jakarta: A Tale of Two Juntas’, December, www2.irrawaddy.org. Jones, David M and Smith, MLR (2006) ASEAN and EAST Asian International Relations (Cheltenham, Edward Elgar Publishing). Jones, Lee (2008) ‘ASEAN’s Albatross: ASEAN’s Burma Policy, from Constructive Engagement to Critical Disengagement’ 4(3) Asian Security 271. Jorgensen-Dahl, Arnfinn (1982) Regional Organisation and Order in Southeast Asia (London, Macmillan). Katanyuu, Ruukun (2006) ‘Beyond Non-Interference in ASEAN: The Association’s Role in Myanmar’s National Reconciliation and Democratization’ 46(6) Asian Survey 825. Koentjaraningrat (1967) ‘The Village in Indonesia Today’ in Koentjaraningrat (ed) Villages in Indonesia: Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kraft, Hermann (2000) ‘ASEAN and Intra-ASEAN Relations: Weathering the Storm?’ 13(3) Pacific Review 453. Kraft, Herman Joseph S (2001) ‘Human Rights, ASEAN and Constructivism: Revisiting the “Asian Values” Discourse’ 22(45) Philippine Political Science ­Journal 33. Kuhonta, Erik (2008) ‘Towards Responsible Sovereignty’ in Donald K ­Emmerson (ed), Hard Choices: Security, Democracy, and Regionalism in Southeast Asia (Stanford, The Walter H Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center/Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University). Lee, Khoon Choi (1983) An Ambassador’s Journey (Singapore, Time Books International). Leifer, Michael (1970) ‘Indonesia’s Future Role’ 26(12) World Today 512. Leifer, Michael (1989) ASEAN and the Security of South East Asia (London, Routledge). Leifer, Michael (1996) The ASEAN Regional Forum: Adelphi Paper 302 (Oxford, Oxford University Press for International Institute for Strategic Studies). Leifer, Michael (2000) Singapore’s Foreign Policy: Coping with Vulnerability ­(London, Routledge). Lindsey, Tim (2014) ‘Unlike Any Land You Know About? Myanmar, Reform and the Indonesia Model’ in Melissa Crouch and Tim Lindsey (eds) Law, Society and Transition in Myanmar (Oxford, Hart Publishing). Mahubani, Kishore (2012) ‘Is China Losing the Diplomatic Plot?’, Project ­Syndicate, 26 July, www.project-syndicate.org. Manila Times (2004) ‘A Disappointing Summit’, 9 July, www.manilatimes.net. McCarthy, Stephen (2008) ‘Burma and ASEAN: Estranged Bedfellows’ 48(6) Asian Survey 911.

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Millar, TB (1991) Australia in Peace and War, 2nd edn (Canberra, Australian National University Press). Mohamed, Dato’ Seri Dr Mahathir, (1997) ‘Keynote Address’, 30th ASEAN ­Ministerial Meeting, 24 July. Moller, Kay (1988) ‘Cambodia and Burma: The ASEAN Way Ends Here’ 38(12) Asian Survey 1087. Nabbs-Keller (2011) ‘Growing Convergence, Greater Consequence: The ­Strategic Implications of Closer Indonesia-China Relations’ 7(3) Security Challenges 23–41. Narine, Shaun (2002) Explaining ASEAN: Regionalism in Southeast Asia. ­Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers Inc. New Straits Times (2007) ‘Interview with Singapore Foreign Minister George Yeo’, 2–3 October, www.nst.com.my. Nolutshungu, Sam C (1982) ‘Sceptical Notes on “Constructive Engagement”’ 12(3) Issue: A Journal of Opinion 3. Ortuouste, Maria (2011) ‘Timor Leste in ASEAN: Shaping Region and State in Southeast Asia’ 19(1) Asian journal of Political Science 1. Paribatra, MR Sukhumbhand ‘Burma, ASEAN, Democracy, Dreams and ­Realities’  (1999) The Nation (Bangkok), in NJ Funston, ASEAN and the ­Principle of Non-intervention: Practice and Prospects (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies). Perlez, Jane (2012) ‘Asian Leaders at Regional Meeting Fail to Resolve Disputes over South China Sea’, The New York Times, 12 July. Pfeffer, Nathaniel (1954) ‘Regional Security in Southeast Asia’ 8(3) International Organisation 311. Radtke, Kerstin (2014) ‘Thailand’s Coup—Will ASEAN Answer?’ The Diplomat, 20 May, thediplomat.com. Ravenhill, John (1998) ‘Adjusting to the ASEAN Way: Thirty Years of Australia’s Relations with ASEAN’ 11(2) The Pacific Review 267. Roberts, Christopher (2012) ASEAN Regionaism: Cooperational Values and ­Instuitutionalisation (London, Routledge). Ruland, Jürgen (2001) ‘Burma Ten Years after the Uprising’ in Robert Taylor (ed), Burma: Political Economy Under Military Rule (London, C Hurst & Co). Shanghai Daily (2015) ‘Indonesia to Push Timor Leste Membership in ASEAN at Ministerial Meeting in Malaysia’, 30 July, www.shanghaidaily.com/article/­ article_xinhua.aspx?id=295085. Singapore. Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2007) Press Release, ‘Transcript of Reply by Singapore’s Minister George Yeo to Questions in Parliament’, 22 October. Singh, Belveer (1996) East Timor, Indonesia and the World: Myths and Realities (Kuala Lumpur, ADPR Consult (M)). Steinberg, David I (2007) ‘Legitimacy in Burma/Myanmar’ in Ganesan and Hlaing (eds), Myanmar: State, Society and Ethnicity. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies Publishing. Straits Times (1968) ‘Malik is Cool to Australia Joining the ASEAN’, 12 February.

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Straits Times (1992) ‘ASEAN Prefers Soft Talk to Threats in Dealing with Yangon’, 26 August, www.thestraitstimes.com/global. Straits Times (1996) ‘ASEAN for Southeast Asians Only, Says Badawi’, 5 March. Stockwin, Harvey (1967) ‘Tricky Negotiations’, Far Eastern Economic Review 349. Sukma, Rizal (2008) ‘Political Development: A Democracy Agenda for ASEAN?’ in Donald K Emmerson (ed), Hard Choices: Security, Democracy, and ­Regionalism in Southeast Asia (Stanford: The Walter H Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Centre/Freemen Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University). Tay, Simon SC (2008) ‘Blowing Smoke etc’ in Donald K Emmerson (ed), Hard Choices: Security, Democracy, and Regionalism in Southeast Asia: Stanford: The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Centre/Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University. Tay, Simon SC (2010) ‘The ASEAN Charter: between National Sovereignty and the Region’s Constitutional Moment’ 12 Singapore Yearbook of International Law 151. Taylor, John G, (1990) The Indonesian Occupation of East Timor, 1974–1989: A Chronology (London, Catholic Institute for International Relations). Taylor, Robert (1987) ‘Politics under the Socialist State’ in Taylor, Robert (ed) The tate in Burma (London, C Hurst & Co (Publishers) Ltd). Taylor, Robert (2001), Burma: Political Economy under Military Rule (London, C urst & Co). Thayer, Carlyle A (2012) ‘ASEAN’s Code of Conduct in the South China Sea: A itmus Test for Community Building?’ 10(34) Asia Pacific Journal, http://apjjf. org/2012/10/34/Carlyle-A.-Thayer/3813/article.html. Toler, Deborah (1982) ‘Constructive Engagement: Reactionary Pragmatism at Its Best’ 12(3/4) Issue: A Journal of Opinion 11. Torode, Greg (2012) ‘ASEAN Left on a Knife Edge’ South China Morning Post, 21 July, www.scmp.com. Ungphakorn, Jon (2005) ‘The Next Move to Help Myanmar Change’, New Straits Times 7 October, www.nst.com.my. Wah, Chin Kin (1997) ‘ASEAN: The Long Road to One Southeast Asia’ 5(1) Asian Journal of Political Science 1. Wah Chin Kin (2005) ‘Southeast Asian Affairs 2005’, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies 153. Van der Kroef, Justus M (1962) ‘An Indonesian Ideological Lexicon’ 2 Asian Survey 24. Yeo, George (2007) Statement as ASEAN’s Chair, Singapore’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, 27 September.

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11 On the Periphery: Human Rights, Australia and Indonesia KEN SETIAWAN

The November 2015 visit of Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to Indonesian President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) was, according to the ­ ­ latter, a ‘­ productive and warm’ meeting. Turnbull added that the future of the two ­countries offers ‘the widest opportunities in the history of human development’. These were positive statements, particularly after bilateral relations had been significantly troubled when earlier that year Indonesia resumed the death penalty. Capital punishment and other human rights issues were not discussed during the visit. Both Turnbull and Jokowi commented that what happened in the past was to be left behind (ABC 2015). Not much seems to have changed from the situation more than 20 years ago, when human rights were described as ‘the point of greatest sensitivity and difficulty in the relationship between Indonesia and Australia’ (Joint Standing ­Committee (1993:81)). Both countries have cited cultural differences to explain the contentious position of human rights. However, emphasising supposed differences overlooks the fact that both Australia and Indonesia share similar objectives, including security and trade. This chapter will argue that other objectives of foreign policy such as security, sovereignty and the imperative to maintain cordial ties between Australia and Indonesia, have overridden the protection of individuals or minorities. Even when Australia did extend protection through its role in the international intervention in East Timor and support for the nation’s self-determination, its actions largely reflected the congruence of Timorese independence with Australia’s foreign ­policy objectives rather than a concern for human rights. This pattern reflects the fact that despite the hegemony of human rights in international law and politics, human rights concerns and foreign policy objectives are often not entirely compatible. Michael Ignatieff (2001: 23) has pointed out there is a conflict between the protection of individual rights and maintaining stability, for example. By looking back on turning points in Indonesian political history and discussing Australian government responses, I use a historical perspective and discursive

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approach in exploring how the two countries have positioned themselves towards questions of human rights. The chapter focuses primarily on human rights cases that have occurred in Indonesia, as the Indonesian government has generally made little response to human rights concerns in Australia, with the partial exception of the issue of asylum seekers (discussed in detail in chapter eight). The ­chapter covers Indonesia’s independence and the presidency of Soekarno, the rise and fall of Soeharto’s New Order, the independence of East Timor, and, finally, the reform (reformasi) period that began in 1998. The cases discussed are by no means exhaustive but illustrate the respective countries’ approach to human rights, particularly as part of the bilateral relationship. In exploring the Australian perspective, emphasis is placed on the reasons that have informed Australia’s positioning. The Indonesian perspective is discussed by considering how various presidents have conceptualised human rights. This focus reflects the authority the president continues to possess even after the fall of authoritarianism—should he or she choose to exercise it—to shape government policy formation and by extension human rights practices.1

Setting the Stage: Human Rights in the Early Years of the Bilateral Relationship When President Soekarno proclaimed Indonesia’s independence in 1945, Australia faced a dilemma. On the one hand, the government led by Prime Minister Ben Chifley intended to remain loyal to its ally, the Netherlands, which was expected to reclaim control over its colonial possession. On the other hand, Chifley’s government understood the aspirations of Indonesian nationalists, and gradually—as this section will show—had to consider its relationship with a new neighbour. Meanwhile, Indonesia was focused on securing independence and sought international support for its claims. Human rights were not on the agenda of either Australia or Indonesia. Their absence is explained in part by the relative novelty at the time of human rights as a concept in international relations—the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would only be adopted three years later, in 1948. More importantly, Australia and Indonesia were each occupied with more pressing issues. Under Chifley, Australia had embarked on a neutral approach to Indonesia’s claim for self-determination but it gradually shifted its position as it became clear the Netherlands would not be able to reclaim the territory and Indonesian sovereignty was thus inevitable. On 9 July 1947, Australia recognised the de facto authority of the Republic in the areas that the independence movement controlled. Following the resumption of hostilities by the Dutch in late July, Australia, along with India, somewhat reluctantly brought the matter to the United Nations Security Council. After renewed military action by the Dutch in 1948, Australia 1 

See, eg, Berger (2015: 218).

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demanded strong punitive action against the Netherlands, and immediate transfer of sovereignty to the Indonesian Republic. When the US also shifted its position to support the Indonesian Republic, the Dutch conceded and transferred sovereignty on 27 December 1949. Chifley explained Australia’s changed perspective on Indonesia’s sovereignty in ideological terms. Speaking in Parliament in September 1947, Chifley said, ‘the policy of this country is that every other country should be free to choose its own form of Government’.2 A few years later, after the Labor Party had been voted out of office, Chifley would be even more explicit on the matter: the Labor government realised that 80 million Indonesians could not consent to be ­governed by 10 million Europeans whose sole intent in Indonesia was to extract from that country as much wealth as they could get and to give in return as little as possible.3

Chifley thus suggested adherence to human rights concepts such as self-­ determination and freedom from oppression in rationalising the government’s position on Indonesia. Inevitably, this resonated with the claims put forward by Indonesian nationalists. In claiming self-determination, rejecting colonialism and advocating the liberation of the indigenous population, President Soekarno referred to many human rights norms. His view of human rights was, however, one of ambivalence, from both ideological and pragmatic perspectives. Soekarno’s ideological ambivalence towards human rights can be illustrated by his promulgation of the Indonesian state philosophy, the Pancasila (Five Principles). While Pancasila can be interpreted as consistent with human rights principles such as religious freedom, human dignity, self-determination, representative government and social justice, an explicit reference to individual rights is absent. Soekarno was not so inclined to recognise political rights as he was critical of universalism and argued that Indonesia should have its own conceptualisation of rights. This ‘Indonesian’ concept of rights would not be absolute or confrontational in nature but rather would be focused on negotiation and finding mutual consensus through deliberation—also an element of the Pancasila. Soekarno considered the state and people to be one, based on a principle of ‘family’. As such, there was no need, in his view, for guarantees of individual rights. Furthermore, Soekarno had pragmatic reasons to be critical of individual rights. He believed that a new state should be strong, and from this perspective individual rights could represent an obstacle (Lubis 1993: 56–60). Pragmatism was also evident in the way Australia positioned itself towards Indonesia, especially once it became clear that the Dutch would not be able to sustain themselves as a colonial power in Asia. Australian policy towards ­Indonesia was increasingly based on two interrelated considerations: national security and anti-communism. In 1948, Australian support for the Republic—along with Western support generally—increased when the Indonesian nationalist leadership reacted decisively after a leftist faction of the military seized control over the city 2 

Chifley, as quoted in Adil (1973: 75).

3 ibid.

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Madiun. Soekarno and Hatta, the Vice President, declared the so-called Madiun Affair an illegal uprising, calling upon the people to ‘destroy those rebels’. The fighting that ensued left more than 8,000 dead in Madiun alone, while principal communist leaders were captured and executed.4 This gave the Republic not only an anti-colonial profile but also an anti-communist one, which generated much international support. For the Australian government, it influenced the belief that a unified Indonesia led by nationalists could act as a barrier to mainland Asia, where the rise of communism was perceived as a threat to Australian security. Ultimately, these pragmatic, rather than ideological, considerations led Australia to support Indonesia’s claims for sovereignty. A few years later, the Australian emphasis on pragmatism and, in particular, national security, together with Indonesia’s strong nationalistic views, re-emerged in the bilateral relationship in the context of the so-called West New Guinea ­dispute.5 In 1949, the territory that was then known as Netherlands New Guinea (now referred to as Papua) did not become part of the Indonesian Republic, as had all other parts of the former Dutch colony.6 Instead, it had been agreed that its status would be determined between Indonesia and the Netherlands in the following year. These negotiations stagnated as it became apparent that the ­Netherlands had no intention of relinquishing the territory to Indonesia. Instead, the Dutch started to prepare the territory for full independence and encouraged the development of its own national identity. In 1961, Papuan nationalists declared independence and raised their flag, the Morning Star. Richard Chauvel has pointed out the dual challenge that the Dutch program of decolonisation and Papuan independence posed for Indonesia: both in Papua’s liberation from Dutch colonialism as well as the Papuan national claim to the territory.7 Soekarno and Hatta differed strongly in opinion on whether the ­Netherlands New Guinea should be part of Indonesia. Soekarno won this argument and it was agreed that the Indonesian nation-state would stretch from Sabang, off the ­northern tip of Sumatra, to Merauke, in the eastern part of Papua. This subsequently became a key slogan in Soekarno’s speeches and a central part of ­Indonesian foreign policy, in which ongoing Dutch presence in the region was presented as a manifestation of colonialism and unequal power relations between old empires and newly emerged nations. At the opening of the Bandung Conference in 1955, where many newly independent Asian and African states met, he stated: colonialism is not yet dead. How can we say it is dead, so long as vast areas of Asia and Africa are unfree. And, I beg of you: do not think of colonialism only in the classic form

4 

The violence also affected other regions. See Vickers (2013: 114). Papua is the western half of the island New Guinea, which is under Indonesia’s jurisdiction and shares an international border with Papua New Guinea. It has been known by various names including West New Guinea, West Irian and Irian Jaya. In 2000, as part of special autonomy, the province was renamed Papua, further separating the territory into two provinces: Papua and West Papua. West Papua is also used by supporters of independence to refer to the two provinces. 6 Within the Indonesian political elite there was significant debate whether West New Guinea ­constituted a part of the Indonesian nation state. See Vickers (2013: 143). 7  See Chauvel (2006). See also ch 14. 5 

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which we of Indonesia, and our brothers in different parts of Asia and Africa, knew. Colonialism has also its modern dress […]. It does not give up its loot easily.8

For Soekarno West New Guinea was thus in an issue of self-determination that represented the ongoing struggle against colonialism: the national revolution would not be complete until West New Guinea had become part of Indonesia. At the same time, the identification of an external enemy, in this case Dutch imperialism, also served as a response to domestic political concerns where sections of the population, especially outside Java, had been dissatisfied with the R ­ epublic. ­Indonesia’s claims were thus also an attempt to consolidate national unity (­Chauvel 2006; Vickers 2013: 143). While Australia had eventually opposed Dutch colonialism in Indonesia, it supported the Netherlands in its claim that West New Guinea should not be part of the Indonesian Republic. Australia agreed with the Dutch argument that the territory was culturally, geographically and ethnically distinct from other parts of Indonesia. As Australia did not recognise Indonesia’s claim, it considered ­Indonesian policy towards West New Guinea to be external aggression. In that sense, it appeared consistent with Australia’s earlier criticism of colonialism. Other factors played a crucial role in Australia’s position, however. First, there had been a change in government. In 1949, Robert Menzies had been elected Prime M ­ inister. While in opposition, Menzies had had been critical of Chifley’s support for the Republic. Menzies held pro-Dutch views and considered Soekarno to have collaborated with the Japanese. Second, under Menzies, Australia became increasingly worried about its security. At the root of this was Soekarno’s increasing involvement with the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI), and the risk of Indonesia falling to communism. If that happened and West New Guinea was incorporated with Indonesia, Australia would share a common land border with Indonesia, as, at the time, Australia administered the Territory of Papua and New Guinea (which would gain independence in 1975 as Papua New Guinea). From an Australian perspective, the prospect of a common land border with a possible communist state was undesirable. Although the Menzies government was pro-Dutch it also was reliant on the US. American considerations would eventually prove crucial and trigger a shift in ­Australia’s positioning on the West New Guinea issue. When, in the early 1960s, the US started advocating a solution for West New Guinea to Indonesia’s advantage, this had little to do with a rejection of colonialism. Rather, Soekarno’s increasing anti-western rhetoric had started to concern the US and it hoped that by settling the dispute over West New Guinea in Indonesia’s favour, further alienation of Jakarta would be prevented and the stability of Indonesia could be secured. Australia followed suit, accepting the argument that its friendship with Jakarta was paramount. It was also of concern that an independent Papuan state would be ‘small, unviable, indefensible and the focus of Indonesian antagonism’ (Chauvel 2006) and thus would not serve Australian interests. 8 

Soekarno, ‘Speech at the Opening of the Bandung Conference’, 18 April 1955.

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The appeasement of Indonesia would have severe consequences for Papuans. Records of torture of Papuans by the Indonesian security forces were documented in the early 1960s (Hernawan 2016: 81), before Indonesia formally took control. Papuans were bystanders in the debates on the future of their territory and when in 1969 they were presented with the so-called Act of Free Choice, a plebiscite to determine incorporation into Indonesia or independence, Papuan elders were coerced by the Indonesian military to vote for integration. In so doing, Indonesia did not abide by the 1962 New York agreement between the Netherlands and Indonesia, which stipulated that all men and women resident in Papua (with the exception of foreign nationals) were eligible to vote in the referendum. Despite protests from Papuans and condemnation of the vote in international media, the international community did not object and sanctioned the result, reluctant to create problems with a new, anti-communist, regime in Jakarta. The ways in which Indonesia and Australia positioned themselves show that human rights, despite their international ascendance, were simply not a priority in the early years of the bilateral relationship. Indonesia’s foreign policy was dominated by its quest for independence and to secure its territory. This left little room for individual rights, which Soekarno saw as potentially damaging for national objectives. Criticisms of Indonesian actions were construed as ­neo-colonialism and an attack on Indonesian sovereignty. Meanwhile, Australia’s positioning towards Indonesia was determined by concerns for a cordial relationship with Jakarta and national security, especially as international tensions heightened in the context of the Cold War. As the following sections will show, these approaches set the stage for how human rights would be approached in the bilateral relationship in the decades that followed.

National Interests and Sovereignty: Human Rights under Indonesia’s New Order The ascendance to power of Indonesia’s second president, Soeharto, cannot be separated from one of the worst cases of mass violence since the Second World War, for which justice remains elusive. Soeharto rose to power following the events of 30 September 1965, when six army generals were killed by troops who identified themselves as Soekarno loyalists. Soeharto, then commander of the Army Strategic Reserve Command (Kostrad), swiftly took control over the army. He used the opportunity to delegitimise Soekarno and accused the Communist Party of masterminding the ‘30th September Movement’. This formed the basis for the killing of PKI members and their alleged sympathisers by the army and civilians backed by the military. While the exact number of people killed remains uncertain, most scholars cite figures in the range of 500,000 deaths, while

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approximately 600,000–750,000 people were detained for years without trial (McGregor 2013: 138). The bloodbath in Indonesia sparked little attention in the West. In the context of the Cold War, Western governments welcomed the annihilation of the PKI, the largest communist party in the world after those in the Soviet Union and China. In 1966, Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt showed little concern for the brutal loss of human life: ‘with 500,000 to a million communist sympathisers knocked off, I think it’s safe to assume a reorientation has taken place’ (The New York Times 1966). The opinion that Soeharto’s actions were to the benefit of Indonesia and the region is one that has largely been accepted by Australian governments since then. Prime Minister John Howard acknowledged, for example, that Soeharto was a man with ‘faults, [but] someone who had done the right thing by his country and the region’ (Howard 2013: 396). His predecessor Paul Keating, who developed a close relationship with Soeharto, wrote that had: Suharto’s government not displaced the Sukarno government and the massive PKI communist party, the post-war history of Australia would have been completely different. A communist-dominated Indonesia would have destabilised Australia and all of Southeast Asia. (Sydney Morning Herald 2008)

These approaches illustrate that fear of communism and concerns for national security meant Australia turned a blind eye to a genocide that took place on its doorstep. The new regime under Soeharto called itself the ‘New Order’, emphasising a break with the past and a reorientation of Indonesia in comparison to the old order represented by Soekarno. Under Soeharto, Indonesia welcomed foreign investment and aid. His government managed to quickly bring down inflation and restored economic growth. In foreign policy, Soeharto pursued an a­ nti-communist and pro-Western stance. In 1966, Indonesia rejoined the United Nations (­reversing Soekarno’s withdrawal) and the following year it became a founding member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). At the same time, Soeharto adapted Soekarno’s forms of government to establish his own authority. He retained Pancasila, making it into a tool for government control: in 1985, it became the sole set of principles for any organisation, including political and religious associations. Soeharto also shared Soekarno’s ambivalence towards human rights. On the one hand, the New Order retained the 1945 Constitution, which included a limited number of ‘citizens’ rights’ and was based on the rule of law (rechtsstaat), a pillar for human rights protection. However, the New Order also saw the revival of the concept of an ‘integralistic’ state.9 Coined by the nationalist leader Soepomo in period leading to independence, the notion of an integralistic state represented a unitary nation with a benevolent leader, where no distinction was made between the state and individuals. From this perspective, the 9 

For a detailed discussion, see Lubis (1993: 91–96).

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relation between the state and individuals mirrored that of a family, leaving little room for individual rights. Many New Order officials argued that as this notion was never explicitly rejected by Indonesia’s founding fathers, Indonesia was still bound by it. The New Order regime was ambivalent towards universal human rights. In the 1990s, Indonesia started paying more attention to its international human rights image and growing domestic criticism. In 1993, the government established a National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM). At the same time, it was argued that human rights were in contradiction with Indonesian culture, which gave precedence to duties rather than rights. This emphasis on duties in relation to rights also featured prominently in the 1990s Asian Values debate, of which Soeharto was a strong supporter. The Asian Values discourse, which can also be read as a criticism of international relations and western hegemony, contended that universal norms were inappropriate in the Asian context, which emphasised communality and harmony. The invocation of cultural particularity also gave the New Order a powerful argument to deflect human rights criticism by arguing that other (Western) countries simply did not understand Indonesia. When Indonesian writer Goenawan Mohamad reflected on human rights in the Australia-Indonesia relationship in 1991, he argued that for both Soekarno and Soeharto ‘the West is just the “other”, and you will be guilty of ethnocentrism if you judge ­Indonesia by your own standards’ (Mohamad 1991: 143). The New Order’s ambivalence towards human rights was also informed by the perception that individual rights were an obstacle to economic development, one of the main pillars of the regime. As such, human rights should be deferred until sufficient economic development had been achieved. Thus, under both Soekarno and Soeharto human rights had to make way for other, more important, national goals—independence and economic growth, respectively. Soeharto’s New Order was not only critical of human rights, it was also notorious for their systematic violation. However, this was of little concern of Western governments, including Australia, which considered Soeharto’s rise to power an opportunity to normalise its relations with Jakarta. John Howard wrote in his autobiography that the ‘bipartisan constant was that nothing was to get in the way of smooth relations between Australia and Indonesia […] pragmatically, it was in Australia’s interests to have a cooperative partnership with this huge nation’ (Howard 2013: 396). Human rights were relegated to the periphery. This position became more problematic, however, after Indonesia annexed East Timor in 1975. Indonesian interest in East Timor can be traced back to the period of decolonisation. While preparing for independence, a majority of Indonesian nationalist leaders agreed that East Timor (which at the time was a Portuguese rather than a Dutch colony), together with Malaya and North Borneo, should be incorporated in the new state. Nevertheless, until the 1960s the principal focus of Indonesian territorial ambitions was Papua. As the question of authority over Papua was decided in Indonesia’s favour, attention shifted to East Timor (Kingsbury 2009: 39).

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By 1969, Indonesian army generals increasingly considered East Timor as a potential security threat as leftist political movements took hold in the territory. These concerns became even more pressing after the 1974 Carnation Revolution in ­Portugal, which saw the restoration of democracy and the decolonisation of its overseas territories. By mid-1974, Indonesian military leaders started to design plans for the invasion of East Timor under the name Operation Komodo. These plans were supported by the US, the UK and Australia, as all feared the emergence of a socialist state. In November 1975, the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (Fretilin) declared independence from Portugal, giving Indonesia the excuse to invade the territory on 7 December. In July 1976, it declared East Timor its 27th province. The occupation of East Timor was characterised by violence and brutality, a ‘living hell’ (Kingsbury 2009: 50) for the majority who did not comply with Indonesian rule. The Timor-Leste Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) has estimated, for example, that at least 100,000 civilians died under Indonesian occupation (CAVR 2013: 14). Australia shared Indonesia’s desire to prevent a socialist East Timor, and the Whitlam government had conveyed to Soeharto that it believed East Timor should become part of Indonesia (Gorjao 2001: 101–21). This position should both be read in the context of the Cold War as well as in the context of Australian foreign policy. In 1963, shortly after Australia’s policy reversal on Papua, the Australian Cabinet was of the opinion that Portuguese Timor was ‘an anachronism in this part of the world’ that was ‘not capable of political independence’ and as such there was ‘no practical alternative to eventual Indonesian sovereignty’.10 The rationale behind this was that it was not in Australia’s interest to support the establishment of small states (Kingsbury 2009: 48). This was reflected in the policy decisions of both the Whitlam and Fraser governments, and it was under the latter in January 1978 that Australia de facto recognised East Timor as part of Indonesia, increasing this to de jure status the following year. At the same time, officially Australia remained ‘critical of the means by which integration was brought about’ (Fraser and Simons 2010: 452), an approach that received bipartisan support. Under Prime Minister Bob Hawke, Australia voiced criticism over the Indonesian invasion but stressed the importance of the relationship with Jakarta, which brought economic advantages. Under Hawke, Indonesia and Australia signed the Timor Gap treaty, allowing for exploitation of petroleum resources in the Timor Sea. As Howard later wrote, for reasons of national security and economic advantages, East Timor was ‘never going to become a makeor-break issue in our relations with Jakarta’ (Howard 2013: 394–95). Australian public opinion, however, was more critical of Indonesia. Historically, there have been strong connections between Australia and East Timor, forged in the Second World War, as well as through the Catholic church. Moreover, when five Australia-based television journalists were killed in the East Timorese town

10 

Barwick and Cabinet minutes quoted in Richard Chauvel (2006).

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of Balibo in 1975, their fate and the role of the Indonesian army11 in their m ­ urder increasingly shaped Australian public opinion that Indonesia was an undemocratic and militaristic state. The concerns of the Australian public meant that successive governments could not ignore East Timor, and particularly the behaviour of the Indonesian military, in their relationship with Jakarta. The Soeharto administration was uncomfortable with criticism of its human rights practices, perceiving them as an attack on its national sovereignty. In 1993, the Indonesian ­ambassador cautioned Australia over the ‘aggressive manner’ (Joint Standing Committee (1993:101)) in which it raised human rights concerns and warned it could negatively affect the trade relationship. East Timor was a particularly difficult point in the bilateral relationship and for Indonesia internationally. Foreign Minister Ali Alatas once famously described the territory as a ‘pebble in the shoe’, which over time became ‘a veritable boulder, dragging down Indonesia’s international reputation to one of its lowest points’ (The New York Times 2006). The 1998 fall of the New Order regime opened a new avenue for East Timorese demands for independence. Soeharto’s successor BJ Habibie wanted to settle the question of East Timor, reflecting the unease of some members of his government who regarded East Timor as an ‘international public relations disaster’ (Kingsbury 2009: 66). Habibie’s goal was for East Timor to be recognised as a legitimate part of Indonesia, while at the same time reducing Indonesia’s financial commitment to the territory, a specific concern in the context of economic crisis. From late 1998, deliberations began between Indonesia and Portugal, under the auspices of the United Nations, about East Timor’s future, with Habibie preferring autonomy within the Indonesian republic. By early 1999, Habibie had released East Timorese leader Xanana Gusmao from prison (to house arrest) in Jakarta and stated that if the East Timorese would reject autonomy in favour of independence, this would be granted.12 As deliberations between Indonesia and Portugal continued, John Howard sent a letter to Habibie in which he suggested that the East Timorese should be given the chance to vote on independence within a decade, while at the same time preferring East Timor’s incorporation into Indonesia. This represented a shift in ­Australian policy on East Timor, which, after decades of Australian endorsement of the Indonesian occupation, now supported self-determination in the future. This change, according to Damien Kingsbury, was in Australia’s interest: it did not want to be seen to support ongoing occupation while Indonesia seemed to be moving towards some form of self-determination for East Timor (Kingsbury 2009: 68). In the letter, references were made to former French colonies in the Pacific and this upset Habibie, as he interpreted it as an implication that Indonesia was a colonial power. In response, he made the decision to grant East Timor an independence referendum, which took observers by surprise and many feared a quick ballot would be disastrous. 11  A 2007 coronial inquest confirmed this view, but the Australian government has never formally accepted its findings. 12  For a discussion on the various positions on East Timor of various Indonesian senior government officials, see Kingsbury (2009: 67).

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Habibie’s decision was politically risky. It was feared an independent East Timor might support separatist movements elsewhere in Indonesia, including Papua. The Indonesian military particularly opposed Habibie’s choice, which set the stage for pro-Indonesian militias to unleash a violent campaign in East Timor. Despite the clear complicity of Indonesian security apparatus in the pre-referendum violence, responsibility for security during the ballot was handed to Indonesia. This foreshadowed the violent attacks following the 30 August referendum, in which 78.5% of registered voters chose independence. In two weeks, pro-Indonesian militias and the military killed at least 1,400 people and destroyed more than 70% of East Timor’s built environment, while around 250,000 people (a third of the population) were displaced (Kingsbury 2009: 73). There was international outrage at the events unfolding in East Timor, with calls for intervention. The US placed considerable pressure on Indonesia by announcing that military ties between the two countries would be suspended. On 11 September, President Bill Clinton added that ‘future economic assistance from the international community will depend on how Indonesia handles the situation’ (ABC 2008), alluding to private communication from the US to ­Indonesia indicating that the World Bank could withhold funding (Kingsbury 2009: 74). Considering Indonesia’s dependence on aid to recover from the financial crisis, it had little choice but to accept international intervention, which it did the following day. The International Force in East Timor (INTERFET) was led by Australia. In 2002, East Timor became formally independent and was renamed Timor-Leste. John ­Howard reflected on Australia’s role as ‘one of the more noble things that Australia has done in many years […] reversing a quarter of a century of Australian weakness towards Jakarta in relation to East Timor’ (Howard 2013: 394, 418). While Howard emphasised noble intents, the reversal of Australian policy on East Timor and willingness to lead international intervention served Australia’s interests. According to Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, the question of East Timor ‘hijacked our relationship with our largest neighbour, Indonesia, and a good relationship between Australia and Indonesia is kind of handy in Australian diplomacy’ (ABC 2008). An independent East Timor meant a persistent obstacle in the government-to-government relationship was gone. In addition, as it became clear that the East Timorese call for independence would not subside and had wide international support, the Australian government had its future relations with a government in Dili to consider—mirroring considerations Australia was faced with after the Second World War, as Indonesia sought independence from the Netherlands. Again, Australia was keen to be seen as a friend of a newly independent nation, in this case East Timor, which it hoped would translate into economic gains. Security considerations played a role too. As the East Timor crisis unfolded and people were forced to flee, Australia was faced with the possibility of an influx of refugees, which it wanted to avoid. Support for East Timor’s independence had more to do with major aspects of Australia’s national interests rather than benevolence or adherence to human rights principles.

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A Place for Human Rights? Challenges after East Timor After the fall of the New Order in 1998, Indonesia witnessed many political and legal reforms, including in the area of human rights. Indonesia rapidly ratified major international human rights treaties and these norms became firmly entrenched in national laws. With regard to the place of human rights in I­ ndonesian politics Hassan Wirajuda, then Foreign Minister, commented in 2001 that: for a long time, the Indonesian public did not see human rights in the same way that the international public did. This discrepancy in perception became a constraint in the development of our foreign relations. We will do our best to remove that perception gap (The Independent 2001).

Indonesia’s acceptance of the international human rights regime together with the independence of East Timor potentially meant that human rights would come to trouble the bilateral relationship less often, or at least that concerns could be more easily discussed. However, the independence of East Timor also was a challenge to Australia-Indonesia relations. While the idea that Australia played a benevolent role in the independence of East Timor may have been politically advantageous for the Howard government, it left Indonesia with a bitter aftertaste and deep suspicion of Australian intentions. John Howard commented that when in 2001 President Abdurrahman Wahid visited Australia it was obvious that Indonesians harboured anti-Australian sentiments. While relations improved under the presidency of Megawati Soekarnoputri (2001–04) within the context of counterterrorism following the 2002 attacks in Bali, Australia was nonetheless kept at a distance (Howard 2013: 608). In 2006, human rights concerns were at the core of another strain in bilateral relations following Australia’s decision to grant 43 West Papuan asylum seekers temporary protection visas. To the Indonesian government, the approval of their visas meant that Australia agreed with the refugees’ argument that they faced persecution at home. Indeed, the granting of the protection visas confirmed the asylum seekers’ claims of continuing human rights abuses, with senior ­Australian officials confirming that the Papuans had established a ‘well-founded fear of persecution’ (Sydney Morning Herald 2006a). In the weeks prior to the decision, the Immigration Department that handled the Papuans’ claims had been notified of the potential impact the case could have on bilateral relations with ­Indonesia. While John Howard refused to state whether he endorsed the decision, the ­Immigration Minister, Amanda Vanstone, stated that Australia was meeting its domestic and international obligations related to refugees. While Australia reassured Indonesia that its sovereignty over Papua was not questioned, and Howard warned Papuans not to flee to Australia (Sydney ­Morning Herald 2006b), Jakarta was furious. The Indonesian ambassador to Australia was withdrawn and Foreign Minister Wirajuda hinted that Indonesia could reduce its cooperation with Australia on issues of immigration and counter-terrorism.

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President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said, ‘don’t insult us, don’t toy with us and don’t deny us justice’ (Sydney Morning Herald 2006c), and blamed the Howard government for an ‘inappropriate, unrealistic and biased’ decision on the P ­ apuans. He added: ‘Indonesia will not tolerate any elements in any country, including ­Australia, which clearly give support to separatist movements in Papua’.13 The strong language employed by Yudhoyono contrasts with how he is portrayed internationally, where he had been lauded for the protection of human rights. Similarly, it was under the presidency of Yudhoyono that the promotion of democracy, particularly in the Southeast Asian region, gained political support (Karim 2017: 391). However, domestic assessments of Yudhoyono have been more critical, pointing to impunity for past human rights violations and continuing abuses by the security forces. While Yudhoyono rhetorically condemned the murder of Munir Said Thalib, a human rights activist killed weeks before Yudhoyono’s inauguration, he extended little support to the legal proceedings that followed. Yudhoyono also failed to protect religious minorities and allowed the enactment of Islamic by-laws that violate the rights of women. While legal and political factors play a role in the stagnation of human rights reform after New Order, Yudhoyono’s views on human rights are also ambivalent. While he was still coordinating minister for legal, political and security affairs under Megawati Soekarnoputri, Yudhoyono commented, for example, that human rights and democracy ‘should not be considered as the Indonesian nation’s absolute goals’ (Antara 2004) but had to be considered as part of other objectives. Greg Fealy has explained Yudhoyono’s approach towards human rights by looking at his personal background. In the mid-sixties, Yudhoyono’s father-in-law, Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, had been instrumental in the purge of anti-communists as a commander of the army’s para-commando regiment, and was also associated with violations in Papua. In 1969, Sarwo Edhie was a regional commander and in that capacity responsible for repressing opposition to the referendum on the future of Dutch New Guinea. Yudhoyono venerated his father-in-law, and according to Fealy this personal connection has made it difficult for him to prioritise human rights issues. For Yudhoyono: democracy was not just about upholding citizens’ rights […] it was also about respecting the wishes of the population when it came to government decision-making […] to keeping society stable and prosperous. If too much weight was given to minority views or black-letter law, then large sections of society could become restive, leading to tension and disorder. (Fealy 2015: 49)

Yudhoyono’s approach reflects the unease towards human rights that persisted in the post-Soeharto period despite impressive legal reforms (Hadiprayitno 2010: 373–99). Human rights continue to be seen as obstacles towards the attainment of other goals, including national stability. Together with Yudhoyono’s strong 13  See The Age (2006). To some extent, Indonesian concerns were accommodated in the Framework for Security Cooperation Agreement between Australia and Indonesia that was signed in November 2006. See also Chauvel (2008: 158).

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­ ationalistic tone in the Papuan refugee crisis, these discourses are reminiscent of n those employed by both Soekarno and Soeharto. In 2015, Indonesia again invoked its sovereignty when it resumed capital punishment. The execution of Australians Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan brought the bilateral relationship to a new low point, which for the first time saw the withdrawal of the Australian ambassador to Indonesia. Australia, consistent with interpretations of capital punishment in international law, argued that the death penalty is a violation of human rights. Australia was also consistent in protesting the execution of its citizens elsewhere in the world. However, in 2008 the Australian government supported the execution of the masterminds of the terrorist attacks in Bali. The execution of Australians in Indonesia therefore meant Australia was faced with a moral contradiction. On one hand, it had been a vocal campaigner against capital punishment; on the other it had not earlier made the death penalty an issue in the bilateral relationship. Australia only did so when the lives of its citizens were at stake, which led the Sydney Morning Herald to comment, ‘we only care if it’s Australian blood’ (The Age 2015). The Indonesian Foreign Minister, Retno Marsudi, expressed on several occasions her understanding of the appeals made by Australian officials. The I­ndonesian government at the same time stressed, however, that capital punishment was a law enforcement issue, one deemed necessary as the country faced a ‘drug ­emergency’. As such, Indonesia called for respect for its laws and, invoking the severity of the narcotics problem, claimed that capital punishment is not in contradiction with international law.14 The Indonesian Constitutional Court has also upheld the validity of capital punishment. This illustrates that capital punishment was considered to be a matter of implementing laws, rather than a human rights issue. The newly-elected Indonesian president, Jokowi, proved to be a strong supporter of the death penalty. Jokowi’s stance in this matter cannot be separated from the fact that, at the time, he was a politically weak president.15 He won election with a narrow margin, lacked control over the legislature, and wielded only limited authority within his own party, the PDI-P (Partai Demokrasi Indonesia– Perjuangan, Indonesia Democracy Party–Struggle). For Jokowi, the executions were thus an opportunity to gain support among the public and the political elite, appearing indifferent to the international condemnation that he received. After the first executions took place in January 2015, he took to Facebook to explain his position. Jokowi argued that the trade and use of narcotics was an area in which

14  Indonesia based this argument on Art 6(2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which states that countries that have not yet abolished the death penalty may impose capital punishment for the most serious crimes. International law does not, however, consider drug trafficking to be a ‘most serious crime’. In 2007, the Indonesian Constitutional Court acknowledged that the ICCPR supported the abolition of capital punishment but also reasoned, based on the UN Drugs Convention, that narcotics crimes satisfy the concept of ‘most serious crimes’ as they can negatively affect the ‘economic, cultural and political foundation of society and cause a danger of incalculable gravity’ (Decision No 2–3/PUU-V/207). 15  It appears that by 2016, Jokowi had turned this around. See Warburton (2016b).

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‘the state must be present and directly fight against drug syndicates. A healthy Indonesia is one without drugs’. Both the invocation of a strong state and the metaphor of a fight are in line with the nationalistic sentiments that Jokowi promotes, as well as his emphasis on development. This became particularly evident once Jokowi consolidated his power, and gave prominence to economic programs and infrastructure, as well as deregulation (Warburton 2016a: 298). Strong leadership and Indonesia’s status as a great power are consistent themes for Jokowi. During his campaign, Jokowi inspired many when he argued that the country needed a ‘mental revolution’, by which Indonesians could reject feelings of inferiority. Furthermore, he argued that Indonesia had to reclaim sovereignty over its territory—particularly its seas. When Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi announced a new focus for Indonesian diplomacy in 2015, sovereignty was identified as a key issue. She remarked that this was in line with Jokowi’s vision to restore Indonesia’s greatness as a maritime nation (Antara 2015). Jokowi derived this from Soekarno’s ideas in the late 1950s; the first president had also considered maritime power as an avenue towards national glory. The presence of ­Soekarno’s ideas in Jokowi’s policies can, to some extent, be explained by his political affiliation. Jokowi’s party, PDI-P, is led by Soekarno’s daughter Megawati and is widely considered the successor of Soekarno’s own nationalist party. As this chapter has shown, however, nationalism was not just a characteristic of Soekarno. It is an ideology deeply rooted in modern Indonesian political history. Indonesian presidents and their governments have consistently invoked national sovereignty and interests, often in direct opposition to human rights norms.

Moving Forward? This chapter has shown that the challenges surrounding issues of human rights in the Australia-Indonesia relationship have a long history. From the early days of bilateral relations, human rights have been given a peripheral place. While in the late 1940s this could be explained by the relative novelty of human rights in foreign policy, at the time it was already clear both countries had overarching objectives. In Australia’s case this was national security, while Indonesia was concerned with securing its independence and asserting its sovereignty. The prioritising of other interests over human rights has been a recurrent theme for both countries. Australian responses to human rights issues in Indonesia, or the lack thereof, have consistently been determined by considerations of national security and maintaining a good relationship with Jakarta. Meanwhile, ­Indonesia considers human rights as primarily a domestic issue and remains ambivalent towards the implementation of these norms, which it considers to be an obstacle to national goals of security, stability and economic development. As a consequence, both Indonesia and Australia have preferred to avoid human rights issues in managing their bilateral relationship.

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At the same time, human rights have become a fundamental part of international law, politics and society. That inevitably means that human rights will remain a part of Australia-Indonesia relations. More importantly, Indonesia and Australia’s geographical proximity means there are, and will continue to be, human rights issues affecting both countries and their citizens. This raises the question what the future of human rights in the bilateral relationship looks like. Considering past controversies and the place of human rights in the foreign policies of both countries the outlook is, at first glance, bleak. There are, nonetheless, lessons to be learned from the past. The manner in which Indonesian presidents have conceptualised human rights can be an important reference point for Australia in shaping its policies towards Indonesia. Indonesian presidents may have represented different political regimes but their discourses share an emphasis on national sovereignty. As human rights issues are often considered by Indonesia to be primarily a domestic affair— perhaps also reflected by its minimal engagement with Australia’s human rights record—and criticism thus as an attack on its sovereignty, Australia should be meticulous about how it presents its views on human rights issues to Indonesia: as constructive feedback in an equal partnership. Although Indonesia in 2015 clearly stated it understood Australian sentiments on the death penalty, overall it largely dismisses Australian criticism. Under the New Order, Indonesia reacted by threatening to reduce economic cooperation, while during the Papuan refugee crisis it said it would scale back collaboration efforts to combat terrorism and people smuggling. Such comments overlook the benefits bilateral cooperation brings to Indonesia. Similarly, these responses ignore that bilateral cooperation in these areas is crucial for the protection of human rights to which Indonesia has increasingly committed. Negotiating human rights in foreign policy is complicated for any country: Australia and Indonesia are no different. Both countries have considered human rights as a source of potential conflict and a risk to the bilateral relation. ­Indonesia has justified human rights violations by referring to overriding interests while Australia has looked the other way, considering its own security and cordial relations with Jakarta. This has frequently had a very high human cost, for which neither government has taken responsibility. While it is impossible to demand of governments that they abandon their national interests, both the prominence of human rights in international politics, and their urgency in Australia-Indonesia relations, requires that these norms should be accorded more importance in the bilateral relationship. In an open and mutually respectful dialogue, both countries can move towards altering their perception of rights, so they are no longer seen as an obstacle but recognised for what they do for human beings. While this chapter has focused on the position of human rights in the bilateral relationship, it has also shown that human rights are a call to protect, and give agency to, individuals who oppose and resist what is unjust. From that perspective, shared agreement can be found in the fact that human rights are intended to keep individuals from harm and pro-

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tect their dignity. That understanding may be narrow common ground but it also offers the opportunity for progress.

References ABC (2008) ‘The Howard Years’, 24 November. ABC (2015) ‘Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull Attempts to Repair Damaged Indonesia Ties with Jakarta Visit’, 13 November. Adil, Hilman (1973) ‘Australia’s Relations with Indonesia 1945-62’ (Leiden, Leiden University, PhD thesis). Antara (2004) ‘Democracy, Human Rights Must not Become Absolute Goals: Minister’, 10 January. Antara (2015) ‘Indonesia to Focus on Sovereignty, Citizens’ Safety, Economic Diplomacy’, 8 January. Berger, Dominic (2015) ‘Human Rights and Yudhoyono’s Test of History’ in Edward Aspinall, Marcus Mietzner and Dirk Tomsa (eds), The Yudhoyono ­Presidency. Indonesia’s Decade of Stability and Stagnation (Singapore, ISEAS). CAVR (2013) Chega! The Final Report of the Timor-Leste Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (Jakarta: Gramedia). Chauvel, Richard (2006) ‘Australia, Indonesia and the Papuan Crises’, APSNet ­Policy Forum, 27 April, . Chauvel, Richard (2008) ‘Refuge, Displacement and Dispossession: Responses to Indonesian Rule and Conflict in Papua’ in Eva-Lotta E Hedman (ed), Dynamics of Conflict and Displacement in Indonesia (Ithaca, Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications). Fealy, Greg (2015) ‘The Politics of Yudhoyono: Majoritan Democracy, insecurity and vanity’ in Edward Aspinall, Marcus Mietzner and Dirk Tomsa (eds), The Yudhoyono Presidency. Indonesia’s Decade of Stability and Stagnation (Singapore: ISEAS, 2015), 49. Fraser, Malcolm and Simons, Margaret (2010) Malcolm Fraser: The Political ­Memoirs (Melbourne, The Miegunyah Press). Gorjao, Paolo (2001) ‘The End of a Cycle: Australian and Portuguese Foreign Policies and the Fate of East Timor’ 23(1) Contemporary Southeast Asia 101. Hadiprayitno, Irene (2010) ‘Defensive Enforcement: Human Rights in Indonesia’ 11 Human Rights Review 373. Hernawan, Budi (2016) ‘Torture as Theatre in Papua’ 10(1) International Journal of Conflict and Violence 81. Howard, John (2013) Lazarus Rising: A Personal and Political Autobiography (­Sydney, HarperCollins). Ignatieff, Michael (2001) Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press). Independent (2001) ‘N Hassan Wirajuda: We are Concerned by These Military Strikes’, 17 October.

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Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade (1993) A ­ ustralia’s Relations with Indonesia (Canberra, Australian Government Publishing Service). Karim, Moch Faisal (2017) ‘Role Conflict and the Limits of State Identity: The Case of Indonesia in Democracy Promotion’ 30(3) The Pacific Review 385. Kingsbury, Damien (2009) East Timor. The Price of Liberty (New York, Palgrave Macmillan). Lubis, Todung Mulya (1993) In Search of Human Rights. Legal-Political Dilemmas of Indonesia’s New Order, 1966-1990 (Jakarta, Gramedia). McGregor, Katharine (2013) ‘Mass Violence in the Indonesian Transition from Sukarno to Suharto’ 15(1) Global Dialogue 138. Mohamad, Goenawan (1991) ‘Indonesia’s Self-Perception’ in Desmond Ball and Helen Wilson (eds), Strange Neighbours. The Australia-Indonesia Relationship (North Sydney, Allen & Unwin). New York Times (1966) ‘Holt Says US Actions Protect all non-Red Asia’, 6 July. New York Times (2006) ‘A Book about East Timor Jabs Indonesia’s Conscience’, 17 August. Sydney Morning Herald (2006a) ‘Visa Ruling Puts Jakarta Ties at Risk’, 24 March. Sydney Morning Herald (2006b) ‘PM Takes Tougher Line on Asylum’, 8 April. Sydney Morning Herald (2006c) ‘Jakarta: Say Sorry or No Ambassador’, 19 April. Sydney Morning Herald (2008) ‘The Nation Builder’, 2 February. The Age (2006) ‘Papuan Boat Arrival Fuels Crisis’, 5 April. The Age (2015) ‘Bali Nine Executions Highlight Australia’s Hypocrisy on the Death Penalty’, 4 May. Vickers, Adrian (2013) A History of Modern Indonesia, 2nd edn (Cambridge, ­Cambridge University Press). Warburton, Eve (2016a) ‘Jokowi and the New Developmentalism’ 52(3) Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 298. Warburton, Eve (2016b) ‘What Does Jokowi Want for the Indonesian E ­ conomy?’ East Asia Forum, 30 October, .

12 A Common Enemy: Police Cooperation between Australia and Indonesia MICHAEL McKENZIE

On 9 September 2004, a suicide bomber from the terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah exploded a delivery van outside the Australian Embassy in Jakarta. The blast killed nine people—all Indonesians—and injured many others. An iconic photograph of the bomb site published in newspapers at the time shows an office building next to the Embassy with its windows blown out. An Australian flag flutters in the foreground. At the request of the Indonesian National Police (Kepolisian Negara Republik Indonesia, Polri), the Australian Federal Police (AFP) flew a team of specialists to Jakarta on the evening of the bombing to join the existing contingent of 10 AFP officers already working with the Indonesian authorities. The Australian Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, and the AFP Commissioner, Mick Keelty, were also on the flight. When the plane landed in Jakarta, Downer and Keelty went for meetings with President Megawati Soekarnoputri and their Indonesian counterparts, while the team of AFP specialists went directly to the Embassy. After arriving at the Embassy, the head of the AFP team, Bruce Hill, was taken next door to the office building that features in the photograph mentioned above. Waiting in the foyer were senior members of Polri’s elite counter-terrorism taskforce, Satuan Tugas Bom (Satgas Bom). They were wearing AFP shirts and caps. After greetings were exchanged, the head of Satgas Bom, Gories Mere, declared, ‘F**k the terrorists, they won’t beat us.’ In the eyes of the AFP officers, this was an affirmation of the trust and solidarity that existed between the two police forces. One AFP officer recalls, ‘It was their way of saying we support you as brothers.’ A Polri officer involved in the bombing investigation used similar terms: ‘We understood each other, we are brothers working together on this.’ Across town, the politicians signed off on the joint police response to the bombing. As Mick Keelty explained, ‘in the political meetings we were going through the motions of ensuring we had top cover to continue doing what we

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were doing’.1 Importantly, however, the joint response was first and foremost a policing initiative. When Keelty returned to Australia the next day, he brought with him CCTV footage of the bombing to show to the Australian security community. Such was the relationship between the two police forces, Polri had already shared it with their ‘brothers’ from the AFP. This chapter examines the history of police cooperation between Australia and Indonesia, and seeks to identify the factors that promote such cooperation. After discussing the tentative beginnings of the cooperative relationship in the 1970s and 1980s, the chapter describes how the relationship was solidified in the late 1990s, coinciding with Polri’s split from the military, and entered a golden era in the years following the 2002 Bali bombings. It then explores the reasons for a downturn in the cooperative relationship that occurred around 2007 and the nature of the relationship in the period since. This historical analysis draws on fieldwork the author conducted in 2014 and 2015, including over 50 interviews with current and former participants in the relationship. The chapter concludes that the close cooperation between the AFP and Polri since the late 1990s is due in large part to their relative independence from national politics and the professional subculture that they share.2 At the core of this police culture is a common interest in combating transnational crime. The conclusion also briefly considers whether other bureaucrats from the two countries might share professional subcultures that could facilitate cooperation between them.

Identity Clash The policing relationship between Australia and Indonesia can be traced at least as far back as the early 1970s, although its first few decades were unremarkable. In these early years, police cooperation between the two countries was confined to occasional information sharing on crime—in particular drug trafficking—and low-level training support. Polri’s international engagement during this period was complicated by its status as a part of the Indonesian military (Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia, ABRI). Established after the declaration of Indonesia’s independence in 1945, Polri initially operated as an autonomous agency in the new state. In the 1960s, however, it was integrated into Indonesia’s military structure. By the end of that decade ‘Polri was practically a new wing of ABRI without any autonomy of its own’ (Meliala 2001: 423). The military identity of the police made it easier for the Soeharto government to use them for political ends. Rizal Sukma and Edy 1 

Interview with author, 18 August 2014. This argument is adapted from the work of Mathieu Deflem (2002), who contends that national police forces are more likely to engage in international cooperation when they have achieved a high level of bureaucratic autonomy. 2 

A Common Enemy: Police Cooperation between Australia and Indonesia 213 Prasetyono suggest that ‘rather than function as the protector of society and the law enforcer, the police played a role as the guardian of the New Order regime’ (Sukma and Prasetyono 2003: 26–27). In the pithy words of another Indonesian policing scholar, Muradi Clark, Polri was ‘under the thumb’ (Clark 2014: 35). Polri’s militaristic structure and style made them a difficult partner for foreign police forces. A former Polri chief (Kapolri), Awaloedin Djamin, states that Polri was often excluded from international policing initiatives because of its military identity. Djamin also recalls that on one occasion patrol boats gifted to Polri by international donors were instead given to the army (Meliala 2001: 425). Although the Indonesian military had significant political power at the time, Polri was ‘like the smallest child in the family’, deprived of resources and with minimal public or self-esteem.3 While the AFP enjoyed operational independence from the moment of its creation in 1979, it suffered from identity issues of a different kind. In its early years, the AFP’s leadership struggled to unify the various policing bodies it subsumed, and its officers also suffered from low morale. Australia first posted a police liaison officer to Jakarta in 1977 to help combat drug trafficking in the region, and this position was retained under the AFP. The officers who filled the position were regarded as largely ineffectual, however, charged with the unenviable task of forging links between a paramilitary police force in Indonesia and their own fractured organisation. When the AFP’s liaison officer in Jakarta was implicated in a scandal involving the sale of duty-free cars in the late 1980s, he was brought home and not replaced. Around the same time, the AFP embarked on a period of reform that included a flattening of its rank structure, with authority and accountability pushed downwards. A former AFP Deputy Commissioner, Adrien Whiddett, described the years between 1988 and 1994 as ‘the period of most significant transition for the AFP’ (Whiddett 1999: 20). When he wrote these words in 1999, the AFP was entering another major period of transition with Indonesia as a focal point. These two transition periods are linked by the AFP’s decision to reopen its Jakarta liaison office in 1992. With Polri still firmly located within the Indonesian military apparatus, the AFP’s liaison officers posted to Jakarta in the 1990s faced many of the same challenges as their predecessors. Policing scholar Didier Bigo describes liaison officers as ‘the human interface between various police forces’ (Bigo 2000: 74), but during this period the relationship between the AFP’s liaison officer in Jakarta and Polri was largely fax-based. As one former liaison officer explained, ‘We would fax a request to Polri from the Embassy regarding a particular investigation, and they would action it and send the results back to the Embassy.’ In a profession that thrives on personal relationships and informality, this was a significant barrier to the two police forces developing closer ties.

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Indonesian legal scholar Hikmahanto Juwana, interview with author, 24 March 2014.

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The AFP had more success engaging Polri through its Management of Serious Crime Course. The course commenced in 1991, with the aim of enhancing the management skills of senior police officers responsible for the investigation of serious crimes. The AFP began inviting Indonesian officers to attend the course from 1993, with the first being a Lieutenant Colonel named Made Pastika. During the course, Pastika struck up a friendship with then AFP Commander Mick Keelty. As will be discussed, their friendship would facilitate cooperation between the AFP and Polri on several high-profile investigations. Reflecting on the importance of personal relationships within the policing fraternity, Keelty states, ‘I guess it is what policing is all about, it’s a people industry. It’s about relationships, it’s about being able to pick up the phone.’4 The second liaison officer posted to Indonesia after the AFP reopened its Jakarta office, Graham Ashton, also recognised the value of personal ties in international policing. He arrived in Indonesia in 1996, inheriting a policing relationship that was ‘cordial … but one-dimensional’. With a quiet and unassuming personality that endeared him to his Indonesian hosts, Ashton set about developing the ‘nonissues based’ side of the relationship.5 He learnt to speak Indonesian, arranged golf days and other social activities with his Polri counterparts, and always started meetings with some basa-basi (small talk). Over time, the relationship deepened and Ashton gained greater access to Polri’s senior ranks. In the second and final year of his posting, Ashton and his primary Polri counterpart, Wayan Arjana (then a brigadier general responsible for international liaison), began discussing how they could leave a legacy on the bilateral policing relationship. They agreed that a more formal framework for cooperation could elevate the relationship, and convinced their superiors that the idea had merit. Polri was positioning itself for a split from the military and needed training to help it prepare. The AFP wanted to enhance its operational cooperation with Polri, particularly in response to drug trafficking. On 5 August 1997, the AFP Commissioner and Kapolri signed the first ever Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the two police forces for cooperation in combating transnational crime. Notably, the MOU was conceived and negotiated by the police, with little involvement from politicians or diplomats. In May 1998, amid the political turmoil leading up to Soeharto’s resignation, ten Polri officers visited Australia to attend a pilot Industrial Security Management course. The course was the first of various capacity building initiatives run by the AFP to assist Polri reassume responsibility for public safety and security from the military. By all accounts, the Indonesian police were starting from a low base. A 2001 International Crisis Group report on police reform in Indonesia summarises the views of a former Kapolri as follows: General (Retired) Kunarto … exposed the degradation of police powers by the New Order, the usurpation of its authority by the Army, and the challenges of reforming an

4  5 

Interview with author, 18 August 2014. Interview with author, 24 June 2014.

A Common Enemy: Police Cooperation between Australia and Indonesia 215 under-staffed, poorly equipped, totally corrupt force despised by the public and with no institutional memory of institutional independence as part of a properly functioning law enforcement system. (International Crisis Group, 2001: 1)

Ashton suggests that the developing relationship between the AFP and Polri at that time had a lot to do with the ‘brotherhood of policing’. While alert to Polri’s limitations as a law enforcement agency within a military structure, he states that it would be wrong to mistake this for an unwillingness to get things done: ‘There was a commonality between the AFP and Polri as cops. We both want to catch the crooks.’6 He adds that this was true even though Polri was part of the military. Indeed, the Indonesian police were struggling with their military identity for this reason. Yet, as part of the military—and, by extension, political—structure in Indonesia, Polri’s cooperation with the AFP remained limited. A police bond was one thing, but Polri had limited scope to engage in cooperative initiatives while it was still ‘under the thumb’. Even the 1997 MOU, which provided the framework for more substantive cooperation between the AFP and Polri, was negotiated in the context of Polri’s move towards autonomy during a period of political transition in Indonesia. As it happened, this move was completed only a few years later. Discussions about separating the police and military had, in fact, been taking place within the Indonesian government since the late 1980s. After a Defence ministry working group proposed a split, the Kapolri asked universities to promote it publicly. So began a public discourse about police autonomy, which gained momentum as part of broader calls for reform of the military and, ultimately, regime change. There was increasing pressure on ABRI to ‘move back to the barracks’ and allow Polri to stand alone as a professional civilian police force (Clark 2014: 41). On 1 April 1999, less than a year after Soeharto’s resignation, President BJ Habibie announced that the police would be granted their independence. On 1 July 2000, Polri was removed from the Defence ministry and placed under the direct control of the president. This increased proximity to political power arguably made Polri more vulnerable to politicisation. Offsetting this, however, was its new mandate to function as an autonomous law enforcement agency. In 2002, Polri’s separation from the military was enshrined in law. Substantive reform of the Indonesian police would be a longer-term p ­ roject. Still, by the turn of the century, Polri had joined the AFP in achieving an ­important precondition for closer cooperation between the two police forces: a sufficient level of independence from its political centre. The two police chiefs who together built the Polri-AFP relationship in the post-Soeharto era, Mick Keelty and Da’i Bachtiar, agree on the significance of this moment. Keelty states, ‘In all honesty, one of the things that drove the cooperation was a determination by the police to separate from the military in Indonesia.’7 Bachtiar reflects that if Polri had failed to gain operational autonomy ‘it would hinder our ­overseas cooperation because people will see our police as not merely a civilian police

6  7 

Interview with author, 24 June 2014. Interview with author, 18 August 2014.

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but as having ties with the military’.8 Instead, Polri was now on the path to ­becoming a professional police service, and the AFP was eager to help. From this point on, the AFP and Polri would increasingly define their identities with reference to each other. For the AFP, the relationship with Polri would become the cornerstone of its much-feted international network—a point of difference and pride in a crowded domestic law enforcement environment. For Polri, the relationship with the AFP (and other international donors) would provide a base from which to build its reputation as a domestic security provider distinct from the military.

The Police Union In December 1998, Australian Prime Minister John Howard wrote to President Habibie suggesting that the Indonesian government could quell the desire of the East Timorese for an act of self-determination by offering them an autonomy package with a built-in review mechanism. Partly as a reaction to Howard’s letter, on 27 January 1999 the Indonesian government announced that a referendum on independence would be held in East Timor within a year. In June 1999, 50 AFP officers deployed to the province as part of a multinational United Nations mission established to supervise the referendum (UNAMET). Their brief included advising the team of Polri officers responsible for maintaining peace and security in the province. The ability of the AFP and Polri to work together in East Timor was aided by the existing friendship between Made Pastika, who was Polri’s chief liaison officer with UNAMET, and Mick Keelty, who was then an AFP deputy commissioner responsible for the East Timor deployment. Relations between more junior AFP and Polri officers in the field were also good, despite occasional tensions arising from communication problems and cultural differences. One Polri officer who served in East Timor commented, ‘We know each other as police. We are networking, making friends, even drinking together.’ He also said there was a professional understanding between the police despite their different backgrounds: ‘We could speak the same language with other police there.’ Certainly, the AFP and Polri got to know each other better in East Timor, adding an additional layer to a deepening relationship. After the East Timorese voted overwhelmingly in favour of independence on 30 August 1999, militia groups linked to the Indonesian military reacted violently, and UNAMET personnel were evacuated. In their place, a UN peacekeeping force led by the Australian military entered the province to help restore order. The loss of East Timor provoked a nationalistic backlash in Indonesia, and many Indonesians blamed Australia. Caught on a wave of anti-Australia sentiment, one of the last acts of Habibie as president was to abrogate the 1995 security agreement between the two countries in September 1999. The newly-elected

8 

Interview with author, 30 November 2014.

A Common Enemy: Police Cooperation between Australia and Indonesia 217 president, Abdurrahman Wahid, asked, ‘Do they [the Australian government] not realise that they have erred? I don’t need to mince words or use diplomatic language. I am using the people’s language’ (McGibbon 2006: 79). The bilateral relationship was badly damaged, with defence cooperation taking a particular hit. One senior Australian defence official described the defence relationship as ‘98% broken’ following the East Timor crisis, noting that the crisis revealed ‘how national interests can be brought into stark relief ’. Out of this political storm, however, the AFP-Polri relationship emerged largely unscathed. One explanation for this is that Polri was less invested in East Timor than the Indonesian military, so did not feel as aggrieved by its loss. The military had led Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor since 1975, and had significant economic interests there. Its forced retreat from the province was humiliating. The police did not share this legacy, and were more inclined to look forward than back. At a more fundamental level, the differing impacts of the East Timor crisis on the defence and policing relationships can be explained by their differing orientations. Defence forces exist to defend and protect the interests of their respective states. They are far closer to their political centres than the police, and see each other in primarily oppositional terms. For this reason, as a senior Australian defence official noted, the defence relationship between Australia and Indonesia is largely about ‘lowering the temperature’. The police are different. A Polri officer who worked in East Timor commented, ‘Because of our job we are very different to the army. We are not seeking to resolve the conflict. The universal police job is the same—how to keep the people safe. So it was a good relationship between police.’ The Australian defence official echoed this sentiment: ‘It is different for police forces, as they don’t conceive of each other as existential threats. Instead, they have problems in common. Criminals provide them with a common enemy.’ In East Timor, the police had a common enemy in the militia who were threatening public safety, and arguably those members of the Indonesian military supporting the militia. In the words of one senior AFP officer, ‘I think we had a common enemy in the military. That is not from an Australian perspective, it is from a pure policing perspective.’ Even at the height of the political tension following the referendum, the policing relationship did not skip a beat. In September 1999, one week before Australian troops entered East Timor, an AFP officer was embedded in Polri’s headquarters in Jakarta to support its transition into a civilian police force. The officer stayed for eight months, and recalls that the events in East Timor had little impact on his posting. Mick Keelty describes the policing relationship in the years after East Timor as follows: Policing has to be neutral, it has to be apolitical … TNI [as the Indonesian military is now known] was seen to be a political arm of government, an enforcement arm of government, and the police were at great pains to make sure they were not seen in the same light. So we were getting a lot of cooperation.9

9 

Interview with author, 18 August 2014.

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Polri was still vulnerable to politicisation—both from within and without—but it was also seeking to forge a professional identity beyond the political and military spheres, and international cooperation provided a means of doing this. During this period, the AFP and Polri continued to cooperate in areas of mutual interest to their countries, including drug and fraud operations. The primary focus of cooperative efforts, however, was people smuggling, which was largely an Australian government priority. In September 2000, the AFP and Polri agreed a protocol on combating people smuggling under their 1997 MOU. Among other things, the protocol enabled the establishment of five Special Intelligence Units within Polri to target people smuggling syndicates. As with the MOU, it was negotiated by the police with little political involvement. The AFP’s senior liaison officer at that time said the cooperation ‘worked outstandingly well’. As a result of the joint efforts of Polri and the AFP, thousands of people were prevented from departing Indonesia on people smuggling ventures. In August 2001, the bilateral political relationship frayed again after the Australian government declared that Indonesia should take responsibility for 438 asylum seekers rescued near Christmas Island by a Norwegian freighter, the MV Tampa. The Indonesian foreign minister, Hassan Wirajuda, accused Australia of ‘megaphone diplomacy’, and his ministry responded by reviewing people smuggling engagement between the two countries (Nafik and Unidjaja 2001). Having not previously been aware of the significant cooperation between Polri and the AFP under their people smuggling protocol, the ministry demanded that the protocol be suspended. This suspension occurred on 12 September 2001. Despite the suspension of the protocol, the police continued to work together on people smuggling operations. Mick Keelty’s explanation of this during a parliamentary hearing in 2002 is revealing: CHAIR—Did the suspension of it [the protocol] in any way compromise any operations that you had on foot at that time? Commissioner Keelty— … As I understand it, the answer is no. Part of that is because of the relationship we had developed over the period of time that we had been working with the Indonesian National Police. To give you an indication of the extent of that relationship, we maintained that even during the period that we were in East Timor. The policing relationship is a very different one from, for example, the defence relationship. In law enforcement, it is largely considered that we are all working to the one goal, particularly in terms of transnational crime. We were able to operate on the goodwill of the existing relationship but … it became a little more tense. It was on a case by case basis as to which operations were going to be successful. … CHAIR—If I can put it in the colloquial, inoffensively I hope: the coppers kept after the villains irrespective of what the foreign affairs department said about the agreement. Is that what we are talking about here? Commissioner Keelty—In a nutshell, that is right. (Commonwealth of Australia 2002: 1955-1956)

A Common Enemy: Police Cooperation between Australia and Indonesia 219 In other words, the AFP and Polri were able to maintain their distance from their respective political centres, bound together by their common interest in fighting crime.

Terror Hits Home In June 2002, Mick Keelty—who was by then the AFP Commissioner—and the Kapolri, Da’i Bachtiar, met at a golf resort in Western Australia to renew the MOU on police cooperation. Although there was a language barrier, the two men muddled through, assisted by the relaxed setting and forced intimacy of a golf buggy. In previous meetings, Bachtiar had warmed to Keelty’s informal style and grasp of Indonesian culture, describing him as ‘more subtle than the Javanese’.10 They also shared the common language of policing. Bachtiar opened up to Keelty about the challenges Polri faced in dealing with the emerging terrorist threat in Indonesia, and Keelty suggested that the AFP could assist by running training on post-bomb blast analysis in Jakarta. Bachtiar welcomed the idea. On the evening of 12 October 2002, an AFP forensics team was in Singapore, en-route to Jakarta, to run the first post-bomb blast analysis course for the Indonesian police. They never made it to Jakarta, however, rerouting to Bali instead. It was the night of the first Bali terrorist bombings. The 2002 Bali bombings killed 202 people, including 88 Australians and 38 Indonesians. Many others were seriously injured. Fortuitously—and indicative of a policing relationship that was already well established—the AFP’s two Jakartabased liaison officers were in Bali that night, accompanying two separate AFP teams: a people smuggling taskforce and a counter-narcotics unit. Also in Bali were several AFP officers on leave from their assignments with the United Nations in East Timor. Shortly after the explosions in the tourist district of Kuta, one of the liaison officers made contact with AFP headquarters in Canberra, which swung into action. The next morning, Keelty and Bachtiar spoke on the phone. Bachtiar reminded Keelty of their conversation on the golf course a few months earlier and indicated that Polri’s need for assistance was now more urgent. Keelty offered the AFP’s full support. That afternoon, a joint response team of AFP and Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) officers led by Graham Ashton flew to Bali. By then, the AFP officers on the ground were already working with Polri, including arranging for questionnaires to be given to departing Australians at the airport. The next day, Bachtiar briefed the Indonesian cabinet at an emergency meeting in Jakarta, advising his colleagues that he had invited the AFP to assist in the bombing response. In Australia, a meeting of the National Security Committee of Cabinet

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Interview with author, 30 October 2014.

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resolved to send a delegation to Indonesia to formalise the joint investigation. The delegation included Foreign Minister Downer, Justice Minister Chris Ellison, Mick Keelty and other senior bureaucrats. The bilateral relationship remained fragile at this point, with the East Timor crisis and the MV Tampa affair11 still fresh in the minds of Indonesia’s political leaders. Prime Minister Howard had taken steps towards mending the relationship, visiting Indonesia in February 2002 to meet with President Megawati and other senior Indonesian politicians. During the visit, the two leaders signed an MOU on counter-terrorism cooperation, and Howard pledged A$1 million in aid to Indonesia for flood relief. Yet, Howard’s visit also raised the ire of some Indonesian legislators, who refused to meet with him. Howard called Megawati on the day after the Bali bombings. She had famously refused to take his calls at the height of the MV Tampa affair but on this occasion the two leaders put aside their political differences. Howard recalls, ‘at that time, relations between Australia and Indonesia were strained [. . .] but she responded in a positive fashion’ (Mottram 2012). Getting the Indonesian government’s agreement to a joint investigation was another matter. Sensitivities in Indonesia about the country’s sovereignty, links between terrorism and Islam, and an interventionist Australia made such an agreement far from certain. In Australia, public anger about the many Australians killed in the bombings also threatened to inflame the situation. As the head of the Australian delegation sent to Indonesia to formalise the joint investigation, Alexander Downer was concerned that the two countries would ‘fall upon each other with swords in a ghastly blame game’. Instead, when the delegation met with their Indonesian counterparts in Jakarta it became apparent that they were ‘pushing against an open door’ (Alford 2012). It was a door that had been opened by the police, along with other officials from the two countries. By that stage, 45 AFP officers were already on the ground in Bali undertaking investigative and victim identification work alongside the Indonesian police. At the same time, the AFP’s two liaison officers were in Jakarta drafting a joint investigation agreement with two of their Polri counterparts. In a sense—appreciating the gravity of the situation—the politicians simply fell in behind their police forces. Less than a week after the bombing, the joint investigation agreement was signed. Graham Ashton recalls, ‘It was the result of the relationships we [the police] had been building for more than a decade that we were able to strike up our initial agreements in a matter of days.’12 Keelty’s old friend Made Pastika, who was originally from Bali, was appointed to lead the investigation. Building on his previous experience working in Indonesia, Ashton was confirmed as the head of the Australian team. Joining the AFP in support of the Indonesian authorities were various other Australian and international law enforcement agencies. At the height of the operation—dubbed 11  12 

See ch 8 for discussion of the Tampa affair. Interview with author, 24 June 2014.

A Common Enemy: Police Cooperation between Australia and Indonesia 221 Operation Alliance—over 100 Australian law enforcers were deployed in Bali, with hundreds more providing support from Australia. The Australian and Indonesian police struggled to coordinate their work in the chaotic early days of the joint investigation, but it did not take them long to find a common rhythm. Although the joint investigation agreement was an important document—reflecting the political will of both governments and providing the necessary legal coverage—it was of little assistance here. As one senior AFP investigator said, ‘To be honest with you, the fact that the agreement was signed, that was filed in the top drawer and probably not pulled out for months. It was really down to basic human networks, forming a bond, trusting each other, and getting on and doing it.’ On top of the existing relationship shared between the senior police leadership—Keelty, Bachtiar, Pastika and Ashton—bonds soon formed between the more junior Australian and Indonesian officers who were working together for the first time. The police culture, based around a sense of common purpose, provided the unifying spark. Reflecting on the policing relationship at the time, one Polri officer said, ‘Working with the AFP was easy. They had a shared vision and a focus on analysing the crime using professional methods.’ Another commented, ‘We respected each other, and we had the same enemy in terrorism. We were working hand-in-hand.’ The idea of a common enemy was raised time-and-time again in interviews with AFP and Polri officers involved in the investigation. So too was the importance of the personal relationships they formed in pursuit of this common enemy. As an AFP officer explained, ‘We had a job to do. If you follow the rulebook you’ll do the job, but overlay this with the bond, the friendship, the trust, and the hard work of building up that rapport and cadence, it is just so powerful.’ The Australian police brought significant technical expertise to the joint response across many policing disciplines including victim identification, crimescene management, intelligence analysis, and computer and bomb forensics. The policing relationship developed around the transfer of this specialist knowledge. One senior Polri officer commented, ‘We learnt a lot from the AFP. Why do I say that? The Bali bombings was the first time the police dealt with terrorists in Indonesia … The politicians were talking about the CIA as being the enemy. We just wanted to work on the facts.’13 The AFP also introduced Polri to various technologies, none more important than the call tracking equipment used to trace the movements of the terrorists. One Polri officer described this technology as ‘like a light from the sky’. The transfer of knowledge was not simply in one direction. The Indonesian police had all the experience of criminal investigations in an Indonesian context, including an understanding of the (somewhat limited) legislative framework under which they were working. An AFP officer said, ‘We learnt as much from them as they did from us. We had the technology, and they had the people skills and 13  A popular conspiracy theory in Indonesia following the bombings was that they had been carried out by the CIA.

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environmental knowledge.’ It was Polri that made most of the early breakthroughs in the investigation, including locating evidence that led to one of the perpetrators, Amrozi bin Nurhasyim. Following his arrest on 5 November 2002, Amrozi named some of the other perpetrators, and his mobile phone records put investigators on their trail. The joint investigation was about to enter a new phase.

The Golden Era Although the political friction between Australia and Indonesia was put to one side in the immediate aftermath of the Bali bombings, it soon re-emerged. As one Australian journalist observed a few weeks after the bombings, ‘for all the best of intentions, the spirit of shared loss and the sense of common purpose is beginning to unravel’ (Parkinson 2002). At the end of October 2002, a few days before Amrozi’s arrest, ASIO and the AFP raided the homes of suspected Indonesian extremists in Australia. A backlash ensued in Indonesia, where the raids were portrayed as anti-Muslim. Marty Natalegawa, then a foreign ministry spokesperson, described the raids as ‘unacceptable’ (Riley, Moore and Daley 2002). The Indonesian ambassador to Australia, Imron Cotan, suggested they could jeopardise the joint investigation: ‘Some Indonesians would say how could we entertain them while they are humiliating our countrymen? We have to listen to our people’ (Forbes and Moore 2002). One month later, Prime Minister Howard came under heavy criticism in Indonesia for arguing that Australia should be able to launch pre-emptive action against terrorists overseas. The Indonesian newspaper Republika ran the headline ‘Australia ready to invade Asia’. A member of the Indonesian national legislature’s foreign affairs commission, Djoko Susilo, suggested that Howard’s comment would ‘inflame the situation’ and called for a tough response from President Megawati (AAP 2002a). Separately, Megawati raised concerns about the Australian government’s decision to issue a travel warning discouraging its citizens from visiting Indonesia. In Australia, there was public outrage after Bachtiar interviewed Amrozi in front of the international media, and the two men smiled and laughed throughout. Foreign Minister Downer claimed to be horrified. Later, responding to ongoing scepticism within the Australian public about Indonesia’s criminal justice system, Downer suggested that Australia could seek to extradite some of the alleged perpetrators to face an Australian court. Natalegawa was unimpressed: ‘To have an overbearing expression of interest in the micro-management of the trials may have the deleterious impact of leading to accusations Indonesia is bowing to foreign pressure’ (AAP 2004). The bilateral political relationship was threatening to boil over. For the most part, however, all of this political theatre had little impact on the joint Polri-AFP investigation. Pastika repeatedly warned Indonesian politicians

A Common Enemy: Police Cooperation between Australia and Indonesia 223 not to interfere with the police investigation, at one point telling journalists he wanted them to ‘shut up’ (Perlez 2002). Another senior Polri officer commented that, despite the significant political and media interest, the police just wanted to ‘present their case based on the facts’. Similarly, a senior AFP officer said that the Australian police refused to be drawn on political issues, responding instead, ‘We are here in support of the Indonesians. Our job is to capture the murderers.’ For his part, Mick Keelty reminded the Australian public that this was Indonesia’s jurisdiction, whatever its peculiarities, and gave his assurances that the perpetrators were being pursued (AAP 2002b). Shortly after Amrozi’s arrest, the police realised they needed to expand their search for the bombers beyond Bali. A rudimentary analysis of the targets’ phone traffic revealed that they had probably left the island. The lead Indonesian investigator, Gories Mere, and his Australian counterpart, Steve Jackson, formed a joint team to track the bombers across the Indonesian archipelago. They based the operation out of Jakarta, where the AFP set up a covert office known as the Jakarta Operations Centre (JOC).14 Over the next few years, the AFP and Polri worked side-by-side in pursuit of the perpetrators of the Bali bombings and the other terrorist incidents that followed: the 2003 Marriott Hotel bombing in Jakarta; the 2004 Australian Embassy bombing; and the second Bali bombings in 2005. After each of these incidents, the AFP sent further specialists to Indonesia to supplement the JOC. AFP and Polri officers who were involved in these joint investigations emphasise the closeness of the police relationship during this period. An AFP officer commented that from an operational perspective the AFP could not have been closer: ‘We weren’t kicking the door in, but when the door was kicked in we were only a few blocks away. And once the scene was secure, we were there.’ A Polri officer said, ‘As a friend and a brother, we work at the same time and the same place. We drink the same water and eat the same food. We have the same intention.’ Officers from both countries saw themselves as part of a single team. As one AFP officer reflected, ‘That was one team. The group that we put in behind Satgas Bom, particularly in those early years, they have got intrinsic relationships with the Indonesian police, not cordial relationships, intrinsic.’ At the same time, AFP officers working in this team were mindful of their status as guests in a foreign country. They kept a low profile, respected local customs, and were happy for Polri to take the credit for operational successes. An AFP officer commented, ‘We didn’t make a song-and-dance about what we were doing, and I think that appealed to the Indonesians, who are a very proud, nationalistic people.’ Given the sensitivities involved in investigating Islamic terrorism in a predominantly Muslim country, Polri also wanted to avoid being seen as ‘doing Australia’s bidding’. This was amplified by the fact that most of the members of Satgas Bom, including its leader Gories Mere, were Christian. Jealousy within the military about Polri’s elevation in

14 

The JOC was later renamed the Jakarta Regional Cooperation Team.

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the Indonesian security architecture, and the significant support it received from foreign donors, was a further source of tension. As before, the glue binding the AFP and Polri officers in the field was their common interest in fighting crime. One senior Indonesian police officer suggested national interests were of less concern: We don’t think about countries, we think about the common enemy, and we think about the destroyed lives … Our job is not about Indonesia, Australia, or any other country, our job is how to stop the terrorists.

Of course, the AFP and Polri could always be pulled back towards their respective political centres. The success both police forces had enjoyed in the national security space gave them greater political clout but also made them more vulnerable to politicisation. One senior AFP officer commented, ‘We give them [Polri] 110 percent of what they need, but if the powers that be in Australia decide that things need to change, they change.’ A Polri officer said that much depended on the attitude of the Indonesian president, as some presidents intervened in Polri’s operations more than others. Yet, absent a political crisis, the two police forces were generally able to work together with minimal political interference. While counter-terrorism was the focus of cooperative efforts in the years following the Bali bombings, the AFP and Polri also continued to collaborate in response to other transnational crimes, including drug trafficking, people smuggling, human trafficking, child-sex tourism, money laundering and illegal fishing. They also worked together to establish various law enforcement institutions in Indonesia, including a regional law enforcement training facility known as the Jakarta Centre for Law Enforcement Cooperation (JCLEC). The AFP gradually increased its presence in Indonesia—with the number of posted officers peaking at around 30—and from 2003 Indonesia also posted a police liaison officer in Australia. The following remark by one Indonesian officer who served in this position is telling: When I came to Australia, I was closer with the Australian police than the people in my own Embassy. I was looking for my comfort zone, and I got that feeling with the guys from my profession. The foreign affairs people are more concerned with the foreign politics … They talk a different language. Whereas the Australian police talk my language. They talk in police terms, so it is easier to understand.

The officer felt he had more in common with the members of his professional subculture in Australia than his Indonesian government colleagues. Such was the distance between the police and their political masters during this period that some academic and media commentators argued the police should be reined in. Much of this commentary focused on the ‘Bali 9’ case, which concerned nine Australian citizens arrested in Bali on 17 April 2005 for attempting to smuggle 8.2 kilograms of heroin to Australia. The arrests were made possible by intelligence the AFP provided to Polri, and exposed the nine Australians to the death penalty under Indonesia’s drug trafficking laws. Two of the Bali 9—Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukamaran—ultimately received this penalty. Although the AFP was

A Common Enemy: Police Cooperation between Australia and Indonesia 225 subject to guidelines on international cooperation in death penalty cases at the time, nothing in the guidelines restricted intelligence sharing prior to an arrest. Scholars argued that the AFP’s decision to disclose intelligence about the Bali 9 to Polri was inconsistent with the Australian government’s opposition to the death penalty. Ronli Sifris, for example, suggested that ‘Australia is prioritising its commitment to international criminal cooperation above its commitment to death penalty abolition’ (Sifris 2007: 107). In the Australian media, the AFP was accused of having ‘blood on its hands’ and sacrificing the nine Australians in the interests of counter-terrorism cooperation with Indonesia. Human rights and legal NGOs also raised concerns about the discretion afforded to the AFP in such cases, as did the judiciary. Facing pressure from multiple fronts, the Australian government tightened the AFP’s death penalty guidelines in 2009. Despite the public criticism, the AFP stood resolutely behind its decision to inform Polri about the Bali 9. Shortly after the arrests, Commissioner Keelty put out a press release stating that the AFP had ‘no choice’ but to work cooperatively with foreign police in the fight against transnational crime (Australian Federal Police 2005). He also told the ABC’s Four Corners program that such cases were ‘just a reality of working in the global environment’ (Masters 2006). The AFP again defended its actions following the executions of Chan and Sukumaran on 29 April 2015. AFP Commissioner Andrew Colvin stated that the AFP opposed the death penalty but ‘can’t apologise for the role that we have to try to stop illicit drugs from coming into this community’ (Hunter 2015). The AFP remained intent on maintaining the flow of information with its foreign partners as part of its strategy to take the fight against crime offshore, and was willing to wear the political consequences.

Breach of Trust By 2006, the AFP and Polri had consolidated the close partnership they had built in the wake of the 2002 Bali bombings. With the AFP’s assistance, Polri had arrested and charged over 200 people with terrorism offences. The two police forces had also run successful joint operations targeting various other crime types, including some major drug interdictions. Over 800 law enforcement officials had been trained at JCLEC, which was the ‘jewel in the crown’ of their expanding institutional relationship.15 In addition, there were strong personal relationships between AFP and Polri officers at all levels. A political flare-up in early 2006 demonstrated the strength of the policing relationship at the time. After a period of relative stability in bilateral relations, tensions resurfaced in March 2006 following Australia’s decision to grant temporary

15 

Senior Australian legal official, interview with author, 6 June 2014.

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protection visas to 42 Papuan asylum seekers.16 Many Indonesians saw the decision as a show of support for the Papuan separatist movement, and thus a further attempt by Australia to undermine Indonesia’s territorial integrity (the events leading to East Timor’s independence being the first). President Yudhoyono reacted angrily, recalling Indonesia’s ambassador to Australia and calling for a review of cooperative agreements between the two countries in areas such as people smuggling. ‘Ties between Australia are now entering a difficult phase that is full of challenges,’ he declared (AFP 2006). Cooperation between the AFP and Polri held strong throughout this diplomatic crisis, however, with one senior AFP officer recalling, ‘There was not a blink in our engagement.’ According to the officer, the police were able to maintain their distance from politics, propelled by the success of recent joint operations. In April 2006, during an address to the Interpol Asian Regional Conference in Jakarta, Yudhoyono shared his own thoughts on what made international police cooperation possible in such circumstances: ‘Fortunately, compared to military cooperation or intelligence cooperation, police cooperation can usually be done without much political inhibition’ (Yudhoyono 2006). Put simply, the policing relationship could exist at the fringes of political life, sustained by the common goals and values of the policing profession. Yet it was never immune from political or professional disagreements, as a number of information leaks in 2007 would demonstrate. On 9 June 2007, Polri arrested a senior member of Jemaah Islamiyah’s military wing, Abu Dujana, in an operation supported by the AFP. Before the Indonesian authorities had announced Dujana’s arrest, Australia’s foreign minister, Alexander Downer, confirmed the arrest to the Australian media. Indonesian politicians were furious that the Indonesian public was not told first. People’s Consultative Assembly Speaker Hidayat Nur Wahid blamed a lack of coordination between Polri and the State Intelligence Agency (Badan Intelijen Negara, BIN): ‘This is pathetic that in something as serious as this arrest, there wasn’t coordination between the police and BIN. And we had to hear it first from another country.’ The Kapolri, Sutanto, tried to shift the focus onto the operation’s success: ‘There’s nothing to fuss about. The media shouldn’t exaggerate this. What matters is people’s safety’ (Suwarni and Maryono 2007). One month later, on 8 July 2007, the Australian government reissued its travel advice for Indonesia, informing its nationals that there was a very high threat of terrorism in the country and they should reconsider their need to travel. While Australia’s travel advisory had long been an irritant in the bilateral relationship, on this occasion it could also be traced back to intelligence Polri had shared with the AFP. As the intelligence indicated a safety risk for Australians in Indonesia, the AFP felt obliged to share it with domestic security agencies. From Polri’s perspective, however, the intelligence had been provided on a police-to-police basis only, and it was dismayed to see it used for this different purpose. On the back of Downer’s confirmation of Dujana’s arrest, the reissuing of the travel advice caused significant damage to the policing relationship. A senior 16 

A 43rd member of the group subsequently also received a visa.

A Common Enemy: Police Cooperation between Australia and Indonesia 227 AFP officer recalled that the two incidents ‘hurt us severely’. Counter-terrorism cooperation between the AFP and Polri was largely restricted to training from then on. There would be no more joint operations, and only a limited amount of technical assistance and information sharing. After terrorists bombed the Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in Jakarta in July 2009, Polri mostly rebuffed the AFP’s offers of assistance. Both political and professional factors contributed to this change in the policing relationship. From a political perspective, Polri was being drawn back towards its political centre. A senior AFP officer said that after the information leaks ‘politics really came into play’, and senior Polri officials received instructions from above to cut off the AFP. Of the travel advisory issue—which continued to cast a shadow over the Polri-AFP relationship in the years that followed—a Polri officer said, ‘It affects our tourism, it is a political thing. The chief of police needs to go to Cabinet and explain this.’ On top of these immediate concerns, the AFP’s continued involvement in counter-terrorism operations in Indonesia was becoming politically unpalatable so many years after the 2002 Bali bombings. From a professional perspective, the information leaks fractured the strong bond that had developed between the AFP and Polri. One of Polri’s most senior terrorism investigators said there was a loss of trust: ‘We are very open with Australia. No other country is like us in being so open, but then the issues like the travel advisories happened and things changed after that.’ Many other police officers on both sides also described the information leaks as a breach of trust. Secrecy and loyalty are core values of police culture. As policing scholars have observed, ‘Among the attitudes and values identified as characteristics of a police culture are adhering to a code of silence, with grave consequences for violating it, and maintaining loyalty to other officers above all else’ (Cox et al 2013: 102). Polri’s leadership took the view that the AFP had failed to honour these values and should be frozen out. It was not all bad news. Another major reason why the AFP was excluded from the counter-terrorism space in Indonesia was the growth in Polri’s capacity in the years after the 2002 Bali bombings. When the 2009 hotel bombings in Jakarta occurred, Polri had the skills and confidence to investigate terrorism on its own. One Polri officer commented, ‘I can say that in 2009 we have more experience than Australia. So how can Australia help?’ An AFP officer described it as a ‘natural progression’, and a testament to the capacity building assistance the AFP had provided to Polri over many years.

New Opportunities, New Challenges After the downturn in the policing relationship in 2007, the AFP set about regaining Polri’s trust. As was the case when Graham Ashton was posted in

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Indonesia a decade earlier, this involved an investment in personal relationships as much as anything else. While counter-terrorism cooperation between the two police forces has never been the same, it was not called off altogether. When asked whether Polri would call upon the AFP if there was another major terrorist bombing in Indonesia, a Polri officer said, ‘We are still in touch, we are still speaking. If there is something we cannot do it is easy for us to say “Hey brother, we have a problem.”’ In recent years, there has also been renewed impetus for Polri-AFP collaboration to help navigate a changing terrorist landscape. Most notably, the rise of the so-called Islamic State has given the two police forces a new common enemy. From 2007, cooperation in response to other transnational crimes also became an increasing focus of the bilateral policing relationship. In particular, when people smuggling re-emerged as a major political issue in Australia from late 2008, the AFP was directed to ramp up its engagement with Polri in this area. As people smuggling had remained a low political priority in Indonesia, the AFP’s Jakarta-based officers initially struggled to achieve this, with one suggesting it was ‘like trying to sell ice to eskimos’. Australian politicians were willing to commit millions of dollars to Indonesia for support tackling people smuggling but, while the additional funding helped, it was not in itself sufficient. As Australia was the destination country for asylum seekers, and Indonesia was only a transit point, many Indonesians believed people smuggling was primarily Australia’s problem. Further complicating cooperative efforts on people smuggling was a bilateral dispute in late 2009. On 16 October 2009, 78 Sri Lankan asylum seekers were rescued in Indonesia’s search and rescue zone by an Australian ship called the Oceanic Viking. Initially, the Indonesian government refused to accept the asylum seekers for processing. President Yudhoyono eventually acceded on humanitarian grounds after entreaties from Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd but the situation remained tense because the asylum seekers refused to disembark. The stand-off lasted a month. A senior AFP officer suggested that the incident made the cooperative relationship with Polri much more difficult because it ‘politicised everything’. Despite the politics, the AFP and Polri were able to collaborate on combating people smuggling during this period because of the strength of their professional and organisational links. An AFP officer who was in Jakarta at the time said, ‘We only got assistance from the [Indonesian] police because of our long-standing relationship. The AFP were “brothers”. We had assisted them to combat terrorism and they felt a loyalty towards us.’ In September 2009, Indonesia’s police chief approved the establishment of a taskforce (Satgas) within Polri to combat people smuggling. The AFP supported the Satgas to set up a central office in Polri’s Jakarta headquarters and 12 provincial offices in people smuggling hotspots across the archipelago. It also provided training, equipment and funding for Satgas operations. The creation of the Satgas provided a much stronger platform for people smuggling cooperation between the two police forces. AFP officers began

A Common Enemy: Police Cooperation between Australia and Indonesia 229 travelling around Indonesia with their Satgas counterparts to disrupt people smuggling ventures and apprehend the smugglers. Both sides worked long hours, with the AFP trailing behind to show solidarity in cases where Satgas officers were required to exercise formal police powers. One AFP officer compared these joint investigations to the counter‑terrorism cooperation between the police after the 2002 Bali bombings: We were out in the field, deploying together and staying in the same hotels. We were living and breathing with these people. After a period of time you are part of the family. It is one team. There is no separation unless it relates to a formal police process.

A Satgas officer commented, ‘We had a great spirit to combat people smuggling and put the people smugglers in jail. We were working side-by-side.’ Another AFP officer highlighted the importance of relationships developed between officers in the field: ‘Obviously it is helpful to have money and equipment, but I think a lot of it has to do with both the personal and professional relationships you develop over time.’ The police culture, reinforced by personal ties, created a powerful bond. Polri and the AFP also began a major program of cybercrime cooperation during this period. Cybercrime was an increasing priority for Polri, and the project helped create goodwill in support of their engagement on people smuggling. In 2011, the two police forces launched the Cyber Crime Investigations Centre in Polri’s Jakarta headquarters, with additional satellite centres rolled out in the years that followed. The AFP contributed A$9 million to assist with infrastructure and training in the start-up phase. Again, the project’s success owed much to the professional and personal relationships between AFP and Polri officers. In 2013, a new crisis in the bilateral relationship threatened to disturb the cooperative momentum the AFP and Polri had achieved in response to people smuggling and other transnational crimes. On 18 November 2013, ABC News and Guardian Australia jointly published allegations that Australia’s intelligence services had attempted to intercept the phone calls of President Yudhoyono, his wife, and other senior Indonesian officials in 2009. The allegations were based on material leaked by former US national security agency contractor Edward Snowden. The spying allegations were front-page news in Indonesia. Kompas ran the headline ‘Australia is not a good neighbor’, quoting the head of the foreign affairs commission Mahfudz Siddiq. An editorial in Tempo stated that the surveillance was ‘not the actions of a friend’. Declaring that ‘Indonesia is not an inferior nation’, Media Indonesia expressed support for the government’s decision to recall its ambassador and called for further retaliatory measures (Dibley and Graham 2013). The twitter hashtag ‘#Ganyang Australia’—meaning ‘Crush Australia’—became popular, and protestors rallied outside the Australian embassy. Facing growing pressure at home, Yudhoyono issued a (somewhat vague) directive to halt military, intelligence and people smuggling cooperation with Australia. Cooperation would only recommence, he stated, once the Australian government had provided a proper explanation of the spying allegations and

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the two countries had negotiated a code of conduct. While it was clear that all cooperation between defence and intelligence agencies was suspended, the impact of Yudhoyono’s directive on police cooperation was less certain. Most Polri officers indicated that their personal relationships with Australian counterparts were not affected by the spying scandal, and no trust had been lost. Nonetheless, they were very conscious of following (and being seen to follow) the directive. In an interview with Kompas, the head of the AFP in Indonesia, Chris Sheehan, appealed to the policing brotherhood: ‘Although there is an issue between our Australian government and the Indonesian government, we consider Indonesian police as our brothers and will always do so’ (Prabowo 2013). Similarly, an Indonesian police officer commented that Polri officers wanted to continue cooperating because ‘the police task is about all human beings and the spying controversy is just about the politicians’. After a period of uncertainty, police cooperation on people smuggling and cybercrime was suspended, but cooperation in response to terrorism and other transnational crimes continued. An AFP officer said that engagement was still difficult in the absence of a political resolution to the spying scandal but ‘relationships and trust get you through’. In August 2014, after the Indonesian election but before Yudhoyono ended his term in office, the two countries finally signed a short code of conduct on intelligence. More time passed before a directive trickled down to Indonesian officials that they were free to recommence all cooperation. An AFP officer working in Indonesia said that, once this occurred, the AFP and Polri simply picked up where they had left off: ‘It was almost like nothing had happened.’ Within a few weeks, two major people smugglers were arrested in Indonesia as a result of joint operations between the two police forces. The spying scandal provides a further example of the resilience of the Polri-AFP relationship in the face of bilateral political tensions. In the years since, the two police forces have continued to cooperate in response to a broad range of crime types. The AFP has downsized its operations in Indonesia during this period—with around 10 officers now in-country—but this primarily reflects changing needs and priorities on both sides rather than a cooling of relations. While the future of the Polri-AFP relationship is by no means assured, with much depending on their capacity to grasp new opportunities for collaboration and negotiate the inevitable challenges to achieving it, the foundations of the relationship remain strong.

Bureaucratic Subcultures By tracing the history of police cooperation between Australia and Indonesia, this chapter has shown that such cooperation is not simply a manifestation of international politics. Instead, its first-hand accounts of the Polri-AFP r­elationship suggest that international police cooperation relies on the participating police forces achieving a sufficient level of independence from their respective ­political

A Common Enemy: Police Cooperation between Australia and Indonesia 231 centres.17 Polri only gained such independence following its separation from the Indonesian military in the late 1990s. It was at this point that its c­ooperative relationship with the AFP, which has always had operational autonomy, began to flourish. For international police cooperation to be sustained, it is also evident that the participating police forces must share a common organisational interest in the fight against transnational crime.18 This chapter contains numerous examples of the AFP and Polri coming together to pursue this common interest. The joint Polri-AFP team that tracked down the Bali bombers is particularly emblematic of their shared mission. From a professional perspective, this common organisational interest can be reframed in terms of police culture. Many AFP and Polri officers discussed the cooperative relationship in the context of their membership of a global policing community or ‘brotherhood’. As well as emphasising their common interest in fighting crime, officers on both sides stated that the police had a common language and outlook, and a sense of solidarity. Some also claimed that the police culture insulated them from tensions in the broader bilateral relationship. Of course, police culture is neither monolithic nor static, and embodies the power structures of the societies being policed. Some female officers interviewed for this study felt a degree of exclusion from this culture, as reflected in the concept of a ‘brotherhood’. In addition, a shared police culture does not in itself guarantee that police from two different countries will always see eye-to-eye. While police culture may be a unifying force, broader cultural differences between AFP and Polri officers—including in language, etiquette and protocol—can undermine their cooperative endeavours. This was raised in multiple police interviews as an area where the policing relationship could be improved. As one Polri officer put it, ‘There is a universal concept of policing, but it must be mixed together with local culture. It is necessary to “think global, act local.”’ Personal and organisational relationships also matter. One AFP officer described the way bonds formed between police from the two countries as follows, ‘You are a copper, I am a copper. You are Polri, I am AFP. Then you had to work on developing personal relationships.’ This ‘work’ often occurs outside the professional context during meals, golf games, and karaoke sessions. It is made easier by another welldocumented aspect of police culture: the tendency of police to socialise with each other. In this and other ways, police culture reinforces, and is reinforced by, personal and organisational relationships. When all three elements were strong in the years after the 2002 Bali bombings, the policing relationship proved highly resilient. Might the police’s ability to develop and execute cooperative initiatives at a distance from bilateral politics be replicated by other government agencies from the two countries? Based on the findings above, this will depend on the distance of these agencies from their respective political centres, and the degree to which

17  18 

Deflem (2002: 21) refers to this independence as ‘structural bureaucratic autonomy’. Deflem (2002: 22) refers to this common interest as ‘operational bureaucratic autonomy’.

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their organisational interests overlap. It will also depend on the professional and personal ties that exist between their officers. This begs another question: might other bureaucrats from the two countries be part of shared professional subcultures that facilitate cooperation between them? It seems likely, although these subcultures may not be as well-defined as police culture. On the one hand, it is reasonable to assume that many bureaucrats would share goals, values and attitudes that derive from their professional milieus. On the other hand, police culture is somewhat unique, animated by the nexus of authority and danger peculiar to the policing profession (Skolnick 2011: 39-61). For the police, cooperation means more than just pursuing common interests. It is about fighting a common enemy.

References AAP (2002a) ‘Howard Dubbed “Deputy Sheriff ”’, Sydney Morning Herald, 2 December. AAP (2002b) ‘Smiling Assassin Interview “A Circus”: Police Chief ’, Sydney ­Morning Herald, 14 November. AAP (2004) ‘Indonesia Warns of Bali Backlash’, Sydney Morning Herald, 26 August. AFP (2006) ‘Yudhoyono Calls for Review of Aust Cooperation’, ABC News, 3 April. Alford, Peter (2012) ‘Out of the Flames’, The Australian, 6 October. Australian Federal Police (2005) ‘AFP Stands by Its International Role to Combat Drug Trafficking’, Media Release, 26 October. Bigo, Didier (2000) ‘Liaison Officers in Europe: New Officers in the European Security Field’ in JWE Sheptycki (ed), Issues in Transnational Policing ­(London, Routledge). Clark, Muradi (2014) Politics and Governance in Indonesia: The Police in the Era of Reformasi (Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge). Commonwealth of Australia (2002) ‘Official Committee Hansard: Senate Select Committee on a Certain Maritime Incident’, 11 July. Cox, Steven M; McCamey, William P; and Scaramella, Gene L (2013) ‘The Police Culture’ in Introduction to Policing (Thousand Oaks, California, Sage). Deflem, Mathieu (2002) Policing World Society: Historical Foundations of International Police Cooperation (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Dibley, Arjuna and Graham, Tim (2013) ‘“Australia Is Not a Good Neighbour”: Indonesian Reactions to the Spying Saga’, The Lowy Interpreter, 20 November. Forbes, Mark and Moore, Matthew (2002) ‘Raids Threaten Bali Cooperation, Indonesia Warns’, The Age, 11 July. Hunter, Fergus (2015) ‘AFP Breaks Silence: Key Questions and Answers from Bali Nine Press Conference’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 4 May. International Crisis Group (2001) ‘Indonesia: National Police Reform’, ICG Asia Report 13 (Jakarta/Brussels, 20 February). Masters, Chris (2006) ‘Interview—Mick Keelty’, Four Corners, 27 March.

A Common Enemy: Police Cooperation between Australia and Indonesia 233 McGibbon, Rodd (2006) ‘Pitfalls of Papua: Understanding the Conflict and Its Place in Australia–Indonesia Relations’, Lowy Institute Paper 13 (Sydney, The Lowy Institute). Meliala, Adrianus (2001) ‘Police as Military: Indonesia’s Experience’ 24(3) Policing 423. Mottram, Linda (2012) ‘John Howard Reflects on Receiving the “Horror” News from Bali’, ABC Radio, 11 October. Nafik, Muhammad and Unidjaja, Fabiola Desy (2001) ‘Stop Megaphone ­Diplomacy, Indonesia Tells PM Howard’, The Jakarta Post, 13 November. Parkinson, Tony (2002) ‘Why Did Indonesia’s Police Chief Laugh with the Bali Bomber?’, The Age, 15 November. Perlez, Jane (2002) ‘Threats and Responses: The Investigators; Police Official ­Independent and Known for Bluntness’, New York Times, 23 November. Prabowo, Dani (2013) ‘Polisi Australia: Kami Akan Tetap Kerja Sama dengan Polri’, Kompas, 2 December. Riley, Mark; Moore, Matthew; and Paul Daley (2002) ‘ASIO Raids Justified, Claims PM’, Sydney Morning Herald, 2 November. Sifris, Ronli (2007) ‘Balancing Abolitionism and Cooperation on the World’s Scale: The Case of the Bali Nine’ 35(1) Federal Law Review 107. Skolnick, Jerome H (2011) ‘A Sketch of the Policeman’s Working Personality’ in Justice without Trial: Law Enforcement in Democratic Society, 4th edn (New Orleans, Quid Pro Books). Sukma, Rizal and Prasetyono, Edy (2003) ‘Security Sector Reform in Indonesia: The Military and the Police’, Working Paper Series (The Hague, Netherlands Institute of International Relations, February). Suwarni, Yuli Tri and Maryono (2007) Agus ‘Police Deny Australian Favoritism’, The Jakarta Post, 15 June. Whiddett, Adrien (1999) ‘Reflections on 20 Years of the Australian Federal Police’, Platypus Magazine, October. Yudhoyono, Susilo Bambang (2006) ‘Opening Remarks of Dr Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, President of the Republic of Indonesia’, 19th INTERPOL Asian Regional Conference, Jakarta, 11 April.

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13 Successful Justice Sector Collaboration: A Prerequisite for a Healthy Australia-Indonesia Relationship DENNY INDRAYANA

Indonesia and Australia were destined to be next-door neighbours, separated only by a small stretch of sea. The countries might be close geographically but in so many other aspects of life they are vastly different. Relations between them therefore need to be carefully managed for the benefit of the citizens of both countries. Indonesia and Australia have, in fact, had a long and turbulent history. The relationship has been likened to a roller coaster ride or a love-hate relationship. The times when relations are strong have invariably been followed by a crisis— and none bigger than the secession of East Timor. Indonesians are still smarting from the loss of the territory in 1999, which many believe occurred because of Australian intervention. In recent years, the Australia-Indonesia relationship has been strained by: ­tensions over asylum seekers; the tapping of the phones of senior Indonesian officials by Australian intelligence; trade in illicit drugs; and the execution of two members of the so-called Bali Nine, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. But despite this turmoil, Indonesia and Australia must continue to work together. Geographic realities mean that no matter how fraught relations become, compromises must always be sought. For two neighbouring countries, a close alliance will always offer more benefits than repeated squabbling. Australia and Indonesia should prioritise peaceful solutions to disagreements and avoid outright hostility or conflict, because positive interactions between the two countries are critical for the broader security of the region. I think many would agree that the two are ­leading countries and geopolitically influential in Southeast Asia. One of the most important fields of collaboration is the justice sector, as almost all the issues that disturb the bilateral relationship are at least partially related to law enforcement. A strong rule of law, with associated outcomes in access to justice and democratic governance, will contribute to mutually beneficial relations between Indonesia and Australia.

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While the Australia-Indonesia relationship often seems inordinately influenced by individual cases, broad collaboration in the justice sector does, in fact, exist. This is rarely reported but is critical for legal development in Indonesia. This ­chapter will explore this justice sector collaboration, first looking at the individual cases that dominate the media, and then exploring the rich collaboration that ­seldom captures the interest of the media in either country. It is important that this history of effective justice sector collaboration is better known. It can help create a richer understanding that goes beyond the differences of opinion over legal cases that have too often defined our relationship. This chapter will reflect on these issues from an Indonesian perspective, because I have a greater understanding of justice sector collaboration from that side. The chapter is coloured by my personal experience of law reform in Indonesia. In 2008, just three years after I completed my doctorate in law at the University of Melbourne, President Yudhoyono asked me to join the palace as Special Staff to the President on the Justice Sector (2008–09). Presumably my academic background was a factor in my selection, as President Yudhoyono recruited many special staffers with doctoral degrees from outside Indonesia.1 During his second term in office (2009–14), the president asked me to take on an expanded role as Special Staff to the President on Justice, Human Rights and the Eradication of Corruption, Collusion and Nepotism (2009–11). I left this position when he promoted me to Deputy Minister for Justice and Human Rights (2011–14). Accordingly, aside from a brief examination of the history of collaboration between both countries in the next section, this chapter will focus on the seven years from 2008 to 2015, a period when I was in government for much of the time.2 Before I elaborate on my experiences during the Yudhoyono era, however, it is important to briefly revisit the history of bilateral relations between Australia and Indonesia.

An Overview of the Bilateral Relationship The relationship between Indonesia and Australia has a long history, going back well before Indonesian Independence in 1945. Initially, relations between the two countries were smooth. Australia was one of the first countries to recognise

1  eg, Andi Mallarangeng and Dino Patti Djalal, who served as presidential special staff and spokesman respectively, hold doctoral degrees from the US and the UK. 2  The personal experience of the author is particularly relevant in this case, because my career is an example of successful justice sector collaboration. I am a recipient of an Australian Development Scholarship (ADS), and completed my doctoral studies in the Law School at the University of ­Melbourne, 2002–2005. During those three years I had the opportunity to conduct legal research and interact with the academic sector in Melbourne. This taught me that solutions to the legal problems between the two countries should not be sought exclusively through formal channels, which are often rigid, and in many cases do not result in a satisfactory solution.

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Indonesia’s right to independence: it offered de facto recognition of Indonesian sovereignty in July 1947 and recognised the Indonesian state de jure in ­December 1949. The Dutch government’s efforts to regain its colonial authority over Indonesia between 1945 and 1949 were hindered by the efforts of Australian maritime workers’ unions and the governments of the time. Australian dockworkers had refused to load or refuel Dutch ships travelling to Indonesia. In the United Nations Security Council, the Australian representative spoke loudly in defence of Indonesia. Colonel WR Hodgson described Dutch military aggression in December 1948 as a clear and intentional violation of peace by a member state and therefore grounds for the Netherlands to be dismissed from the United Nations. These statements convinced the Indonesian leaders to nominate Australia as one of the three member states of the UN-appointed Commission of Good Services. Australia represented Indonesia’s interests in the commission, which also included the US and Belgium (representing the Netherlands) and later became the United Nations Commission on Indonesia (UNCI), tasked with finding an end to the conflict between Indonesia and the Dutch. The UNCI actively monitored the negotiations between the two combatants, from talks on the USS Renville to the Round Table Conference. With ­Australia’s backing, these negotiations were ultimately successful, and the Netherlands ­formally recognised Indonesian independence on 27 December 1949 in The Hague. Australia then went on to co-sponsor Indonesia’s UN membership in 1950. Between 1947 and 1950, the relationship between Indonesia and Australia could hardly have been better, even though Indonesia was still so young. In defending its newly declared independence from re-colonisation by the Dutch, Indonesia deployed two strategies: diplomacy and armed conflict. For diplomacy to be ­successful, it needed the support of other countries, so Australia’s relatively early decision to back Indonesia was crucial. However, these friendly and harmonious relations did not last long. The relationship soured in the 1950s and 1960s, when Australia came to view Indonesia’s actions in the region as aggressive. Under President Soekarno, Indonesia attempted to re-claim West Papua (Irian) (1957–63) and opposed the formation of Malaysia in the Konfrontasi conflict (1963–66). Australia worried that if Indonesia secured West Papua it would also attempt to claim Papua New Guinea, which it administered. This fear of Indonesia’s expansionist ambitions increased with K ­ onfrontasi, and history shows that Australia supported Malaysia during the conflict, even fighting Indonesian troops in Kalimantan. The relationship between Australia and Indonesia improved when Soeharto came to power in 1967. The new Indonesian government’s virulently anticommunist stance was one of the most important factors in the rapid return to warm relations. Accordingly, Australia joined the Inter-Governmental Group on Indonesia (IGGI) in 1967, charged with coordinating development aid to the country. Cracks reappeared in the relationship when Indonesia invaded East Timor on 7 December 1975. The death of five Australian journalists in Balibo, East Timor,

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caused the relationship to deteriorate further. In 1980, Indonesia chose not to extend the visas of Radio Australia supervisor Joe Coman and his colleague, ABC journalist Warwick Butler, seeing their reports as overly critical, particularly on East Timor. This signalled an end to decades of ABC broadcasting in Indonesia, for years. Relations thawed when the Labor Party came to power in 1983, with the highlight being Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s acknowledgement of ­Indonesian ­sovereignty over East Timor on 22 August 1985. But relations did not stay a­ micable for long. In 1986, Sydney Morning Herald journalist David Jenkins p ­ ublished an article on President Soeharto and his family’s business interests, and the I­ ndonesian government responded fiercely. It cancelled a state visit by ­Minister for Research and Technology BJ Habibie, refused to grant visas to a planeload of ­Australian tourists who had landed in Bali, extended the ban on Australian ­journalists reporting in Indonesia and ceased all military cooperation. The g­ overnment even refused entry to an Australian journalist accompanying US President Ronald R ­ eagan on a visit to Bali. The crisis sparked by Jenkin’s article lasted another two years, with tensions only beginning to dissipate when the then Defence Minister Kim Beazley urged a return to broader defence and security cooperation with Indonesia in a statement on 23 February 1988. This led to nearly a decade of healthy relations. Although the Santa Cruz massacre in Dili, on 11 November 1991, generated a vocal response from the Australian people, the relationship remained close at the government level. This was largely down to the warm relations between Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas and his Australian counterpart, Gareth Evans, and between President Soeharto and Prime Minister Paul Keating. All these leaders worked hard to open the channels of communication and increase cooperation in the fields of politics, economics, security and culture. In 1995, three issues disrupted these warm relations, eventually bringing them to a halt, for a while at least. The first was Australia’s protest over the nomination of Lieutenant General HBL Mantiri as Indonesian ambassador to Australia on 6 July 1995. The second was Australia’s decision to grant visas to 18 East ­Timorese asylum seekers on 24 May 1995. The third was the burning of the Indonesian flag by Timorese independence protestors in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide. As a consequence of these events, the ambassador’s post sat vacant for nearly eight months, before Wirjono Sastrohandojo was finally installed on 6 December 1995. A Security Agreement between the two countries was signed soon afterwards, on 18 December. This agreement proved one of the most important in the history of Indonesia-Australia foreign and defence relations. It surprised many because it was negotiated in secret and only unveiled shortly before its signing. The surprise was even bigger because relations between the two ­countries seemed so poor in 1995. After the fall of Soeharto in 1998 and the period of reform that followed, the Indonesia-Australia relationship has continued to experience ups and downs. The process of transition from the New Order towards democratisation led to a series

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of domestic political and security difficulties, and this affected the dynamics of the relationship with Australia. East Timor’s vote for independence in 1999 and Australia’s participation in the Interfet peacekeeping taskforce then led to arguably the lowest-ever point in relations between the two countries. This brief overview of bilateral tensions has sought to demonstrate that the Australia-Indonesia relationship has always experienced instability. Changes in public opinion or the political climate cause the relationship to oscillate rapidly between moments of warmth and deep animosity. The remainder of this c­ hapter will examine contemporary relations between the two countries, focusing on ­justice sector collaboration under the Yudhoyono administration.

Bilateral Relations in the Yudhoyono Era Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono came to office on 20 October 2004 as the first president directly elected by the Indonesian people. This domestic legitimacy was a major asset for Yudhoyono as he sought to advance the country’s international diplomacy efforts during his 10 years in power. After a long period of relative obscurity following the collapse of the Soeharto regime, Indonesia under Yudhoyono became recognised as an important player in global affairs. This improvement in Indonesia’s broader international standing had implications for the country’s relationship with Australia. Yudhoyono’s efforts to improve the relationship with Australia actually began in 2002, when he was the coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs under President Megawati Soekarnoputri. After the first Jemaah Islamiyah bomb attack in Bali on 12 October 2002, which killed 88 Australians, Yudhoyono played a crucial role in coordinating counter-terrorism cooperation between the two countries. Following the tragedy, the countries focused on defence and security collaboration as part of the ‘War on Terror’, including direct military collaboration. Recognising that Indonesia and Australia shared similar strategic and security concerns, the countries signed a framework for security cooperation on 13 November 2006, in Mataram, Lombok, West Nusa Tenggara, now known as the Lombok Treaty. The agreement offered a framework of basic principles considered crucial for strengthening the bilateral relationship. It marked a new era in the relations between Indonesia and Australia because it provided clear parameters for approaching a number of longstanding and sensitive issues in the relationship. Embedded in the 2006 Lombok Treaty were principles of: equality and mutual benefit; respect for the sovereignty, territorial integrity, national unity and political independence of each other’s territories; and acknowledgement of global challenges, such as international terrorism, and military and non-military security threats. The Lombok Treaty repeated and reinforced earlier cooperation in the ­security sector replacing the security agreement signed in 1995 but torn up by Indonesia

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because of Australia’s intervention in East Timor (Rezasyah 2009: 1). The new Treaty covered collaboration in defence, law enforcement, counterterrorism, intelligence sharing, maritime affairs, airline safety and security, international trade in weapons, natural disaster response, and people-to-people links. It also contained an article that, at least from an Indonesian perspective, specifically prohibited the use of Australian territory as a base for the Papuan separatist struggle.3 After the signing of the Lombok Treaty, relations between the two countries were steady, with the only really significant disruption coming in late 2013, when the ABC and The Guardian Australia revealed that the Australian intelligence agency had tapped the phones of senior Indonesian officials, including the ­president and his wife. This event led to a major breakdown in relations, with ­President ­Yudhoyono expressing deep hurt and disappointment over the actions of the ­Australian government. Through his private Twitter account, Yudhoyono stated that the Indonesian government would ‘re-examine a number of our bilateral cooperation agenda [activities] as a result of Australia’s hurtful behaviour’. According to him, the intelligence ­gathering activities of the US and Australia were not appropriate for countries claiming to embrace democratic values, and had seriously damaged the strategic partnership with Indonesia. ‘I also deplore the statement by the ­Australian prime minister that made light of the spying of Indonesia, without any feeling of remorse’, he said. Ultimately, the president decided to suspend cooperation over military activities and management of asylum seekers, and the bilateral relationship did not regain any of its former vigour until Yudhoyono and Abbott met in Batam in June 2014, which led to Foreign Ministers Julie Bishop and Marty Natalegawa signing a reconciliation ‘Code of Conduct’ agreement in August that year. There are a number of interesting points to be made about the rapid escalation of diplomatic tensions between Indonesia and Australia during this period. The roots of the problem were the same as they have so often been in the past: a feeling of offence or hurt because national sovereignty and interests are seen as not being treated seriously or with respect. This feeling of anguish, when felt not only at the government level but also among the public in Indonesia, can have serious negative implications for collaboration between both countries. The spying scandal, in particular, was considered to have deeper political ramifications because it shattered President Yudhoyono’s concept of a foreign policy based on ‘one ­thousand friends, zero enemies’. This was not the only bilateral dispute to occur under President Yudhoyono’s rule, although it was the most serious. A couple of years earlier, the relationship 3 Art 2(3) states: ‘The Parties, consistent with their respective domestic laws and international ­ bligations, shall not in any manner support or participate in activities by any person or entity which o constitutes a threat to the stability, sovereignty or territorial integrity of the other Party, including by those who seek to use its territory for encouraging or committing such activities, including separatism, in the territory of the other Party’ [emphasis added].

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had been rocked by reports published in Fairfax papers based on diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks, accusing Yudhoyono of corruption and abuse of power. The Age ran the story on 11 March 2011, under the title: ‘Yudhoyono “abused power”: Cables accuse Indonesian president of corruption’. The Sydney Morning Herald published the same piece but used a more restrained title: ‘Corruption allegations against Yudhoyono’. The articles were published just as Vice President Boediono was visiting Canberra to discuss bureaucratic reform and anti-corruption measures in Indonesia. I was working as Special Staff to the President on Justice, Human Rights and Eradication of Corruption, Collusion and Nepotism at the time the revelations surfaced. I recall being summoned to the palace on the evening of 10 March, along with a number of other ministers and presidential staff, to discuss the articles, which were due to be published the following day. The palace knew about the articles because senior officials had been asked by Fairfax journalists to provide a response to the allegations. President Yudhoyono chaired the meeting, expressing regret that the newspapers would base their reports on an incorrect source from Wikileaks. The meeting discussed what, if any, legal action should be taken. Eventually Yudhoyono decided against suing the publications, electing instead to use his right of reply, which was delivered by Foreign Affairs Spokesman and Special Staff to the President, Teuku Faizasyah. This was consistent with the president’s longstanding support for freedom of the press, a principle he had demonstrated in the past by referring reports damaging to his or his family’s reputation to the Press Council (rather than pursuing defamation charges against the journalist or publication, which other lawmakers and senior government officials have been known to do). The president’s decision to avoid direct confrontation and use only his right of reply was a crucial factor in ensuring that The Age and Sydney Morning Herald reports did not cause lasting damage to the Indonesia-Australia relationship. Another case that proved pivotal in the Australia-Indonesia relationship was that of Schapelle Corby, convicted in 2005 of attempting to smuggle 4.2 kilograms of marijuana into Indonesia. Corby’s case regularly agitated the relationship, and it flared up again when I served as Deputy Minister of Justice and Human Rights. The Indonesian government made three legal decisions on Corby’s case during this period that aggravated the Indonesian public. The first was the granting of remissions by the Minister of Justice and Human Rights; the second was President Yudhoyono’s decision to grant a five-year sentence reduction (clemency) in 2012; and the third was the granting of parole in 2014 by the Minister of Justice and Human Rights. The then Minister of Justice and Human Rights was Amir Syamsuddin, who served under President Yudhoyono from 2011–14. He routinely approved sentence reductions proposed by his ministry on religious holidays and the anniversary of Indonesian Independence, in accordance with Indonesian law. Such remissions often cause controversy, as critics believe that crimes such as narcotics offences and corruption should not be eligible for remissions, claiming that this negates the potential deterrent effect of the sentences imposed. Proponents of ­remissions

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argue, meanwhile, that remissions are the right of all inmates, and should be ­available to any person who fulfils the legal and behavioural requirements. The critics should know that Indonesia has, in fact, on several occasions tightened regulations around the granting of remissions for so-called ‘special crimes’, which include narcotics, corruption and terrorism offenses. The most recent of these was Government Regulation (PP, Peraturan Pemerintah) No 99 of 2012, which states that inmates convicted of offences in this special category must ­cooperate as ‘justice collaborators’ to be eligible for remissions. These stricter rules were implemented not only to create a stronger deterrent effect but also to prevent bureaucratic corruption in the corrections system, where remissions, parole and other sentence reductions could be bought for a price. In Corby’s case, she remained eligible for remissions because PP No 99 of 2012 could not be applied retrospectively to her case. Corby had been sentenced, and the decision on her case had become final and binding, long before the regulation was passed on 12 November 2012. The previous regulation on remissions, PP No 32 of 1999, contained much more lenient provisions on sentence reductions, and this is what allowed her to be eligible for conditional release. If she had been sentenced after 12 November 2012, she would not only have been ineligible for sentence reductions but would also not have fulfilled the requirements for conditional release (parole). At the same time that the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights was being ­battered in the media for granting remissions and conditional release to a convicted narcotics criminal, the behaviour of Corby and her family was deeply unhelpful and counterproductive to her cause. Schapelle Corby and her sister, Mercedes Corby, offered an exclusive interview to an Australian national television station. While Schapelle did not go ahead with the interview, Mercedes spoke on her behalf, and maintained Schapelle’s innocence, sparking a ferocious backlash from the Indonesian public. We in the ministry were very close to cancelling Corby’s parole. But Justice and Human Rights Minister Amir Syamsuddin approached the situation with intelligence and equanimity. He asked me to contact Mercedes and warn her against making further provocative or inflammatory remarks in the media that could jeopardise Schapelle’s parole.4 He also asked me to suggest that she make a public statement apologising and asking for forgiveness from the Indonesian people. Soon after, Mercedes gave a press conference where she did just that, and public anger was effectively controlled. Of course, Corby’s case did not only cause controversy at the time of her release. The government also faced fierce criticism following President Yudhoyono’s ­decision to grant her clemency appeal in 2012, reducing her sentence from 4  This was done on the basis of Government Regulation (PP) No 32 of 1999 and Minister of Law and Human Rights Regulation No 21 of 2013, which provides that one of the conditions for revocation of a conditional release is where the convicted person ‘menimbulkan keresahan dalam masyarakat’ (creates public disturbance).

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20 to 15 years in prison. In fact, the grant of clemency for narcotics offenders will always provoke a strong reaction in Indonesia, and the government will always be accused of not being serious about eliminating the drug trade, no matter what the circumstances are. Yudhoyono’s decision was, in fact, challenged at the State Administrative Court, the Pengadilan Tata Usaha Negara (PTUN), with prominent legal expert Professor Yusril Ihza Mahendra leading the case against the ­government. Although Yusril is known for rarely losing a case, in this instance the PTUN stated that clemency was the prerogative right of the president, and could not be challenged in the court. As we know, Bali Nine members Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran had an entirely different outcome to their clemency applications, which were submitted under President Yudhoyono but decided by President Joko Widodo (Jokowi). Their application was rejected outright in early 2015 and they were executed by firing squad on 29 April 2015. What do these two vastly different responses to clemency tell us about Indonesian government policy on the death penalty, especially for narcotics offenders? Given my experience as special staff to the president and deputy ­minister, I am in a better position to answer this question in relation to the ­Yudhoyono administration rather than that of Jokowi, which appears to have a very different political style and policy direction to its predecessor. President Yudhoyono also came under fire when he granted the clemency applications of four people on death row in 2011 and 2012, commuting their death sentences to life in prison. In my position, as special staff and deputy minister I was able to discuss these and Corby’s cases with the president in a number of special meetings, and his rationale in all cases was the same. I attended one such meeting as deputy minister, when President Yudhoyono was deciding the clemency applications of criminals sentenced to death. He considered these meetings to be of great consequence, and all related government agencies were therefore invited to offer their perspective.5 Granting clemency involves a number of steps. First, according to Indonesian law, the president must consider the advice of the Supreme Court. Second, because the Supreme Court’s opinion is not binding on the president, before making a decision the president will also seek the advice of the relevant ministries and related parties. If the case involved a foreign national, for example, the president would also seek the opinion of the foreign affairs minister. On a personal level, President Yudhoyono did not agree with the death penalty. He nevertheless acknowledged that it was a part of the ‘positive law’ of ­Indonesia, and recognised that the Constitutional Court had recently ruled that the death penalty was not in conflict with the right to life under the 1945 Indonesian

5 In addition to President Yudhoyono, senior officials attending the meeting included: Vice President Boediono; Coordinating Minister for Political, Legal, and Security Affairs Djoko Suyanto; Minister of the State Secretary Sudi Silalahi; Foreign Affairs Minister Marty Natalegawa; Attorney ­General Basrief Arif; Police Chief Timur Pradopo; Cabinet Secretary Dipo Alam; and myself, attending on behalf of Minister of Justice and Human Rights Amir Syamsuddin.

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­ onstitution. Yet Yudhoyono maintained that the death penalty must be impleC mented very carefully, in limited circumstances, or even be subject to a moratorium. From my observation, Yudhoyono’s position appears to be based on the following considerations. First, he recognised a global trend towards abolition of the death penalty or, in situations where this was not possible, implementing a moratorium on its use. Second, he knew that there were many Indonesians on death row abroad, and that the majority of them had committed narcotics crimes, as well as murder. Yudhoyono realised that Indonesia’s advocacy efforts on behalf of Indonesians on death row abroad would be seriously compromised if it continued to implement the death penalty at home. As mentioned, the Constitutional Court upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty in 2007. This decision was a momentous moment for the brief history of constitutional review in Indonesia. It was a knife-edge decision, with five Constitutional Court justices ruling that the death penalty did not conflict with the Constitution, and the remaining four dissenting. One of the judges who examined the case said at the time that if the petitioner was not a narcotics criminal, the decision could have easily gone the other way, resulting in the elimination of the death penalty in Indonesia. But because the petitioner was a narcotics criminal, he explained, he did not want to appear to be defending the drug trade. This admission demonstrates the potency of ­public opinion in influencing judges’ decisions on the death penalty for narcotics ­offenders. Although such pressure is unavoidable, a Constitutional Court judge should be able to put aside these concerns and make an independent legal decision according to the facts of the case. Examining the text of the 1945 Constitution, it is hard to reach any other conclusion than that the judges who argued for the constitutionality of the death penalty did so based on public opinion. Article 28I of the Constitution describes the right to life as a non-derogable right, meaning that it cannot be revoked under any circumstances. Judges should have ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional. But they did not, and the death sentences of the three Australian petitioners, Scott Rush, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, remained in place.6 Nearly eight years later, Chan and Sukumaran were put to death. Concrete cases such as these involving Australian (or Indonesian) citizens have a significant impact on the relations between the two countries. After the execution of Chan and Sukumaran, Australia recalled its ambassador to Indonesia, Paul Grigson. Indonesia-Australia relations soured once again. It did not help matters that the executions were almost immediately followed by a 40% reduction in Australia’s foreign aid allocation to Indonesia. Although the reduction in the aid budget was the result of months of planning, the cut led to an unavoidable but

6 Scott Rush’s death sentence was reduced to life in prison by the Indonesian Supreme Court in 2011.

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predictable view—at least among Indonesian observers—that the budget was cut in retaliation for the execution of the two Australians. The drop in the aid budget provided an ideal opportunity to discuss broader cooperation in the justice sector, not only in relation to specific cases, which have thus far dominated justice sector collaboration between Australia and ­Indonesia. Unfortunately, such discussions have not taken place, at least not in any substantive way. This is a great pity. If Australia and Indonesia were able to work together more effectively in the justice sector, then many of the problems discussed above could have been resolved. As mentioned, legal or law enforcement problems have played a significant part in almost every issue that has disrupted the relationship.

Justice Sector Collaboration between Indonesia and Australia Before examining the range of justice sector initiatives involving Indonesia and Australia it is important to define what exactly is meant by justice sector collaboration. In its broadest sense, justice sector collaboration can include fields such as defence and intelligence—the type of cooperation described under the 2006 Lombok Treaty. A narrower definition would restrict justice sector cooperation to matters of law enforcement, for example, transnational crimes like people smuggling, money laundering, terrorism, corruption, illegal fishing, cybercrime, narcotics trade, illegal weapons and ammunitions trade, and other crimes considered important by Australia and Indonesia (Rezasyah 2009: 14). This narrow definition of justice sector cooperation might also include justice sector reform, such as efforts to build a court system that is more transparent and accountable, as well as efforts to improve access to justice for Indonesia’s poorest citizens. This chapter is primarily concerned with this narrower definition of justice ­sector cooperation, as this is my main area of experience. Before discussing the contemporary challenges of justice sector collaboration, however, it is worth looking briefly at the extradition arrangements between our two countries. The existence of an extradition treaty is a measure of the strength of justice sector cooperation between two countries. It demonstrates a degree of mutual trust, and expedites collaboration in the sector.

Extradition As demonstrated above, Indonesia and Australia can become more intimate— or, more often, estranged—at times when the countries’ leaders are dragged into commenting on or contemplating specific legal cases, such as those involving corruption, narcotics offences and people smuggling. Solving such cases is not easy.

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In addition to the principle of judicial independence, issues of national s­ overeignty often complicate advocacy over legal cases involving Indonesian or Australian citizens. This is all the more unusual when one considers that at the formal level, justice sector cooperation between Indonesia and Australia is in a better shape than many other countries. Take the example of extradition. While many of Indonesia’s other neighbours have refused to sign extradition treaties with Indonesia, Indonesia and Australia have had an agreement since 22 April 1992, formalised into Indonesian law on 2 November 1994 by the passage of Law No 8 of 1994. This treaty is one of only eight extradition agreements Indonesia has with its neighbours: Malaysia (1974), Philippines (1976), Thailand (1978), South Korea (2007), India (2014), Papua New Guinea (2015), and Vietnam (2015).7 The agreement with Australia was further strengthened by the passage of Law No 1 of 1999 on the Treaty between the Republic of Indonesia and Australia on Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters. There have been at least two cases that have captured the Indonesian ­public’s attention since the signing of the extradition treaty with Australia: Hendra Rahardja and Adrian Kiki Ariawan, and both involved corruption. Unfortunately, Hendra Rahardja died in custody in Australia in 2007 while extradition proceedings were underway. Adrian Kiki Ariawan, meanwhile, was extradited to Indonesia in January 2014 following a process that began in December 2010, when ­Australian Minister of Justice and Home Affairs Brendan O’Connor granted Indonesia’s extradition request for the former Bank Surya executive. The process dragged on over a number of years because the Federal Court quashed O’Connor’s ruling in 2012, and upheld this decision on appeal in 2013. Although Rahardja was never extradited, both cases are, in fact, examples of effective collaboration in the justice sector. Further, these cases involved charges of corruption, a particular focus of law enforcement efforts in Indonesia. The support of the Australian government was a major factor in the success of the extradition process. Although the process consumed about five years, it is not ­unusual for cases to be drawn out over several years, especially where they involve the laws of two countries, which, of course, increases complexity. Experience has shown that it is not easy to resolve corruption cases when the suspect has fled to another country that does not have an extradition treaty with Indonesia. In such cases, Indonesia’s efforts to capture the fugitive not only fail in many instances but also cause significant state losses because of the funds that must be expended for, among other things, hiring foreign lawyers. The successful extradition of this corruption convict should be recognised as the first step toward more effective collaboration in the justice sector between ­Australia and Indonesia. These cases could even be publicised as examples of effective extradition cooperation between countries, and are of particular relevance 7  In addition to these eight countries, Indonesia signed an agreement with Hong Kong before the People’s Republic of China was responsible for the administration of the territory. The agreement with Singapore (2007), meanwhile, has yet to be ratified.

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to neighbours like Singapore, which does not yet have a formal agreement with Indonesia. Underpinning successful extradition cases is a sense of mutual respect, a fundamental principle in successful bilateral relations. Without mutual respect, it is near impossible to achieve effective collaboration in the justice sector, as international law can easily provide procedural or substantial impediments to bilateral cooperation. A further reason that the cases of Hendra Rahardja and Adrian Kiki Ariawan were managed successfully—in addition to a desire to help and the principle of mutual respect—was the understanding that corruption must be eradicated, and that often means working across borders. When Indonesia submitted its extradition request, it provided evidence of the crimes committed, and Australia showed clear support from the beginning of the process. Another important factor contributing to success was the intense communication and coordination between the central authorities of both countries. While I was serving as the deputy minister, attempting to facilitate the extradition of Adrian Kiki Ariawan, I ensured that the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights carried out its tasks without fault, and coordinated regularly with relevant Indonesian law enforcement bodies (the KPK or Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi or Corruption Eradication Commission, the National Police and the Prosecutor’s Office), as well as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The 1999 Treaty on Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters served to strengthen the potential for successful extradition between Indonesia and Australia. The reciprocal agreement was needed to overcome the problem of fugitives ­misusing provisions in international law to evade capture. More detailed regulations on ­justice sector cooperation were desperately needed. As explained above, the Indonesia-Australia relationship has been coloured by a variety of specific legal cases, many of which relate to transnational crime. In addition to corruption cases, which have been a focus of extradition proceedings, ­people smuggling and narcotics crime have caused significant disruption to relations. The author was involved in the management of these cases, both when ­serving as Special Staff to the president and as deputy minister.

People Smuggling People smuggling is a perennial concern for Indonesia and Australia.8 Thousands of asylum seekers fleeing conflict in places such as Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Sri Lanka and Myanmar have arrived in Indonesia to attempt the treacherous journey from the south coast of West Java to the Australian territory of Christmas

8 

For a detailed discussion of the impact of people smuggling on the bilateral relationship, see ch 8.

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Island. At the end of 2014, there were more than 10,000 asylum seekers and refugees registered with the United Nations High Commission on Refugees in Jakarta, including 1,123 children with no adult guardian (Missbach and McNevin 2015). Most asylum seekers and refugees who arrive in Indonesia only ever intend to transit through the country on the way to Australia, which, as a party to the United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees, is obliged to protect the human rights of all asylum seekers and refugees who arrive there. Despite not being a party to the convention, a challenge for Indonesia is that when it captures asylum seekers and refugees attempting to make the journey to Australia, it is forced to release most of them again, because they have registered with the UNHCR. This is not always the case. Some register with UNHCR only after they are detained, and others are detained even though they are already registered. In any case, international law provides that, once registered with the UNHCR, asylum seekers and refugees cannot be deported to their countries of origin (refoulement). If detained, they are typically housed in one of Indonesia’s Immigration Detention Centres, of which there are just 13 across the entire country. It is not difficult to see why the problem has not been solved. As part of efforts to address it, Indonesia and Australia have held a routine meeting since 2002. Known as the Bali Process, it brings together several countries to discuss strategies for managing refugees and illegal immigrants. The Bali Process has had a remarkably positive impact on Indonesia-Australia relations. Through the forum, both countries have agreed to bolster the enforcement of people smuggling crime and have developed training programmes that bring law enforcement officials together with immigration management experts. These efforts were further fortified when Indonesia and Australia signed a cooperative agreement on the elimination of people smuggling and human trafficking on 9 March 2010. The agreement included strategies to: reduce incentives for onward movement; provide temporary accommodation in Indonesia; assist with timely resettlement, including voluntary return to countries of origin (or involuntary resettlement for those not protected by international law); and, last but not least, provide stronger protection for victims of human trafficking, particularly women and children, with full respect for their human rights. It is my view that effective cooperation that coordinates strategies for prevention and enforcement must be increased. To strengthen prevention, Indonesia should continue to reform its national regulations to bring them into line with international law. There is concern in some quarters that by revamping or modernising its detention centres, Indonesia will attract increasing numbers of asylum seekers and refugees. But whether it wants to or not, Indonesia needs to provide adequate facilities, especially for those asylum seekers and refugees protected under international law. As they stand, Indonesia’s detention centres are overcrowded and their facilities inadequate. At the same time, cooperation to enforce the law firmly against people smugglers is critical. This is unfortunately not easily achieved, as unscrupulous individuals in the Indonesian security forces are known to collaborate with people

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smugglers. The law must come down harshly against those well-off individuals seeking to profit from people smuggling, but a different approach is needed for members of the public, often teenagers or members of poor families, who have become involved in the trade as a way out of poverty. For these economically disadvantaged individuals, for example in East Nusa Tenggara (NTT) province in remote eastern Indonesia, the emphasis of justice sector cooperation should be on preventing them from becoming involved in the trade. In this context, the Australia Indonesia Partnership for Justice (AIPJ), an Australian-funded aid facility working in Indonesia’s justice sector, supported efforts to strengthen governance in NTT. This is an effective first step to prevent increases in people smuggling. The logic is that people smuggling is more likely to flourish in environments where governments are corrupt, so clean and effective governance will have a positive outcome on people smuggling. As a province that has long struggled with high levels of corruption, it was ­initially not easy to convince the NTT provincial government to cooperate in a corruption eradication programme. The NTT governor at first refused to collaborate, declaring there was no problem with corruption in his province. Although it was a much slower process than with the neighbouring province of West Nusa Tenggara (NTB), following a period of patient communication and persuasion, the NTT governor eventually agreed to AIPJ’s proposal for cooperation. By working carefully in collaboration with local CSOs, and communicating clearly and regularly with the local government, the AIPJ programme has been able to implement a series of activities designed to promote government accountability.

Narcotics Trafficking Another law enforcement issue that has affected Australia-Indonesia relations is narcotics trafficking, with the most prominent cases being those of the Bali Nine and Schapelle Corby. Corby’s case was discussed above, so this section will focus on the nine Australians convicted of attempting to smuggle heroin from Indonesia to Australia. Although they were arrested based on a tip-off from the Australian Federal Police, when Andrew Chan and Myuran ­Sukumaran were sentenced to death, Australia protested. As mentioned, when President Joko Widodo came to power he refused to consider the clemency applications of the two men. Ignoring the pleas of Tony Abbott’s administration, which had called for a commutation of the men’s sentences, Chan and Sukumaran were executed on 29 April 2015. The Australian government launched a variety of efforts to reverse the death sentences. Abbott even connected the executions to Australia’s granting of development aid to Indonesia following the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004. The government also proposed a prisoner swap, suggesting it would transfer three Indonesians convicted of narcotics crimes in 1998—Kristito Mandagi, Saud ­Siregar, and Ismunandar—in exchange for the two Australians. But the I­ndonesian

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government would not budge. For Indonesia, the death penalty had become a matter of national sovereignty. It is believed to have a deterrent effect, essential given the scale of the drug problem faced by Indonesia. Both the deterrent effect and the scale of the drug problem are, however, highly debatable and those who oppose the death penalty argue that the problem is exaggerated and the deterrent effect not clearly proven. Regardless of this controversy, however, the execution of drug dealers seems to have strong support from the Indonesian public, who believe drug issues should be handled more seriously. The case of the Bali Nine shows how justice sector cooperation in narcotics cases, and indeed in many other cases, is much more effective if approached through calm and informal communication, and not conducted in the public sphere. As soon as the death penalty is discussed in the public sphere, admittedly unavoidable in a transparent democracy, public emotion spills over and the debate becomes embroiled in matters of ‘national interest’. The discussion should focus on our shared views and matters of common interest, such as the danger of narcotics crime, and how Indonesia and Australia have cooperated to combat it together, and how they can continue to do so effectively. When the debate focuses solely on the controversial issue of the death penalty—even without the added distraction of tsunami aid funds—the core issue is lost, and hostility between countries defines the conversation. Even if we understand that the core issue was the death penalty for many Australians, in that they did not object to law enforcement against narcotics trafficking but did object to the punishment imposed, bilateral problems remain. One reason for this is that for many Indonesians the death penalty is not only a matter of law but also seen as part of Islamic teaching. In Islam, the death penalty is allowed for some serious crimes. It is clear that Indonesia and Australia will continue to have to work together to combat drug trafficking. Despite the executions it is important to recognise that Indonesia’s approach to the death penalty is also undergoing reform. The country is in the midst of deliberations on a new Criminal Code, and while it does still provide for the death penalty, it would no longer be considered a ‘primary punishment’. That is, the death penalty can be reduced to life in prison, as long as a number of other requirements are met (such as a significant improvement in behaviour while in prison). The push to limit the death penalty to specific circumstances could be one area in which there might be a role for Australian justice sector assistance. Of course, Australia could not be seen to be intervening, and would have to demonstrate respect for Indonesia’s legal system. Tightening the use of the death penalty to specific circumstances is likely the best option available to Indonesia at the moment, given the Constitutional Court’s ruling in 2007 that the death penalty did not contravene the Constitution. Finally, I would like to make a comment on the need for more effective communication between national leaders. Both countries understand that ­ the Indonesia-Australia relationship is prone to turbulence, so they should adopt a style of communication that is not only relevant to the matter at hand but is also conscious of this troubled history. I attended several meetings with

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­ resident ­Yudhoyono and on several occasions I saw him adopt a deliberately P non-­confrontational tone—both in domestic and international affairs, including in his management of relations with Australia. In international relations, ­President ­Yudhoyono rejected megaphone diplomacy (or addressing foreign leaders through the media), which he considered counterproductive. He would keep his emotions in check and comment only as necessary in the public sphere, preferring instead to communicate directly with the leader in question, usually by telephone. This style of communication helped direct the debate back to the core issue, and helped prevent discussions bubbling over into other issues that only served to ­create additional strain on the relationship. In the context of more effective communication and cooperation in the justice sector, it is critical that Indonesia and Australia do not allow individual cases to continue to dominate the conversation. Such cases are often complex, and involve two quite different legal systems in two different countries. What is needed is more frequent informal communication, focusing on concrete issues needed to strengthen the justice sector, not individual cases or crimes. For this reason, the next section focuses on justice sector cooperation as part of the AustraliaIndonesia Partnership for Justice (AIPJ).

Justice Sector Cooperation: AIPJ AIPJ was not the first model for justice sector cooperation between Australia and Indonesia. From 2004 to 2009, for example, AusAID provided support to the Indonesian justice sector through the Australia Indonesia Legal Development Facility (AILDF). In 2010, it began to prepare for AIPJ through the short-term AIPJ Transition programme (AIPJt). AIPJt concluded in December 2010 and was followed by a Bridging Program, which ran from January through to 31 August 2011, and focused on supporting the Supreme Court and Prosecutor’s Office. The five-year AIPJ programme began on 10 June 2011. AIPJ focuses on working with justice sector institutions at the national level to help them realise Indonesia’s commitments to legal reform. The ultimate goal of AIPJ is ‘Increased access to better quality legal information and services for the people of Indonesia’ and ‘strengthening frontline justice sector institutions so that they are more effective and can provide information and legal services in a m ­ anner that is predictable, easy to access and at a reasonable cost’ (AIPJ 2010: 18–19). On its website, AIPJ describes its areas of focus as: —— Right to legal identity: birth, marriage and divorce certificates; —— Right to court services that are fair and accessible; and —— Right to legal information. The website also divides AIPJ’s programmatic areas of focus into legal aid, legal identity, court reform, inclusion of people with disability, civil society strengthening, and corruption eradication.

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I felt lucky that after receiving an Australian Development Scholarship to complete my doctorate at the University of Melbourne between 2002 and 2005, I was able to once again work with an Australian organisation to strengthen the justice sector in Indonesia. I joined the AIPJ programme as senior advisor for corruption eradication and legal aid in late 2014, soon after I finished my term as deputy minister. Although, as explained, AIPJ covers a broad range of activities in the justice sector, I will focus on those fields in which I had direct experience.

Legal Aid Indonesia’s legal aid system received a huge boost from the passage of Law No 16 of 2011 on Legal Aid. In fact, legal aid has existed in Indonesia since the 1970s, when the late Adnan Buyung Nasution—respected human rights advocate and honorary professor at the University of Melbourne—founded the Legal Aid Foundation (Lembaga Bantuan Hukum Indonesia, LBH). Since then, LBH has advocated for the rights of marginalised Indonesians who face a variety of specific and structural legal problems. This NGO and others like it did a good job with very limited resources but for decades there was no comprehensive, governmentfunded legal aid scheme. LBH activists therefore initiated moves to legislate legal aid back in 1998. A draft law on legal aid was formulated in 2004, and this bill entered the priority list of legislation for deliberation at the House of Representatives in 2009. It was finally passed into law on 2 November 2011. I began serving as deputy minister in October 2011, so one of my first priorities was to guide the implementation of this new Law. Instructing me when I took up the appointment, President Yudhoyono offered four directives: ensure law enforcement is just and equitable; protect human rights; hold fast to the principle of anti-corruption; and accelerate the implementation of the administration’s priority programmes, given that his second and final term would conclude in 2014. Legal aid is closely intertwined with the first of these goals, just and equitable law enforcement. President Yudhoyono stated that law enforcement in Indonesia had failed to live up to the community’s sense of justice and the state has a responsibility to help its marginalised citizens when they come into contact with the justice sector. In this context, the legal aid programme, which provides legal aid funds to marginalised communities, is highly relevant and was therefore one of my priorities as deputy minister. The AIPJ programme provided significant assistance in the early stages of implementation of the 2011 Legal Aid Law. It supported, for example, the preparation of implementing regulations for the law, and assisted in the verification and accreditation process for the legal aid organisations that would channel state funds to marginalised people. In 2013, of 593 legal aid organisations that registered, 310 passed the verification process, with 10 receiving an A accreditation, 21 ranked B, and 279 C (Indonesia. Ministry of Justice and Human Rights 2014: 7). Of the 593

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organisations examined, 281 (or 49%) were located in Java. Several provinces were serviced by just one legal aid organisation: Bangka-Belitung, Riau Islands, West Sulawesi and North Sulawesi (Indonesia. Ministry of Justice and Human Rights 2014: 26). In 2015, AIPJ’s legal aid component focused on constructing a system for the dissemination of funds to ensure that support was actually delivered to the poorest Indonesians. Over the past few years a major concern has been that the amount of funds available (Rp50 billion, or just over A$5 million) was relatively small, and local organisations have not been able to take advantage of them. In 2013, for example, budget absorption reached just 10%, and, while things improved in 2014, absorption was still only 25%. This is a shame when one considers that the sector is capable of absorbing much more than Rp50 billion. AIPJ therefore focused on developing a system to disburse funds quicker, while ensuring transparency and accountability. It supported the development of a Legal Aid Database Information System (SIDBankum), an online system that aims to circumvent lengthy and complicated bureaucratic procedures, speed up fund disbursement and increase budget absorption. In 2015, AIPJ had planned to support the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights to conduct verification of legal aid organisations. But Australia’s decision to cut its aid budget to Indonesia had a significant impact, and this programme did not proceed. As mentioned, many Indonesian political observers saw the decision to slash aid as a form of retaliation for the execution of Chan and Sukumaran. I also heard from some Australian friends that the Australian government questioned the effectiveness of supporting the development of the justice sector in Indonesia, given it remains a country that still uses the death penalty and is willing to execute Australian citizens. As a consequence of the executions, the annual meeting between AIPJ and its partners was cancelled, as were plans for the signing of a memorandum of understanding between the Indonesian Judicial Commission and the New South Wales Judicial Commission, which was set to take place at the meeting. It is deeply regrettable that these incidents occurred, especially considering that AIPJ had a significant impact on strengthening the delivery of legal aid, with outcomes that have already been felt by its intended beneficiaries. Surely, if the Australian government was concerned about the capacity of the Indonesia justice sector or indeed the bilateral relationship it would not slash the aid budget in this way. Rather, by increasing Australian justice sector support, Australia could contribute to a more rapid improvement in the legal system in Indonesia, in turn, improving bilateral relations between Australia and Indonesia.

Anti-Corruption Programmes The reduction in aid funds and the uncertain fate of Indonesia-Australia justice sector collaboration—particularly through the AIPJ programme—could not

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have come at a worse time. Not only had a study on the continuation of the AIPJ ­programme just been prepared but also, Indonesia’s anti-corruption drive had been in desperate need of support since the beginning of 2015 because of conflict between the police and the KPK. Ever since the KPK was established in 2003, it faced fierce resistance every time it attempted to take on cases involving the police leadership. The first such instance occurred in 2009, when the KPK investigated the police’s head of criminal investigations, Susno Duadji. The case became known as ‘Gecko vs Crocodile’ (Round 1) because of an interview Susno gave to leading news magazine Tempo, in which he boasted that a small gecko (the KPK) had no hope of ever beating a great big crocodile (the police). Susno’s statement immediately prompted an intense public reaction in support of the KPK, an institution considered to have had significant success in the eradication of corruption. When two of the KPK’s commissioners, Chandra M Hamzah and Bibit Samad Riyanto, were declared suspects by the police (on concocted charges), the public pressured President Yudhoyono to take action to stop the investigation. At this point I urged the president to form an independent fact-finding team, which became known as the Team of Eight, led by Adnan Buyung Nasution. I served as the secretary of the team, which eventually concluded that there was no evidence for the charges against the pair, forcing the police to drop the case. In 2012, when the KPK was handling a corruption case involving Police ­Traffic Corps head Djoko Susilo, it faced a counter-attack once again, an incident that became known as Gecko vs Crocodile (Round 2). One of the KPK’s leading ­investigators, Novel Baswedan, was declared a suspect by police and President Yudhoyono was again forced to intervene. At the time, I was serving as deputy minister of justice and human rights, and the president asked for my opinion on the matter. I stressed that Djoko Susilo’s case must be managed by the KPK and not the police, as some senior police figures had urged. The president also asked the police to cease their investigation into Baswedan. The third round of Gecko vs Crocodile occurred in early 2015, when President Joko Widodo proposed Budi Gunawan as sole candidate for police chief. The KPK had previously warned the President against nominating Gunawan over ­suspicions of corruption and soon after Jokowi proposed his name, the KPK declared him a suspect.9 The police struck back and two KPK commissioners, Abraham Samad and Bambang Widjojanto, were also declared suspects.10 The KPK was left with just two active commissioners, as KPK rules stipulated that any commissioner under investigation must step down from his or her post.11 This forced President 9  In the end, the investigation of Budi Gunawan was terminated by court order following a controversial pre-trial hearing at the South Jakarta District Court. 10  As a public and strident defender of the KPK since the first ‘Gecko vs Crocodile’ incident, the writer was also declared a suspect by the police. At the time of writing, my case, along with those of the two former KPK Deputy Commissioners, Abraham Samad and Bambang Widjojanto, remained unresolved, despite pressure from civil society organisations for it to be dropped. 11  The KPK usually has five active commissioners but the fifth commissioner, Busyro Muqqodas, finished his term in December 2014, leaving one position vacant.

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Jokowi to issue a Government Regulation in Lieu of Law (or Perpu) to install three temporary commissioners to serve for the remaining months until a new set of commissioners took their posts. The KPK was significantly weakened by this episode. The five new commissioners elected in December 2015 have not inspired much hope for a renewed anti-corruption drive. The legislature has also indicated that it hopes to revise the law on the KPK, creating fears that the institution may be dismantled, or at least its authority to conduct investigations (such as through phone tapping or prosecution) will be weakened. With the KPK shackled in this manner, support from the international community, including Australia, was needed (although such support must, of course, be provided prudently and in a manner that respects Indonesia’s sovereignty). In previous years, Australia and other international donor agencies have supported anti-corruption civil society organisations to conduct advocacy and analyse the track records of KPK leadership candidates. But given the reduced availability of funds under AIPJ in 2015, these efforts were far from maximal. Nevertheless, AIPJ support was critical for the growth of the SPAK (I am a Woman against Corruption, or Saya Perempuan Anti Korupsi) network, which played a prominent role in public efforts to save the KPK. Tellingly, President Jokowi chose an all-female panel, subsequently named the ‘Srikandi Nine’ after a strong female character in the Indonesian shadow puppetry tradition, to select KPK commissioners for the 2015–19 period. SPAK’s success as an anti-corruption movement was acknowledged by the Newspaper Publishers Union (SPS) at the Indonesian Public Relations Awards and Summit (IPRAS) in 2015, where it won an award for Inspirational Public Relations Program. The KPK, working in collaboration with AIPJ, launched the SPAK programme in six provinces on 21 April 2014, with the intention of involving more women in the anti-corruption movement. Exactly one year later, again coinciding with the commemoration of Kartini Day, a public holiday commemorating a colonial-era Indonesian advocate of women’s rights, the programme was declared a national movement. Since its launch, the SPAK programme has reached more than 200,000 women from a variety of backgrounds, including housewives, civil servants, teachers, students, and community and religious leaders. In 2016, the programme had aimed to educate more than one million women across Indonesia. Unfortunately, the reduction in Australia’s aid budget to Indonesia has had consequences for the sustainability of the programme. The KPK will, of course, continue to seek alternative sources of funding but by reducing its commitment Australia has lost a fine example of successful cooperation between Indonesia and Australia in the justice sector. The execution of Chan and Sukumaran prompted vastly differing opinions about the future of justice sector collaboration between Australia and Indonesia. On the one hand, those advocating ongoing collaboration argued that the continued presence of the death penalty in Indonesian law demonstrated just how much Australian development aid was needed to support legal reform in Indonesia, helping it move towards becoming a system that is stronger, more democratic, and no

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longer provides for the death penalty. Those arguing to the contrary, meanwhile, said that there was no use in providing development support or collaborating with a country that has no desire to eliminate (or even reduce the implementation of) the death penalty

Conclusion As many have noted, relations between Indonesia and Australia routinely swing between peaks and troughs. Geographical realities mean that our two countries will always be connected, so it is essential that we maintain a mutually beneficial collaboration in the midst of the neighbourly squabbles that often colour the bilateral relationship. All the issues that commonly lead to bilateral tension are closely related to the justice sector, whether they are territorial issues (East Timor and Papua), negative reporting on state leaders (President Soeharto or President Yudhoyono), spying on the Indonesian leadership, or individual cases relating to transnational crimes such as people smuggling, corruption and narcotics. It is therefore both strategic and necessary that we continue to work together to strengthen justice sector collaboration between Indonesia and Australia. The media of both countries often focus on individual cases that easily inflame relations between Indonesia and Australia. But resolving these cases is never easy, as they involve different legal systems in different countries. The situation is not helped by megaphone diplomacy that inevitably leads to tempers boiling over and the substance of the issue at hand being lost. Leaders who prioritise tactful communication and avoid the public statements that so easily lead to public emotion spilling over will be much more likely to reach appropriate solutions and keep tensions under control. It is important to recognise, once more, that the history of Indonesian and Australian justice-sector collaboration is not without successes. Take, for example, the extradition proceedings against corruption fugitives Hendra Rahardja and Adrian Kiki Ariawan. Although Hendra died before he could be extradited, the extradition process for both men demonstrated that Indonesia and Australia could work together effectively. The process took several years, not unusual when dealing with transnational legal issues, but Australia’s support for the resolution of these cases was an important example of bilateral cooperation in the eradication of corruption, in line with the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC). Notably, justice sector cooperation is more often enhanced by efforts to strengthen the legal system than by individual legal cases. As described, the author was directly involved in two such programmes supported by AIPJ (the Australia Indonesia Partnership for Justice), focusing on legal aid and corruption eradication. In both cases, Australian support led to significant improvements in the Indonesian legal system, despite the short duration of the programmes. The recent

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reduction in Australian development aid to the Indonesian justice sector is in this context deeply regrettable. Looking ahead, Indonesia and Australia will—unavoidably—continue to need to cooperate on individual legal cases. As noted, such cooperation must prioritise skilful communication to avoid counterproductive outcomes. At the same time, however, collaboration to strengthen the Indonesian justice sector should also be increased. This type of ‘non-case’ collaboration is far more effective in shoring up bilateral relations. When the legal system of Indonesia (and Australia) is stronger, more just, and in accordance with the objectives of a democratic country, then there is no doubt that relations between our countries will improve to a mutually beneficial level that will allow the people of both Indonesia and Australia to flourish. In short, effective justice sector collaboration is a prerequisite for a successful bilateral relationship between Australia and Indonesia.

References AIPJ (Australia Indonesia Partnership for Justice) (2010) ‘Proposal’, July. Indonesia. Ministry of Justice and Human Rights (2014) ‘Laporan Tahunan Implementasi Undang-Undang Nomor 16 Tahun 2011 Tentang Bantuan Hukum, Kementerian Hukum dan HAM’ [Annual Report on the Implementation of Law 16 of 2011 on Legal Aid] (Jakarta, Ministry of Justice and Human Rights). Missbach, Antje and McNevin, Anne (2015) ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind’, Inside Story, 14 April, . Rezasyah, Teuku (2009) Setahun Perjanjian Lombok: Sekedar Kesepakatan atau Perjanjian Strategis [One Year of the Lombok Treaty: Just an Agreement or a Strategic Pact?], .

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14 Papua as a Multilateral Issue for Indonesia and Australia RICHARD CHAUVEL

At the United Nations General Assembly session in 2016, the leaders of seven Pacific Island states—Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Nauru, the Marshall Islands, Palau and Tuvalu—raised the issue of human rights abuses in ­Indonesia’s Papuan provinces.1 Indeed, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and Tuvalu linked human rights abuses with Papuans’ right of self-determination. These speeches from Pacific Island leaders followed similar expressions of ­concern by the prime ministers of the Solomon Islands and Tonga during the General Assembly session in 2015, and the Prime Minister of Vanuatu in 2013 and several other Pacific Island leaders since 2000. These Pacific Island leaders have used their status as leaders of nation-states to express their concerns about Papua and give voice to the views of Papuans seeking independence from ­Indonesia. The speeches of the leaders of small Pacific Island states carry little weight in the General Assembly or the Human Rights Council and do not diminish the broad international recognition of Indonesia’s sovereignty in Papua. They are, however, a reminder that Papua remains a contested territory, seven decades after ­Indonesia’s independence and 55 years after the transfer of Papua from the Netherlands to Indonesia was negotiated through the United Nations. That the leaders of small Pacific Island states use their speeches in the General Assembly and the Human Rights Council to discuss Papua is a function of the unresolved conflicts in the territory. After the separation of Timor-Leste and the political settlement in Aceh province, Papua is the last, and seemingly the most intractable, of Indonesia’s regional conflicts.

1  Following common Indonesian usage, in this chapter ‘Papua’ will be used to refer to the two I­ ndonesian provinces comprising the western half of the island of New Guinea, except where the reference is to only one of the provinces. Reflecting its contested history, this territory has had numerous names. In the last decade of Dutch rule it was known as ‘Netherlands New Guinea’. In 1961, the Dutch accepted the Papuan proposal that it be called ‘West Papua’. Under Indonesian rule it has been known as ‘West Irian’ and ‘Irian Jaya’. In 2000, President Abdurrahman Wahid accepted the Papuan preference for ‘Papua’ rather than ‘Irian’. Since 2003, the territory has been divided into two provinces—Papua and West Papua—with capitals in Jayapura and Manokwari respectively.

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Such international profile is a goal of Papuan independence activists, who believe that Papua’s integration into Indonesia through the 1962 New York Agreement and the 1969 Act of Free Choice occurred without the consent or participation of Papuans and was illegitimate. The Pacific Islands regional organisations, the Melanesian Spearhead Group and the Pacific Islands Forum, have been the focus of much of the diplomatic lobbying by Papuan activists. The speeches of Pacific Island leaders at the UN are the fruits of these endeavours. Beyond the Pacific, Papuan activists and their supporters have established international support organisations for lawyers and parliamentarians. Papuan lobbying in the Pacific and among sympathetic parliamentarians and lawyers rests both on the belief of the injustice of Papua’s integration into Indonesia during the 1960s and the experience of the Indonesian government’s reluctance to engage in dialogue or negotiations with Papuans. This chapter examines the Papuan attempts to mobilise support in Australia and in the Pacific, and how this international activism has disrupted Indonesia’s relations with its neighbours. In Australia, Papuan diplomacy has not found fertile ground, even if successful claims for asylum in 2006 by a boatload of Papuan activists spurred Indonesia to recall its ambassador amidst heightened tensions in bilateral diplomatic ties. In contrast, Papua’s neighbouring states in the South Pacific have been more sympathetic to pro-independence lobbying. I argue in this chapter that contemporary Papuan activism has disrupted ­Indonesia’s ties with its neighbours because Indonesian policymakers are reluctant to recognise the persistence of Papuan support for independence. The policies of the reformasi-era governments, including the attempt to accommodate ­Papuan values and interests in the Special Autonomy Law of 2001, Susilo Bambang ­Yudhoyono’s policy of accelerated economic development and the ­criminalisation of public expression and mobilisation of pro-independence aspirations, have not quelled support for independence among Papuans. Paradoxically, the policies and practices of democratically-elected Indonesian governments that have been implemented in Papua to sustain Jakarta’s authority have often tended to fuel ­pro-independence sentiment. Policy makers and security officials prefer to see Papuan resistance to Jakarta’s authority as the result of foreign meddling, rather than recognising that international attention to Papua reflects the success of Papuan activists in highlighting the nature of Indonesian governance in Papua to international audiences. Indonesia’s reply to the criticisms of the Pacific Island leaders in the General Assembly in 2016 highlighted the extreme sensitivity of Papua for the government in Jakarta. A young diplomat, Nara Masista Rakhmatia, rebuked the Pacific leaders for abusing Indonesia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. She accused the Pacific leaders of supporting, for their own domestic political purposes, separatist groups in Papua that conducted terrorist attacks against civilians and the security forces (Suara.com 2016; Radio New Zealand 2016). This mindset dates back to Soekarno’s triumph over the Netherlands in Papua in 1962, at which time he depicted Papuan opponents of Indonesian rule as ‘­puppets’ that the Netherlands had educated to hate and ridicule Indonesia (Soekarno

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1965: 485–517). This mindset was subsequently reinforced by Timor-Leste’s independence from Indonesia during the early post-Soeharto period, widely seen by policy makers and security officials as a product of foreign intervention. The loss of Timor-Leste also undermines Australian protestations of its support for ­Indonesian sovereignty over Papua, as the Timor precedent evokes the I­ ndonesian response that, while support for Indonesian sovereignty had been Australia’s longstanding position, this support evaporated when it mattered most to Jakarta. The reluctance of senior military and security officials in the government to support President Joko Widodo’s attempt in 2015 to allow greater access to Papua for ­foreign journalists suggests the persistence of this mindset.

Papuan International Activism in Australia In the more conspiratorial Indonesian understandings of foreign interests in Papua, little agency is given to Papuan activists. Yet it has been Papuan activists’ attempts to attract international attention and support that have most disrupted Indonesia’s relations with its neighbours, including Australia. Since the revival of pro-independence aspirations and organisation following the fall of Soeharto, nearly all pro-independence and human rights activists—across the political ­spectrum—have thought mobilising international support to be an important ­strategy. This emphasis partly reflected their belief that the international resolution of the conflict between Indonesia and the Netherlands in the 1960s was illegitimate and failed to respect their interests. More pragmatically, following the examples of Timor-Leste and Aceh, they believed that only with international pressure would the Indonesian government be willing to engage with them. The first Papuan attempt to engage Australia in an international campaign was in January 2006, when 43 Papuans, led by Herman Wanggai, landed on Cape York, flew the Papuan Morning Star flag2 and displayed a banner pleading for freedom, peace and justice. The banner also asserted that the Indonesian military was committing genocide in Papua. Their quest for asylum was a political act designed to attract Australian and international attention to the struggle for ­ Papuan independence. Both Herman Wanggai and his co-organiser, ­Edison Waromi, had previously been imprisoned for pro-independence activities. According to Edison Waromi, ‘We wanted to show the world a small picture of the terrible 2 The Morning Star flag (Bintang Kejora) has become the symbol of Papuan independence. It was chosen by the Komite Nasional Papoea (National Committee of Papua) as the national flag for West Papua in its Manifest Politik (Political Manifesto) of October 1961 and accepted as such by the New Guinea Council and the Dutch authorities (see, for example, the newspaper, Pengantara: Het ­Nieuwsblad voor Nederlands-New-Guinea, Hollandia, 20 October 1961). The Bintang Kejora was first flown on 1 December 1961. In the opinion of some Papuans this date is an independence day. President Wahid permitted the flag to be flown. However, since the end of 2000 raising the flag, especially on the 1 December anniversary, has often resulted in convictions for treason and long prison terms.

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human rights situation across all of Papua. It was a tactical move in the struggle, to publicise the situation here’.3 ‘This is part of the Papuan National Authority’s international agenda. The asylum-seekers are intended to attract international attention’ (Powell 2006). The Immigration Department’s decision to grant the Papuans temporary protection visas placed the diplomatic relationship with Indonesia under great stress. John Howard supported the Immigration Department’s decision despite President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s undertaking that the Papuans would not be persecuted if they returned. For the first time in the often-turbulent history of the bilateral relationship, Indonesia withdrew its ambassador from Canberra. This had not happened during Konfrontasi when Australian and Indonesian troops fought each other on both sides of the Malaysian Borneo/Kalimantan border in the 1960s or during the 1999 East Timor crisis. It would seem that the arrival of the 43 Papuans caught the Howard government by surprise and ill-prepared. Howard and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer were confident about the strength of the bilateral relationship and their personal relationships with their counterparts. Australia had provided ­Indonesia support during the 1997–98 financial crisis and a A$1 billion aid package after the tsunami devastated Aceh. Following the 2002 Bali bomb attack, close cooperation on counter-terrorism had developed. President Yudhoyono made a successful visit to Australia in 2005. Howard seemed unaware of how the dispute over the status of Papua had dominated the Menzies government’s relations with Indonesia, when he claimed that Australia had never disputed Indonesian sovereignty in Papua (Howard, Andrews and Wilson 2006). Nor did he appear well informed about political conditions in Papua as reflected in the following exchange with Radio 3AW’s Neil Mitchell, in which Mitchell questioned Howard about the imprisonment of Filep Karma for raising the Papuan Morning Star Flag in 2004: Mitchell: Is it fair to put people in jail for 15 years for flying the wrong flag? Prime Minister: No, if that has happened, I don’t think that is fair, but there are a lot of things in a lot of countries around the world that aren’t fair. (Howard 2006)

In fact, the Howard government underestimated the depth of Indonesia’s problems in Papua, the depth of Papuan estrangement from Jakarta, and the depth of ­Indonesian sensitivities about Papua. It did not seem to have realised how restricted political freedom had become in Papua and, accordingly, did not appreciate the impact in Indonesia of the open displays of the symbols of Papuan nationalism, banned in Indonesia, that were broadcast from Australia since the

3 See Fitzpatrick (2006). Edison Waromi and Herman Wanggai were detained at a flag-raising c­ eremony at Cendrawasih University in December 2002. They were sentenced to two years imprisonment for rebellion, under arts 106 and 110 of the KUHP (Criminal Code) (Amnesty International 2004). They were released in 2004. In 2011 Edison Waromi would later be imprisoned again for his leadership role in the Third Papua Congress and the proclamation of independence.

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arrival of the asylum seekers in January 2006. The Papuan asylum seekers, their Morning Star flag and their Christianity received extensive and, on the whole, sympathetic coverage in the Australian media. SBS television’s evening news coverage of Good Friday 2006, for example, featured the Papuan asylum seekers at prayer in a ­Melbourne church (Jackson and Allard 2006). The credibility of the asylum seekers’ assertions about the nature of ­Indonesian governance in Papua was enhanced by the coincidence of their arrival in ­Australia with the shooting of three Papuans by the security forces in Paniai, in the ­central highlands of Papua, in January 2006. The police and military’s own accounts of the Paniai shootings showed how a relatively minor non-political disagreement between Papuans and the Indonesian security forces led to the police and ­military using force to assert their authority. There is no suggestion in the police or military accounts that the three Papuans shot were pro-independence activists (Cenderawasih Pos 2006b). The security forces’ use of violence politicised the incident. A couple of days after the shootings several hundred people demonstrated in Jayapura demanding that all Indonesian troops be withdrawn from Papua (­Cenderawasih Pos 2006a). While the diplomatic crisis was in full swing in March 2006, there was a demonstration at the Cenderawasih University campus at Abepura—just outside Jayapura, the capital of Papua province—demanding the closure of the Freeport gold and copper mine. The demonstration turned into a violent riot, in which five members of the security forces were killed. After the riots, the Cenderawasih Pos reported that the riot police, angered by the death of their colleagues, conducted ‘sweeping’ operations around Abepura, with much shooting into the air, leaving three civilians wounded by stray bullets. Student dormitories were ransacked. Most of the shops and offices of a busy market centre were closed, the university was deserted and most people were too scared to leave their homes. According to the Cenderawasih Pos, Abepura was gripped by fear (Cenderawasih Pos 2006c). The sweeping operation prompted the religious leaders of Papua, led by the Most Reverend Leo L. Ladjar OFM, the Catholic Bishop of Jayapura, to appeal to the Indonesian government: … to restrain the uncontrollable behaviour of the Special Mobile Brigade of the Police (BRIMOB) that blocked the road and conducted house-to-house search to the students dormitories. This operation intimidated the students and the residents in this area and even resulted in a number of casualties (Hampapua 2006).

The diplomatic tensions with Indonesia over the Papuan asylum seekers were only resolved with the signing of the Framework for Security Cooperation Agreement at the end of 2006. The agreement established a treaty framework for cooperation in defence, transnational crime, counter-terrorism and intelligence sharing. ­Negotiations for the Agreement pre-dated that arrival of the Papuan asylum seekers. There is no reference to Papua in the document but from the I­ ndonesian government’s perspective it was designed to clarify Australia’s position on ­ ­Indonesia’s sovereignty in Papua. Article 2.3 of the 2006 Framework for ­Security

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Cooperation Agreement (Lombok Treaty), which might be called the ‘Papua clause’, specified that Australia and Indonesia: … shall not in any manner support or participate in activities by any person or entity which constitutes a threat to the stability, sovereignty or territorial integrity of the other Party, including by those who seek to use its territory for encouraging or committing such activities, including separatism, in the territory of the other Party (Australia DFAT 2006).

At the joint press conference with Alexander Downer in Lombok, the then ­Indonesian Foreign Minister, Hassan Wirajuda, argued that the agreement meant that Australia could no longer be used as a ‘staging post’ for Papuan separatists (Wirajuda and Downer 2006). As Hugh White argued shortly after the signing of the Agreement, there is no likelihood that Australia can or will fulfil its obligations under this provision of the agreement. White asserts that no Australian government would be prepared to act decisively to stop Papuan separatists, or other Indonesian dissidents, from campaigning in Australia (White 2006). Australia’s commitments under the Lombok Treaty were tested by the so-called ‘Freedom Flotilla’ in 2013. Organised by Australia-based pro-independence activists including some who had been involved with the asylum seekers, the ‘Freedom Flotilla’ was a politically motivated and symbolic gesture to (re)establish relations between indigenous Australians and Papuans in order to highlight human rights abuses, land rights issues and build global solidarity. The flotilla had started its journey to Papua at Lake Eyre, leaving Australia in Cooktown. While it did not reach Papua, the organisers claimed that small boats from Australia and Papua met ‘near the Australia-Indonesian border’ to make the symbolic exchanges, under the noses of Indonesian armed forces (Bachelard 2013b). Kevin Buzzacott, an elder of the Arabunna people near Lake Eyre in central Australia, who was one of the participants in the flotilla, asserted: ‘We have a responsibility to care for our brothers and sisters from across the water. We must bring the water and the fire, the love and the music to heal the country and move in solidarity’ (Freedom Flotilla nd). Djoko Suyanto, then Co-ordinating Minister for Political, Legal and Security Affairs, ordered the navy and airforce to be ready to intercept the flotilla (Bachelard 2013a), while in Sorong, Papua, four Papuans were arrested at a prayer meeting held to welcome the flotilla (Tabloid Jubi 2013). As Hugh White had anticipated, the Australian government took no action to stop the ‘Freedom Flotilla’. Indeed, a spokesman for Foreign Minister Bob Carr said there was nothing the Australian government could do to stop an otherwise legal boat sailing from an Australian port (Bachelard 2013a). Carr did, however, send the organisers a letter warning them that: Their proposed actions are high risk. When in Indonesian territory they will be subject to Indonesian, and not Australian, law. Indonesian law provides for penalties of up to 5 years for similar immigration offences.

Carr also made the gratuitous comment, perhaps more for an audience in Jakarta, that the activists aboard the flotilla were perpetrating a cruel hoax on the p ­ eople

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of the Papuan provinces by suggesting that Papuan independence was on the international agenda (Australia. Minister for Foreign Affairs 2013). Carr’s notes in his diary are more disparaging of the flotilla’s organisers, whom he depicts as a fringe group of Australians safely seated at their computers in the Sydney suburb of Leichhardt holding out the illusion of independence (Carr 2014: 438). He recognised that ‘…this dumb flotilla arouses all their (Indonesians) paranoia about Australia.’ He was determined that these ‘hippies’ would not fracture relations with Indonesia (Carr 2014: 441). Earlier in 2013, Carr had anticipated with his ‘friend’, Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa, that Australia-based activists would likely follow Benny Wenda’s4 example in Oxford and open a Free Papua office in Australia. The opening of the office by the Lord Mayor of Oxford had provoked an angry response from Marty Natalegawa (BBC News 2013). Carr told his Indonesian counterpart that the Australian government could not stop such a move but we (Australia and Indonesia) should not be ‘captured by provocateurs’. At the same time, Carr rebutted in the Senate the ‘urban myths’ about Indonesian (mis)management of its Papuan provinces. He ‘… put on record that ­Australia and the whole world recognised Indonesian sovereignty over West Papua.’5 ­Leaving aside Carr’s forthright language, what he is describing in his diary is an attempt to manage the Indonesian government’s anxieties about the campaigns of Papuan activists in Australia, mocking them and their Australian supporters, while disassociating the Australian government from their views. The change of government in Australia in September 2013 meant that the new Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, handled some of the fallout from the ‘Freedom ­Flotilla’. He told an ABC radio audience in December 2013: There was a boat that was heading off from Australia to West Papua, which in the end didn’t go for a whole host of reasons and I think that if we can ensure that boats don’t leave Australia for West Papua to embarrass the Indonesians, well similarly, there’s more that Indonesia can do to help us here. (Abbott 2013)

By linking Papuan separatism to his government’s determination to stop refugees arriving by boat from Indonesia, Abbott was offering to help President Yudhoyono with one of Indonesia’s most sensitive political issues in return for the president’s help with one of the contentious issues in Australian domestic politics. It should be noted that the coincidence of Papuan international activism and Australian boat 4  Benny Wenda is a Papuan activist who was granted political asylum in the UK in 2003, after h ­ aving escaped from custody while on trial in Papua. He is a key figure in the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) and its lobbying activities in the Pacific, as well as with the ­International Parliamentarians for West Papua. 5  See Carr (2014: 368–69). In June 2014, after Carr left office, Jacob Rumbiak, the Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Federal Republic of West Papua opened an office in Melbourne’s Docklands. In October 2014, Rumbiak alleged that Indonesian students studying at Melbourne universities spied on the office for Indonesian intelligence (Fitzsimmons 2014). In October 2011, the Federal Republic of West Papua was the pro-independence organisation responsible for the Third Papua Congress, at which independence was proclaimed. Edison Waromi is one of its Papua-based leaders. It is one of the member organisations of the ULMWP. Jacob Rumbiak has been involved in the ULMWP’s diplomatic lobbying in the Pacific.

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policy pre-dated Abbott’s election. While Carr was managing the possible fallout from the ‘Freedom Flotilla’, he was negotiating Indonesia’s cooperation on asylum seekers transiting through Indonesia. Prior to his last meeting as foreign minister with Marty Natalegawa, Carr was informed that Indonesian Foreign Affairs thought that Australia was demanding that they solve Australia’s people smuggling problems (Carr 2014: 441). Although the Freedom Flotilla venture showed that the Australian government had not implemented its obligations under the Agreement at least as the Indonesian government had hoped, Abbott went further than any of his predecessors in stating his support for Indonesian policies in Papua when he first met with President Yudhoyono in September 2013. He acknowledged the work that President Yudhoyono has done to provide greater autonomy, a better level of government services and, ultimately, a better life for the people of Papua. He asserted that the people of Papua are much better off as part of a strong, dynamic and increasingly prosperous Indonesia (Abbott and Yudhoyono 2013). Although Australian governments since John Howard’s time as Prime M ­ inister have not curtailed the pro-independence campaigns of Australia-based Papuan activists and their Australian supporters, the public responses of the Rudd and Abbott governments to the ‘Freedom Flotilla’ have reiterated declarations of ­Australia’s support of Indonesian sovereignty in Papua. The language that Carr and Abbott used when discussing Papua and Papuan activism gave no hint of understanding, let alone sympathy, for the situation in Papua, as many Papuans see it, although Carr did call for an inquiry into the death of Mako Tabuni, a ­Papuan activist, believed to have been killed by Australian-trained Detachment 88 in 2012.6 Another glitch in this bi-partisan front occurred on 1 October 2014 when, with the support of Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, the Australian Senate passed a motion, proposed by the Greens, that was critical of the detention of two French journalists in Papua and the Indonesian government’s tight press restrictions there (Bachelard 2014). From the perspective of Papuan activists, they have been able to conduct campaigns based in Australia, but the strength of the ­bi-partisan consensus on the strategic primacy of close and cooperative relations with a united Indonesia has meant that they have had little, if any, influence on the conduct of Australian policy. Of the parties represented in Parliament, only the Greens have raised human rights issues, questioned military ties with Indonesia, and declared their support for the Papuans’ right to determine their own future.7 The arrival of the 43 asylum seekers in 2006 and the Howard government’s grant of protection visas created a major disruption in diplomatic relations. However, the policy outcome, as enacted in the Lombok Treaty, reaffirmed Australia’s ­support for ­Indonesian sovereignty. The Howard government was caught off guard in 2006 6  See Carr (2012). In an interview with Leigh Sales, Carr noted that he had made representations to the Indonesian authorities about human rights in the Papuan provinces. 7  Richard Di Natale, Senator and Leaders of the Green Party, Speech in Senate, 24 July 2013, .

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but subsequent governments have heard and heeded Susilo Bambang ­Yudhoyono’s message in his speech to the joint houses of parliament in 2010: Indonesians are proud people who cherish our national unity and territorial integrity above all else. Our nationalism is all about forging harmony and unity among our many ethnic and religious groups. That is why the success of peace and reconciliation in Aceh and Papua is not trivial but a matter of national survival for us Indonesians. We would like Australians to understand and appreciate that. (Yudhoyono 2010)

Bob Carr and Tony Abbott’s affirmation of Australia’s recognition of Indonesian sovereignty in Papua reflects a bi-partisan commitment to close and co-operative relations with a united Indonesia. The strategic assessment has its origins in the arguments advanced by Sir Garfield Barwick, then Minister of External Affairs, in January 1962 to persuade the Menzies government to accept the inevitability of Indonesian control. Barwick argued that it was not in Australia’s interests to support the emergence of an independent Papua—the objective of the Netherlands’ policy. An independent Papua, in Barwick’s judgement, would be unviable, indefensible and the object of Indonesia’s enmity.8 Barwick’s strategic assessment that Australia should not support the emergence of states in the eastern ­archipelago also informed the Menzies government’s attempt in 1963 to persuade Portugal to decolonise East Timor as part of Indonesia9 as well as the Whitlam and Frazer governments’ support for East Timor as part of Indonesia. It is curious that among policy makers there has been no lingering regret at the failure of the Menzies ­government’s 12 year-long policy of keeping Indonesia out of Papua; rather it has been Barwick’s strategic arguments that have informed subsequent policy. Despite the presence of a number of Papuan activists, Australia has not been a fruitful arena for Papuan international diplomacy. Papua’s neighbours in the Pacific have far less influence in the international community than Australia but they have been much more receptive and sympathetic to Papuan interests, and willing to use their status as nation states to bring Papua to international attention.

Papuan Diplomacy in the Pacific When the South Pacific Commission was established in 1947 on behalf of Papua, the Netherlands was a member of the Commission, along with the five other colonial powers with interests in the Pacific—Australia, France, New Zealand, the UK and the US. Together they sought to ‘strengthen international cooperation in promoting the economic and social welfare and the promotion of the welfare of

8  Garfield Barwick, Memorandum by Minister for External Affairs on Cabinet Submission No 10, 11, January 1962, Prime Minister’s file C508, pt 3, CRS A4940, NAA. 9  Cabinet Minutes, 5-2-63, Decision No 632, CRS A5819/2, Vol 15, NAA.

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the peoples of the non-self-governing territories in the South Pacific’.10 Under the auspices of the Commission, many Papuans participated in programs elsewhere in the Pacific and a number were studying medicine and health sciences in Fiji and Port Moresby at the time Indonesia assumed control of Papua in 1963. Participation in the South Pacific Commission programs became one of the means the Netherlands administration used to encourage Papuan bureaucrats, professionals and aspiring politicians to think of themselves as part of the Pacific rather than Southeast Asia. Many of the first generation of Papuan politicians did see themselves as part of a broader Pacific community. Indeed, some of them, like E.J. Bonay, one of the founders of the first Papuan nationalist party (PARNA) and the first Governor of Indonesian Papua, considered themselves more advanced, professionally and in their education, than their contemporaries in Australian New Guinea (Grant 1962). Subsequent generations of Papuan politicians have not shared education, training and professional opportunities with counterparts in the Pacific. Papuan political identity, as it has developed, particularly in the post-Soeharto period, has, nonetheless, had a strong Melanesian dimension, with Papuans identifying themselves with fellow Melanesians to the east to distinguish themselves from ­Indonesians to the west. The Presidium Dewan Papua (Papua Presidium Council) emerged as the dominant pro-independence organisation in the years immediately after Soeharto’s fall. At the Kongres Papua11 held in mid-2000, the Presidium considered that it had received a popular mandate to advance the struggle for independence, both within Indonesia and internationally.12 Much of its international lobbying efforts were focussed on the island states of the South Pacific, as well as the Pacific Islands Forum and the Melanesian Spearhead Group—the principal regional organisations. The President of Nauru and the Prime Minister of Vanuatu spoke in support of Papua at the UN Millennium Summit in 2000 and Theys Eluay and other members of the Presidium attended the Summit. Of greater significance was the profile that Papua acquired at the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) in Kiribati in October 2000. The Presidium representatives attended as members of the Nauru delegation. Despite the reluctance of Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea (PNG), the Communiqué expressed ‘deep concerns about recent violence and loss of life in the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya [Papua]’. The Forum ‘called on the I­ ndonesian Government, the sovereign authority, and secessionist groups to resolve their differences peacefully through dialogue and consultation. They also urged all parties to protect and uphold the human rights of all residents of Irian Jaya’ (­McDonald 2000). 10 National Library of Australia, ‘South Pacific Commission’, . 11  The Kongres Papua was the second mass meeting held by the Presidium in Jayapura in 2000. It was significant for its wide representation of communities throughout Papua and the financial ­contribution made by President Wahid. 12 Resolution of the 2nd Congress of West Papua, Port Numbay, 4 June 2000. Authorised and signed by: Thaha M Alhamid, Chairman; Tt Aronggear; Rev Herman Awom; Franzalbert Joku; Decky ­Iwanggin; Dra Fera Kambu; Sam Manami Satia; and Adolf Fonataba.

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However, as a consequence of a change of government in Nauru and divisions among the Papuans, Nauru, the host government of the 2001 Forum, excluded the Presidium representatives that year (Skehan 2001). The 2001 Forum meeting was Indonesia’s first as a dialogue partner. Nevertheless, the Communiqué restated the Forum leaders’ concern about the continuing violence and loss of life. The Forum leaders urged Indonesia to seek a peaceful resolution through dialogue with all parties. They welcomed the Special Autonomy proposals.13 Vanuatu has been the most consistent supporter of the Papuan independence at the United Nations and the Pacific Islands Forum, and in the Melanesian Spearhead Group.14 In 2013, Prime Minister Moana Carcasses Kalosil raised Papua at the General Assembly and again in 2014 at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. More recently, in March 2017, Vanuatu’s Minister of Justice, speaking on behalf of Tonga, Nauru, Palau, Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, and the Solomon Islands, called on the High Commissioner for Human Rights to produce a comprehensive report on the situation in Papua as the Indonesian government has not produced reports required of UN member states nor taken any steps to address the human rights situation (Vanuatu Daily Post 2017). At the Human Rights Council in 2014, Prime Minister Kalosil asserted that ‘… the Melanesian people of West Papua were the scapegoat of Cold War politics and were sacrificed to gratify the appetite for the natural resources which this country possess.’ The Prime Minister also addressed the issue of contemporary abuses of human rights. Speaking as a Melanesian citizen, he said: I have come here to call for immediate action. Injustice in West Papua is a threat to the principle of justice everywhere in the world. I do not sleep well at night when I know that in 2010 Yawan Wayeni, known as a separatist, was videotaped by the security forces as he was lying in a pool of his own blood with his intestines seeping from a gaping wound in his abdomen. It concerns me that in October 2010 Telenga Gire and Anggen Pugu Kiwo were tied by the military and were severely tortured. It concerns me when I see the video footage of a group of Papuan men bounded and being kicked in the head by the ­uniformed soldiers who are meant to protect them. I am worried because between October of 2011 and March 2013, 25 Papuans were murdered and nothing has been done to bring the perpetrators to justice. And it embarrasses me, as a Melanesian, to note that roughly 10% of the indigenous Melanesian population have been killed by the ­Indonesian Security forces since 1963. While I acknowledge the 15 years of reformation that has taken place, I am also worried that Melanesians will soon become a minority in their own motherland of Papua. (Kalosil 2014)

In recent years, the focus of Papuan diplomacy, with Vanuatu’s support, has been on applications for full membership of the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG). The applications have been based on the premise that Papua is a Melanesian ­territory, sharing the same culture and values as the other Melanesian peoples 13 

Communiqué, 32nd Pacific Islands Forum, Republic of Nauru, 16–18 August 2001. The Melanesian Spearhead Group was founded in 1986 and formalised as a regional group under international law in 2007. It consists of four states—Papua New Guinea, Fiji, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu—and an independence movement, the Front de Liberation Nationale Kanak et Socialisliste (FLNKS). 14 

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represented in the MSG. As noted above, being Melanesian has been a central tenet in the construction of Papuan nationalism. Papuan applications for membership of the MSG have referenced the MSG’s objective of supporting independence for all Melanesian societies and the precedent of the FLNKS’ membership. Prime Minister Moana Carcasses Kalosil’s speech at the General Assembly in 2013 followed resolutions of the MSG that recognised Papua’s right of self-determination and expressed concerns about human rights abuses. In 2015, the MSG granted a broad coalition of Papuan organisations, the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), ‘observer’ status and upgraded Indonesia from ‘observer’ to ‘associate member’. Although the decision constitutes a rejection of ULMWP’s application for full membership, it is the first time that pro-independence organisations have been represented at an international forum. The MSG is the only forum at which both Papua and Indonesia have a seat (SIBC 2015). The MSG leaders discussed the ULMWP’s application for full membership again in July 2016. They agreed: … to defer the consideration of the application by ULMWP until membership criteria and guidelines are further developed by the Sub-Committee on Legal and Institutional Issues (SCLII), considering fundamental principles of international law and to be completed before end of September 2016 (MSG 2016).

The sub-committee would review membership criteria and guidelines, as well as of the participatory rights and obligations of an Observer and Associate M ­ ember (­Melanesian Tok 2016). Since the communiqué was issued, the leaders of the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and the FLNKS have reaffirmed their support for the ­ULMWP’s application for full membership. In contrast, Ambassador Desra ­Percaya, who led the Indonesian Delegation to the MSG meeting, hailed the success of intensive lobbying from his delegation, including representatives of five ­Indonesian provinces with strong ‘Melanesian-Indonesian influences’, which convinced MSG leaders not to accept ULMWP’s proposal for the full membership. The ­Ambassador asserted: ‘There is no place for the ULMWP in the future of MSG.’15 One of the challenges the ULMWP has faced is that the MSG states have not been of one mind about Papua. Vanuatu has been a consistent supporter. The Solomon Islands, through its Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare, Chair of the 2015 MSG meeting, was a strong supporter, explaining that the MSG’s objective was to facilitate dialogue between the ULMWP and Indonesia (SIBC 2015). He posited the Papua issue as: ‘a test of our genuineness to solve a problem between two next door neighbours in the interest of regional peace and stability.’ According to Sogavare, it would also test the MSG’s commitment to human rights and the rule of law (Island Sun 2015). Like Vanuatu Prime Minister, Moana Carcasses Kalosil in 2013, Manasseh Sogavare also raised the issue of human rights abuses in 15  See AntaraNews.com (2016). As of July 2017 the sub-committee had not issued a report, which suggests that the stalemate in the MSG has not been resolved.

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Papua in his speech to the General Assembly in 2015 and called on the UN Human Rights Council to investigate and monitor the allegations of human rights abuse and violence against ethnic Melanesians.16 Papua New Guinea is the critical stakeholder in the Pacific not because it is the strongest supporter of Papua among the Pacific Island states but rather it is the largest state in the MSG and it has a land border with Indonesia. As a former colonial territory, it has a close and complex relationship with Australia. Peter O’Neill is the first Prime Minister to publicly voice his concerns about human rights conditions on the Indonesian side of the border. In 2012, shortly after he became Prime Minister, O’Neill sent a diplomatic note to Jakarta relaying the concerns of his citizens about human rights, in response to questions put to him at a Lutheran Church conference about women being raped and men tortured (Waide 2012). In ­February 2015, at a leaders’ conference in Port Moresby, O’Neill talked about PNG’s role as respected regional leader but one that had forgotten about its brothers and sisters in Papua. He referred to the pictures of brutality in the social media and argued that as a regional leader ‘… we must lead these discussions with our friends in a mature and engaging manner’ (Hayward-Jones 2015a). Peter O’Neill’s role was prominent in 2015 at the MSG meeting in June and particularly when PNG was the host for the Pacific Island Forum (PIF) meeting in September. The PIF is a much larger regional grouping than the MSG and includes Australia and New Zealand. New Caledonia is an associate member and Indonesia is one of several Dialogue Partners.17 The Pacific Islands Forum meeting followed the MSG compromise decision that granted the ULMWP observer status and Indonesia associate membership. Jenny Hayward-Jones attributes this compromise to O’Neill. During President Joko Widodo’s visit, O’Neill had promised PNG’s support for an associate membership for Indonesia and it was O’Neill’s formulation that the ULMWP be recognised as the representative of Papuans living in exile (Hayward-Jones 2015b). O’Neill recognised that Papua was one of the most sensitive issues in the region. He wanted to engage with Indonesia in a constructive manner but with greater frankness than had been the case in the past (O’Neill 2015). O’Neill’s stance on Papua was subject to considerable local and Pacific civil society pressure. Immediately prior to the meeting, O’Neill indicated that he had taken on board some, but not all, of the concerns expressed by the Pacific civil society organisations about Papua. He confirmed that Papua would be one of five issues at the PIF meeting. He contended that Papua had to be discussed with Indonesia at the table and not in isolation. Papua, he said, had to be resolved in the Melanesian 16  See Solomon Star (2015). The Prime Minister of Tonga, Akilisi Pohiva, also raised concerns about West Papua in his address to the UN General Assembly. Tonga is a member of PIF but not the MSG (Radio New Zealand 2015b). 17 Forum members are: Australia; Cook Islands; Federated States of Micronesia; Fiji; Kiribati; Nauru; New Zealand; Niue; Palau; Papua New Guinea; Republic of Marshall Islands; Samoa; S­ olomon Islands; Tonga; Tuvalu; and Vanuatu. See: Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, .

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manner. It could not be swept under the carpet any longer, as it was a regional issue (Mambor 2015b). In their meeting with O’Neill prior to the PIF leaders’ meeting, the civil society organisations pushed for a more assertive position. They were not persuaded by the Indonesian government’s assurances about improved human rights conditions, as mass arrests and fatal shootings persisted. They advocated a self-determination and decolonisation approach as well as a human rights approach (Regional Civil Society Organisation Forum 2015a). They called on the PIF leaders to: —— commission a fact-finding mission to investigate human rights abuses in Papua; —— urge the UN Secretary-General to appoint a special representative to investigate human rights abuses in West Papua; —— grant West Papua observer status at the PIF; and —— pursue the re-instatement of West Papua on the United Nations Committee for Decolonisation (Regional Civil Society Organisations Forum 2015b). Parliamentarian and Governor of Ore (Northern) Province, Gary Juffa, joined civil society groups in urging the PIF leaders to act on Papua. He was critical of Pacific leaders and also the UN for having failed Papua. He contended: ‘We are not free in the Pacific until West Papua is free … the challenge is on our leaders to act on West Papua this week and we expect some firm outcomes’ (Papuani 2015). During President Joko Widodo’s visit to Port Moresby in May 2015, Gary Juffa objected to the restrictions imposed on peaceful protest: We can’t allow Indonesia to extend their authoritarian rule into Papua New Guinea which is what seems to be happening’ (Radio New Zealand 2015a). During the PIF leaders’ meeting, Juffa rejected the assertion of Indonesia’s Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs, AM Fachir, that PIF was not the appropriate place to discuss Papua as it contravened the convention of not meddling in the internal affairs of a sovereign state (ABC Pacific Beat 2015). As expressed in the leaders’ communiqué, the outcome of the Pacific Islands Forum was in keeping with Peter O’Neill’s approach and gave him carriage of implementing the decision. The leaders called on all parties to respect human rights and address the root causes of conflict by peaceful means. More specifically, the leaders: … recognised Indonesia’s sovereignty over the Papuan provinces but noted concerns about the human rights situation, calling on all parties to protect and uphold the human rights of all residents in Papua. Leaders requested the Forum Chair [O’Neill] to convey the views of the Forum to the Indonesian Government, and to consult on a fact finding mission to discuss the situation in Papua with the parties involved. (Forum ­Communiqué 2015)

Indonesian Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs, AM Fachir, attended the meeting in Port Moresby. He made clear Indonesia’s displeasure that human rights abuses in Papua were on the Forum’s agenda at all. The Pacific Island states should not

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meddle in Indonesia’s internal affairs, he said (Kenneth 2015). After the Forum communiqué was issued, the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ response was phrased in more diplomatic language but closed off most possibilities that the PIF initiative could further a discussion of human rights let alone facilitate a resolution to the conflicts in Papua. Like much Indonesian reporting of the PIF meeting, the Ministry emphasised that the Pacific leaders reiterated their recognition of Indonesia’s sovereignty over the Papuan provinces. Further, the Ministry asserted that the allegation of human rights abuses were ‘… baseless and do not reflect the factual situation on the ground …’ and a fact-finding mission to Papua was not necessary (Indonesia. Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2015). During visits to Fiji and Papua New Guinea in early 2016, the then Coordinating Minister for Political, Legal and Security Affairs, Luhut Pandjaitan, told his hosts that they were welcome to visit Papua but there could be no talk of a fact-finding mission into domestic political matters, which would constitute foreign intervention (Simbolon 2016). One notable aspect of the Ministry’s explanation of the communiqué about Papua was the assertion that the issue was on the Forum’s agenda because of ‘… external pressures by a number of NGOs rather than PIF member countries’ (Indonesia. Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2015). There may be some substance in this argument with respect to Fiji. Under Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama, Fiji has been the most outspoken in its support of Indonesia, yet even Bainimarama acknowledged that human rights in Papua needed to be discussed with Indonesia. The Fiji Sun in an editorial entitled ‘Why we support Indonesia’, noted that when in 2006, following the coup that brought Bainimarama to power, Fiji’s traditional allies deserted it and Indonesia was one of the first countries to support it. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono spoke at the Pacific Island Development Forum Leaders Meeting in Fiji in June 2014 and signed several MOUs with Fiji (Bolatiki 2015). Yudhoyono also made a donation of US$30 million to Bainimarama’s alternative regional organisation, which does not include Australia or New Zealand. In contrast to the Bainimarama government’s position, Fiji NGOs supported the Pacific Civil Society Forum lobbying of the PIF leaders (Papuani 2015). Earlier in 2015, building on its links with churches in Papua, the Methodist Church joined the Fiji Solidarity Movement for West Papua to petition the Bainimarama government (Sauvakacolo 2015). However, the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ argument seems least plausible in the case of Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands. It has been noted above that their respective Prime Ministers have been strong advocates of Papuan interests not only in the regional forums of the Pacific but also in the United Nations. With PNG, there have been NGOs, churches and politicians raising Papua issues and urging the PNG government to be more forthright. Nevertheless, throughout his tenure as Prime Minister, O’Neill has persisted in raising issues of human rights, often in language referring to the indigenous peoples on the other side of the border as ‘fellow Papuans’. Unlike the Ministry in Jakarta, O’Neill recognises that human rights is an issue that needs to be addressed and, as Indonesia’s neighbour in New Guinea, he believes he has a role to play.

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The involvement of NGOs in the domestic politics surrounding Papua in a number of the Pacific Island states has complicated Indonesia’s diplomatic strategies. The Indonesian delegates to the MSG and PIF meetings have been well aware of the differences in policies and sympathies between Fiji and PNG, on one side, and Vanuatu, Tonga and the Solomon Islands, on the other. It has not, however, been able to persuade PNG and Fiji to block the MSG and PIF decisions of 2015 that Indonesia regards as contrary to its interests. Indonesia has sought to use closer cooperation in economic development, including human resource development, education and infrastructure, to pre-empt a reoccurrence of decisions like the MSG’s decision to grant observer status to the ULMWP. Since this MSG decision, Indonesia has sought to work with PNG and Fiji to limit the ULMWP’s capacity to use its observer status at the MSG to further the Papuan international agenda. Notwithstanding Indonesia’s refusal to accept a PIF fact-finding mission, on the eve of the 2016 PIF meeting in Pohnpei, the Regional Civil Society Organisation Forum urged the leaders to engage with the Indonesian government to halt the human rights violations and find a peaceful pathway for West Papuan selfdetermination (Regional Civil Society Organisations Forum 2016). PIF Secretary General, Dame Meg Taylor, also recognised that Papua was a sensitive issue for some Pacific governments: It’s an issue that needs to be pursued and it’s not going to go away. Our bigger countries in the region like Australia and New Zealand realise that this issue is just not going to go to sleep—and it shouldn’t go to sleep, because it is very important for our region (Maclellan 2016b).

Indonesian lobbying, with Australian and New Zealand support, prevented Papua becoming a major issue in Pohnpei. Nic Maclellan, who reported on the Forum meeting in Pohnpei, cited a number of sources from the leaders’ retreat who confirmed that Malcolm Turnbull personally weakened the language on West Papua in the communiqué. He quoted Emele Duituturaga, executive director of the Pacific Islands Association of Non-Government Organisations: ‘We know that the draft text reflected their intention to take West Papua to the United Nations, but when the final Communiqué was released, it had been watered down’ (Maclellan 2016b). In the Communiqué the leaders considered that human rights violations should remain on the PIF agenda and that ‘open and constructive dialogue with Indonesia’ was important (Forum Communiqué 2016). Peter Christian, the President of the Federated States of Micronesia and Forum host, distinguished the issue of human rights violations from that of self-determination. In Christian’s view the PIF leaders decided that the self-determination issue could only be addressed at the United Nations, where the Pacific leaders would express their views (­Maclellan 2016a). As noted at the beginning of the chapter, seven Pacific Island leaders raised concerns about Papua at the UN General Assembly Session shortly after the PIF meeting. The ULMWP also accepts that its internationalisation strategies will be most effectively pursued at the UN, reflecting a Papuan view that the UN has a

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r­ esponsibility to implement its 1962 commitment to ensure that Papuans could exercise their right of self-determination. In September 2017 Benny Wenda, on behalf of the ULMWP, presented a petition, supposedly signed by 1,708,167 indigenous Papuans, to the chair of the UN’s decolonisation committee, Rafael ­Ramirez. In Benny Wenda’s opinion, ‘… These signatures are the bones and blood of my people who have been killed and who have suffered; and who continue to suffer and die under Indonesian occupation.’ (Wenda 2017) The petition wanted Papua recognized as a ‘non self-governing territory’, listed on the agenda of the decolonisation committee, and called for an internationally supervised vote be held. It also asked the UN to instigate an investigation into human rights abuses. However, Rafael Ramirez explained that Papua was not an issue for the committee and it was a principle of the UN to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of its members, including Indonesia. (Doherty and Lamb 2017) Domestically in Indonesia, the government has sought to promote its own Melanesian strategy, seeking to undercut Papuan independence activist’s claims that its Melanesian identity makes Papua distinct from Indonesia. The government asserted that Indonesia had five Melanesian provinces—Maluku, North Maluku and East Nusa Tenggara (NTT), as well as the two Papuan provinces— with a total population greater than that of the Melanesian states in the Pacific. On 7 ­October 2015, at Ambon airport, President Joko Widodo witnessed the signing of a ‘­Declaration of Melanesian Brotherhood’ by the governments of five Indonesian provinces designated as ‘Melanesian’.18 The Declaration followed a meeting earlier in the year, also in Ambon, when the five governors met with the then Coordinating Minister for Political, Legal and Security Affairs, Tedjo Edhy ­Purdijatno, to strengthen Melanesian solidarity. The purpose of the meeting seemed to be to convince the governors of Maluku, North Maluku and NTT that their provinces were also Melanesian (Tribun Maluku 2015). In April 2014, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs held a foreign policy discussion forum in Kupang, NTT, to make recommendations on Indonesian policy on the South Pacific based on considerations of the cultural similarities between Melanesian societies in Indonesia and those in the south Pacific. M Wahid Supriyadi, a senior foreign affairs policy advisor, thought that, as there were more Melanesians in ­Indonesia than in the Pacific, it was appropriate that a Centre for Melanesian Culture should be established in Indonesia (Pos Kupang 2014). Peter O’Neill told the Lowy ­Institute that PNG would welcome a delegation of the governors of the five ­Melanesian provinces at the MSG (O’Neill 2015). He wanted to engage with the elected representatives of the Papuan provinces (Mambor 2015a). While the Indonesian government sought to close down the opportunities for a regional discussion opened up by the decisions of the MSG and PIF, various Papuan groups and leaders welcomed the MSG and PIF initiatives. On the eve of the

18  The governors of Maluku and NTT signed the declaration, while senior officials represented the other provinces. In the case of Papua, former deputy governor Constan Karma deputised for Governor Lukas Enembe (Tabliod Jubi 2015b).

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PIF meeting, the pro-independence KNPB (West Papuan National ­Committee),19 had organised a rally in Jayapura to declare its support for PIF’s discussion of Papua and the ULMWP participation in it. The KNPB expectations of the PIF meeting far exceeded the likely outcomes of the Forum. It wanted PIF to organise a United Nations team to investigate the political status of Papua (Tabloid Jubi 2015a). More orientated towards engaging with the government and influencing policy, Neles Tebay, Catholic intellectual and leader of the Papua Peace Network, thought the PIF decision could help resolve the problems in Papua. In the year that Indonesia celebrated 70 years of independence and Papua marked 52 years of integration, Papua ceased being a domestic issue and had become a regional issue in the Pacific. In order to pre-empt Papua becoming an international issue, Neles Tebay urged that the government should deal with human rights abuses by appointing a senior official with ministerial status and a mandate to resolve the conflicts in Papua through peaceful dialogue. A team of three non-Papuans, who were trusted and respected by Papuans, would support that official. Through this approach, Neles Tebay argued that the issues in Papua, including human rights abuses, could be resolved without the involvement of foreigners. Such an approach could lead to talks between the government and the resistance groups represented by the ULMWP (Tebay 2015a; Tebay 2015b). If the Indonesian government continues to reject the PIF fact-finding mission, it leaves its supporters in the Pacific, particularly Peter O’Neill, in a difficult position. O’Neill has raised the human rights of his fellow Papuans from early in his prime ministership but has done so in moderate and diplomatic language and has not linked human rights to issues of self-determination or sovereignty. O’Neill will have to defend his moderate approach to Indonesia against the criticism of his political opponents and civil society groups if Indonesia rejects any discussion on human rights issues. While there remain important differences among Pacific states, there is a consensus that human rights issues in Papua need to be discussed rather than denied. Australia is a member of PIF. Tony Abbott attended the meeting in Port Moresby in what turned out to be one of his last international engagements as Prime Minister. He and his New Zealand counterpart, John Key, were engulfed in a controversy about climate change policy with the Pacific island states. In the public reporting of the Papua issue at PIF there was little if any mention of Abbott’s contribution to the debate. As noted earlier in the chapter, Abbott had been very supportive of Indonesian policies in Papua and thought Papuans better off as part of a prosperous Indonesia. In contrast, John Key and his foreign minister, Murray McCully, were sensitive to New Zealand’s position in the Pacific. Key thought that Papua was a matter for Indonesia and PNG to sort out, and not a matter for New Zealand 19  The KNPB was established in 2008 and has a predominantly highlander leadership and membership. It has close links with Benny Wenda, the International Parliamentarians for West Papua, and the International Lawyers for West Papua. The KNPB is a member of the ULMWP and has organised demonstrations in Papua to support the ULMWP’s diplomacy in the Pacific.

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to involve itself in. He was sceptical about the efficacy of a fact-finding mission as it would require Indonesian cooperation and, from McCully’s discussions with the Indonesian Vice Minister, cooperation was not on offer. McCully considered that the PIF conference was sending Indonesia a clear message that the Pacific is watching Papua carefully and wants Indonesia to do better (Moir 2015). All the members of the MSG and PIF are in Australia’s backyard and in its diplomatic and economic sphere of influence. Papuan lobbying in the Pacific has prompted a much higher level of Indonesian diplomatic activity. In addition to Foreign Minister and Security Minister visits, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono visited Fiji in June 2014 with a large aid package and spoke at the ‘Pacific Island Development Forum Leaders Meeting’. Fiji Prime Minister Bainimarama declined to attend the 2015 PIF meeting in Port Moresby as a protest against Australian and New Zealand influence in the Forum (Fiji Sun 2015). Following his visit to Papua in May 2015, President Joko Widodo visited Port Moresby and secured O’Neill’s support for Indonesia’s associate membership of the MSG. In late October 2016, at the fourth 2+2 Dialogue between Indonesian and ­Australian Foreign and Defence Ministers, there was a particular and unusual focus on the Pacific and on ‘constructive engagement’ of Indonesia and ­Australia in the region. The Joint Communiqué spoke of cooperation in supporting e­ conomic development and good governance, as well as support for PNG as chair of APEC in 2018 (Marsudi et al 2016). The 2+2 Dialogue followed the MGS and PIF meetings and the speeches of seven Pacific leaders at the General Assembly session. In his comments to the press following the dialogue, Indonesian Defence Minister, retired General Ryamizard Ryacudu, was more forthcoming and specific about Indonesia’s interests in the Pacific and how Australia could assist: I have told Australia we never interfere with the internal affairs of any other country and we will strongly object if other countries do so to us. So please tell Solomon Islands and those six nations (from the MSG) never to interfere or encourage West Papua to join them. Those countries better keep their mouths shut and mind their own business. It is better that (Australia) speaks to them gently. If it was left up to me, I would twist their ears (Hodge 2016).

Early in 2017, Papua was one of the issues that prompted General Gatot N ­ urmantyo, then the Commander of Armed Forces (TNI), to announce a suspension of m ­ ilitary cooperation with Australia. Teaching materials used in a training course for Indonesian officers in Perth included an assignment about whether Papua as a Melanesian society should be independent (Topsfield 2017). Generals Gatot Nurmantyo and Ryamizard Ryacudu’s views on international interest in Papua were expressed in blunt language but were consistent with Indonesian diplomatic strategies in the Pacific and at the UN—that Indonesia is unwilling to engage in any discussion of its governance and human rights problems in Papua. The Generals’ interventions are a reminder that, despite the Lombok Treaty and the subsequent statements and attitudes of Australian Ministers, Papua continues to impinge on the bilateral relationship. Gatot Nurmantyo’s short-lived suspension of military cooperation

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also provided the opportunity for a pro-Papuan independence demonstration outside the Indonesian Consulate in Melbourne, at which a demonstrator raised the ­Papuan Morning Star Flag on the Consulate building (Carmody 2017). As the former colonial power, major provider of aid and next-door neighbour, Australia has a particular interest in Papua New Guinea, its defence, security and relationship with Indonesia. The 2016 Defence White Paper identifies the security, stability and cohesion of PNG (along with Timor-Leste and the South Pacific states) as the most important strategic interest after the defence of Australia itself. Australia sought to be the ‘principal security partner’ of these countries. The White Paper emphasised Australia’s commitment to strengthen the security of PNG, as reflected in the 2013 Joint Declaration for a new Papua New Guinea–Australia Partnership.20 It affirms the close cooperation in defence and security established in the 1987 Joint Declaration of Principles Guiding Relations between Australia and Papua New Guinea (Australia DFAT 1987). In May 2015, Peter O’Neill told the Lowy Institute: ‘Our bilateral relationship with Australia is in very good shape, probably in better shape and more harmonious than at any time since Independence’ (O’Neill 2015). From the vantage point of Port Moresby, it may seem so. Joanne Wallis has argued, however, that PNG has diversified its international trade, investment and diplomatic relationships away from Australia. The agreement to process and settle asylum seekers has given PNG leverage in the relationship, as evidenced by Australia’s increased and renegotiated aid program in that country. Wallis suggests there has, in fact, been an erosion of Australian influence in PNG (Wallis 2014). With reference to the 2013 MSG resolutions on ‘the inalienable rights of the people of West Papua towards self-determination’ and the concerns about human rights, Stewart Firth has argued that the ‘pan-Melanesianism’ of the MSG has complications for Papua New Guinea (Firth 2014). Following the MSG and PIF meetings of 2015 and 2016, the complications for PNG have not significantly lessened.

Conclusion In conclusion, of all Indonesia’s neighbours, Australia has the most interest in a peaceful resolution of the conflicts in Papua, yet it is in a weak position to encourage the Indonesian government to adopt policies that offer some prospect of resolution. Australian policy has been immobilised, to use Bob Carr’s terms, by Indonesia’s ‘paranoia’ about Australian intentions in Papua, immobilised by the long shadow of Timor-Leste. After the tensions created by the Papuan asylum seekers in 2006, the diplomatic relationship has been managed. Although P ­ apuan activists have continued to organise in Australia, their activities are largely quarantined from the diplomatic relationship. Pro-independence activists in Australia 20 

Department of Defence, Defence White Paper 2016, Canberra, 2016, pp. 17, 127.

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have succeeded on occasions in keeping Papua in the media but have exercised little influence on the conduct of government policy towards Indonesia. The Rudd-Gillard and Abbott-Turnbull governments frequently reaffirmed Australia’s recognition of Indonesian sovereignty in Papua and have argued that it is in the interests of Papuans to remain part of Indonesia. Malcom Turnbull appears to have moderated the 2016 PIF communiqué on Papua. Paradoxically, the Melanesian states may have stumbled on a format to engage both the Indonesian government and pro-independence Papuans. The MSG has given Papua a voice and a seat at the table of an international forum. It has engaged with Papuan’s arguments about the history of integration, right of self-­ determination and human rights abuses, in sharp contrast to the statements of successive Australian governments. Giving Papua a voice and a seat in an international forum may be as much as the Pacific islands states can do. However, the speeches of seven Pacific leaders during the 2016 UN General Assembly session suggests that they realise the issue of Papua’s self-determination can only be resolved in the world body. These Pacific leaders are prepared to raise Papua’s issues at the UN even when there is not a consensus within the MSG or PIF. Indonesia has responded to PIF and MSG concerns about human rights abuses in Papua expressed over the past 15 years by more intensive diplomatic engagement. While Indonesian diplomacy failed to prevent the ULMWP being granted observer status at the MSG, it secured associate membership for itself and obstructed the MSG from adopting a united consensus position on Papua. However, Indonesia’s success blocking the ULMWP’s full membership of the MSG has not deterred Pacific Island governments, whether members of the MSG or not, from raising human rights and self-determination issues relating to Papua at the General Assembly and the Human Rights Council. The speeches of Pacific Island leaders have paved the way for the ULMWP to petition the UN to inscribe Papua on the list of nonself-governing territories. Given its influence in the Pacific, Indonesia has not yet devised strategies beyond rejecting concerns about human rights abuses in Papua as interference in its internal affairs and an infringement of its sovereignty. The dismissal of the Pacific states’ concerns about human rights, I­ndonesia’s unwillingness to engage with Papuans, domestically or in the MSG, together with reports of on-going human rights abuses, have served to give credence to the arguments of Papuans in the forums of the Pacific. As at July 2017, it was not clear whether there would be a ‘Melanesian Way’ to resolve the differences within the MSG about full membership for the ULMWP—one way or the other.

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Bambang Yudhoyono, President of the Republic of Indonesia, Istana Negara, Jakarta’, 30 September, . ABC Pacific Beat (2015) ‘PNG Governor Dismisses Indonesia’s West Papua Stance’, 10 September, . Adelaide Now (2015) ‘Limited Action on West Papua’, Adelaide Now, 11 September, . Amnesty International (2004) ‘Indonesia: Prisoners of Conscience Action 2004’, ASA 21/004/2004. AntaraNews.com (2016) ‘Indonesia Hails MSG’s Decision to Reject ULMWP as Member’, AntaraNews.com, 15 July, . Australia DFAT (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) (1987) ‘Joint Declaration of Principles Guiding Relations between Australia and Papua New Guinea 1987, as Amended by Exchange of Letters 1992’, . Australia DFAT (2006) ‘Agreement between the Republic of Indonesia and Australia on the Framework for Security Cooperation’, 13 November, ­ . Australia. Department of Defence (2016) ‘Defence White Paper 2016’ (Canberra, Department of Defence). Australia. Minister for Foreign Affairs (2013) ‘Formal Warning Issued to Freedom Flotilla’, Media Release, 20 August, . Bachelard, Michael (2013a) ‘Indonesia Threatens Military Action against Protest Flotilla’, The Age, 19 August, . Bachelard, Michael (2013b) ‘Freedom Flotilla makes Papua Connection, Organisers Claim’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 September, . Bachelard, Michael (2014) ‘Abbott Government Calls for More Openness in West Papua, Risking Insulting Indonesia Again’, Sydney Morning Herald, 2 October, . Bolatiki, Maika (2015) ‘Editorial: Why We Will Support Indonesia’, Fiji Sun, 17 June, . Carmody, Broede (2017) ‘Indonesia Condemns West Papua Protest at its Consulate in Melbourne’, The Age, 7 January, . Carr, Bob (2012) ‘Leigh Sales Interview with Foreign Minister Bob Carr’, ABC 7.30 Report, 28 August, . Carr, Bob (2014) Diary of a Foreign Minister (Sydney, University of New South Wales Press). Cenderawasih Pos (2006a) ‘Demo Anti Militerisme di DPRP Nyaris Rusuh’, 24 January, . Cenderawasih Pos (2006b) ‘Perintahnya Tembakan Keatas’, 28 January, . Cenderawasih Pos (2006c) ‘Abe Masih Mencekam: Tiga Warga Sipil Kena Peluru Nyasar’, 18 March, . Chauvel, Richard (2011) ‘Filep Karma and the Fight for Papua’s Future’, Inside Story, 6 November, . Doherty, Ben and Lamb, Kate (2017) ‘West Papua independence petition is rebuffed at UN’, The Guardian, 30 September, . Fiji Sun (2015) ‘What Our PM Wrote to O’Neill’, 10 September, http://fijisun.com. fj/2015/09/10/what-our-pm-wrote-to-oneill/>. Firth, Stewart (2014) ‘Security in Papua New Guinea: The Military and Diplomatic Dimensions’ 10(2) Security Challenges 107. Fitzpatrick, Stephen (2006) ‘Papuan Refugees Were Hand-picked,’ The Australian, 25 September. www.theaustralian.com.au. Fitzsimmons, Hamish (2014) ‘West Papua Independence Activists Accuse I­ndonesia of Using Students as Spies’, 8 November, ABC Lateline, . Forum Communiqué (2015) ‘Forty-Sixth Pacific Islands Forum, Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea’, 8–10 September, . Forum Communiqué (2016) ‘Forty-Seventh Pacific Islands Forum, Pohnpei’, 8–10 September, . Freedom Flotilla (nd) ‘Freedom Flotilla: Land and Sea Convoy for Peace and ­Justice’, . Grant, Bruce (1962) ‘Indonesia and Papuan Nationalism: West Papuan Leader Aims at Independence by 1969’, The Age, 12 October. Hampapua (2006) ‘Central Government Should Hold a Dialogue with the ­Papuans’, Jayapura, 17 March, www.hampapua.org/skp/news.html, accessed 12 April 2006, website no longer active, reference on file with author. Hayward-Jones, Jenny (2015a) ‘PNG Prime Minister Speaks up on West Papua’, Lowy Interpreter, 9 February, .

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Hayward-Jones, Jenny (2015b) ‘PNG Backs up its Pacific Leadership Claims’, The Interpreter, 10 July, . Hodge, Amanda (2016) ‘Jakarta Pressures Julie Bishop on Papua’, The Australian, 2 November, . Howard, John (2006) ‘John Howard Interview with Neil Mitchell’, Radio 3AW, Melbourne, 7 April, . Howard, John; Andrews, Kevin; Wilson, Nicholas (2006) ‘The Hon John Howard MP, Joint Press Conference with The Hon Kevin Andrews MP, and Mr ­Nicholas Wilson, Executive Director of the Office of Workplace Services’, Parliament House, Canberra, 30 March, . Indonesia. Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2015) ‘PIF Reiterates Support for ­Indonesia’s Sovereignty and Integrity Including on Papua Provinces’, 11 September, . Island Sun, The (2015) ‘Sogavare Tells MSG Leaders Not to Forget their Own People’, 24 June, . Jackson, Andra and Allard, Tom (2006) ‘Papuans Tell of a Fear-filled Journey’, The Age, 10 April, . Kalosil, Moana Carcasses (2014) ‘Statement by the Right Honourable Kalosil Prime Minister of the Republic of Vanuatu before the High-Level Segment of the Twenty Fifth Session of the Human Rights Council Geneva, Switzerland’, 4 March. Kenneth, Gorethy (2015) ‘Don’t Meddle’, Post Courier, 10 September, . Maclellan, Nic (2016a) New Caledonia and French Polynesia Join Forum as Full Members, Islands Business / PINA, 12 September, . Maclellan, Nic (2016b) ‘West Papua High on Pacific Islands Forum Agenda’, The Interpreter, 26 September, . Mambor, Victor (2015a) ‘O’Neill Berharap Gubernur Enembe dan Atururi ­Berpartisipasi di MSG’, Tabliod Jubi, 18 May, . Mambor, Victor (2015b) ‘O’Neill: PNG Akan Bicara Soal Papua Barat di PIF’, Tabloidjubi, 8 September, . Marsudi, Retno LP; Ryacudu, Ryamizad; Bishop, Julie; and Payne, Marise (2016) ‘Joint Communiqué: The Fourth Indonesia-Australia Foreign and Defence

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Sauvakacolo, Siteri (2015) ‘Methodist Church Support West Papua’, Fiji Times, 14 March, . SIBC (Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation) (2015) ‘M.S.G [sic] Decision on West Papua and Indonesia Is to Create Dialogue: PM’, 28 June, . Simbolon, Bob H (2016) ‘Luhut Tolak Tim Pencari Fakta Pelanggaran HAM untuk Papua’, Satu Harapan.com, 4 April, . Skehan, Craig (2001) ‘Nauru Bars Warring West Papuan Secessionists from Pacific Forum’, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 August. Soekarno, Ir (1965) Dibawah Bendera Revolusi, Vol 2 (Jakarta, Penerbit dibawah Bendera Revolusi). Solomon Star (2015) ‘Sogavare Urges UN to Address West Papua’, 4 October, . Suara.com (2016) ‘Diplomat Cantik Indonesia ‘Skakmat’ 6 Pimpinan Negara di PBB’, Suara.com, 29 September, . Tabliod Jubi (2013) ‘Batalkan Pemidanaan Terhadap Pendukung “Freedom Flotilla”’, 4 September, . Tabliod Jubi (2015a) ‘KNPB Declares Support for PIF’, Tabliod Jubi, 8 September, . Tabliod Jubi (2015b) ‘Papua Tanda Tangani Deklarasi Persaudaraan Melanesia’, 7 October, . Tebay, Neles (2015a) ‘Pembahasan Masalah Papua di Pasifik, Kompas, 25 September, . Tebay, Neles (2015b) ‘Papua Now on Pacific Radar’, The Jakarta Post, 29 September, . Topsfield, Jewel (2017) ‘Why Indonesian General Gatot Nurmantyo halted ­military ties with Australia’, Sydney Morning Herald, 5 January, . Tribun Maluku (2015) ‘Melanesia Dibahas Lima Gubernur Dengan Menko Polhukam’, 28 February, . Vanuatu Daily Post (2017) ‘Vanuatu Raises Human Rights Concern for West Papua at UN’, 4 March, . Waide, Scott (2012) ‘Prime Minister Peter O’Neill Speaks about His New West Papua strategy in the EMTV interview’, Pacific Scoop: Report, 2 October,

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. Wallis, Joanne (2014) ‘Is Australia’s Influence over Papua New Guinea Declining?’, The Strategist, 20 October, . Wenda, Benny (2017) ‘Statement from Benny Wenda on the West P ­ apuan ­People’s Petition’, 30 September, . White, Hugh (2006) ‘The Lombok Treaty: Devil in the detail’, The Interpreter, . Wirajuda, Hassan and Downer, Alexander (2006) ‘Joint Press Conference with Indonesian Foreign Minister Dr Hassan Wirajuda, Agreement on Framework for Security Cooperation’, 13 November, . Yudhoyono, Susilo Bambang (2010) ‘Address by the President of the Republic of Indonesia’, to Joint Sitting of the Australian Parliament, Canberra, 10 March, in Parliamentary Debates: House of Representatives: Official Hansard: 2136–40.

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15 Indonesia and Australia: Ties that Rarely Bind ENDY M BAYUNI

There are many strategic reasons why Indonesia and Australia should get along better. Two large countries living in close proximity to one another must have many common interests; they should collaborate more and quarrel less. Indonesia may not have reciprocated Australia’s gesture of declaring the other the most important of all its foreign relationships, but it is still important for Indonesia to get this relationship right. The two neighbours are much better off when they work together rather than fight. The relationship will not become less important as Indonesia rises to become an Asian economic powerhouse in the coming years, as many are predicting. With new power and authority come new responsibilities. Indonesia will have to live up to its status as a new Asian power, and work to earn the respect of its neighbours. It will need to take most of the initiative in building relations with countries in the region, including with its large neighbour to the south. But if the trend since the beginning of the millennium is any indication, Indonesia’s relationship with Australia will become more complex and more challenging to manage. For now, it is a relationship driven more by the differences rather than commonalities between the two countries—and even by the emotions of their leaders and peoples, rather than their common sense and common interests. That needs to change. How will this relationship evolve in the coming years as the balance of economic power between the two countries shifts? Will that change have any impact on how each pursues the relationship? What are the key factors that make the relationship less volatile than has been the case in recent years? This chapter attempts to answer these questions, and then some, from the Indonesian perspective. It analyses trends in the relationship from the period just before the turn of the millennium, a marker of when Indonesia’s democratisation and economic rise began, until 2015 and beyond. It ends with recommendations for how to build a more stable relationship that benefits both countries and peoples.

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The Importance of Being Earnest In April 2015, Prime Minister Tony Abbott recalled his ambassador in Jakarta, Paul Grigson, after Indonesia executed two Australian citizens who had been convicted of drug trafficking. Abbott, who made eleventh hour appeals to Indonesia to save the lives of Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan, called their execution ‘cruel and unnecessary’. After news of plans for their execution was announced in January, Australia had launched a massive national campaign to save the duo, convinced that the leading members of the ‘Bali Nine’ Australian drug syndicate had been reformed while lingering in a Bali prison for the last 10 years, and that they deserved to live. Abbott made personal calls to President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) pleading for compassion but he was rebuffed. Widodo, inaugurated as president in October 2014, had declared war against drug traffickers. In December, he said he wanted all 64 people on death row for drug trafficking, almost all non-Indonesians, executed. Only Widodo stood between the 64 and the firing squad. He had the constitutional power to grant clemency and commute their sentences but would not use it. The drug menace, Widodo argues, has become a grave threat to the nation, particularly its young people. The execution of those already sentenced by court to death was necessary to show Indonesia’s seriousness in pursuing this war. By July 2016, 18 of those on death row had been executed in three separate rounds, including the two Australians in April 2015. Recalling an ambassador, as Abbott did, is a common diplomatic form of protest. It also signals the downgrading of relations, and is one step short of breaking ties altogether. Just 17 months earlier, Indonesia had done exactly the same to Australia. In November 2013, then President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono ordered home his envoy in Canberra, Nadjib Riphat, ‘for consultation’ in the wake of revelations that Australia, in collaboration with the US, had been tapping the mobile phones of top Indonesian leaders, including his own and his wife’s. This behaviour ‘hurt their strategic partnership with Indonesia, a fellow democracy’, Yudhoyono said in a Twitter message explaining his decision to downgrade ties with Australia— although not with the US. Indonesia immediately froze cooperation programs with Australia in three areas: people smuggling, intelligence sharing and military. Just as Abbott was later disappointed with Jokowi’s response on the executions, so Yudhoyono was dismayed by Abbott’s aloof response to the spy scandal. In spite of the strong evidence, Abbott refused to publicly acknowledge the espionage operation and, consequently, refused to apologise to Indonesia or even to promise to cease the activity. Yudhoyono was understandably personally hurt, having invested so much in building the relationship with Australia. An apology was the least the Indonesian leader had expected, just like the one US President Barrack Obama had given German Chancellor Angela Merkel over their own spy scandal, but none was forthcoming.

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To the credit of Yudhoyono and Abbott, both knew where to draw the line in hurting the relationship, despite their anger. They both eventually sent their ambassadors back to their postings—within a few weeks for Grigson and a few months in the case of Nadjib. Both leaders understood the importance of the relationship, and that not having an ambassador would only make further communication difficult. Even Yudhoyono’s retaliation—freezing joint programs in the three areas— was measured, so as not to inflict too much or lasting damage on overall ties. All three areas affected could be revived with just a phone call between officials the moment they got the word from their leaders that the row was over. The two giant neighbours knew that sooner or later they needed to get their relationship back on track. Nevertheless, these two episodes of ambassadorial recall show how precarious the relationship between Indonesia and Australia has become. No two countries in close proximity to one another could be more different in so many respects than Australia and Indonesia, whether in terms of cultural and historical experience or levels of prosperity and economic development. Their geopolitical, security and economic interests are also different, and at times even clash. They may have some commonalities and shared strategic interests, and even shared values as democratic nations, but their relationship has been defined more by what separates them than by what unites them, especially in recent years. The relationship between Indonesia and Australia has had good and bad moments this century but anyone studying press headlines in both countries will find that the bad moments now seem to prevail more than before. The best moments in the relationship came in the first decade of the century. In 1999, they removed a major irritant in their ties after East Timor voted for independence from Indonesia in a United Nations-supervised referendum. Until then, the Indonesia-Australia relationship had been constantly undermined by Indonesia’s handling of the former Portuguese colony, which it annexed in 1975. In fact, Indonesia’s foreign minister Ali Alatas called it a ‘pebble in the shoe’ in bilateral ties. Once removed, relations strengthened and expanded on almost all fronts. Other factors also contributed to the blossoming of ties. After 1998, Indonesia embarked on massive political and economic reforms to turn the country from being governed, for over three decades, by a dictator backed by the military, to one ruled by democratically elected leaders. With other Western nations, Australia contributed to some of these endeavours through its aid programs. More important than the Australian aid, however, were the more relaxed attitudes shown by leaders in both countries in pursuing their ties as Indonesia became more open and democratic. There was not so much need any more for Australia to pay as much heed to Indonesia’s ‘cultural sensitivity’, a factor that had previously prevented them from being more open and frank about one another. In fact, this now seems to have been replaced by consistent use of Indonesia as a convenient punching bag for Australian politicians in election campaigns, as the problem of illegal immigration flowing into Australia became a decisive issue to win votes. John Howard’s re-election campaigns, like later victories by Kevin Rudd,

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Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott, came after they promised to ‘get tough’ on illegal immigrants, and on Indonesia, which they claimed was not doing enough to stop the flow of refugees from central and south Asia using the archipelagic nation as a springboard to enter Australia. But in each case, as soon as the elections ended, the new prime minister made a point of making Indonesia his or her first overseas stop to patch up whatever damage may have been caused to relations by their campaign speeches. Indonesia has now become more accustomed to Australian verbal abuse, knowing that Australian politicians need to address their domestic audience’s concerns in order to win the elections. It is expected that Australian politicians will speak a different language, one of cooperation, when talking directly to Indonesia. Indonesia’s own democratic elections also see politicians attacking foreign interests to win extra votes here and there, although not Australia as much as large international corporations, the US and Malaysia. They are playing exactly the same game as Australian politicians, albeit not to the same extent, because international issues are not as important in the Indonesian elections as the asylum seeker issue is in Australia. In any case, regardless of the verbal abuse directed at Indonesia during Australian election campaigns, governments in Jakarta have continued to work with Australia, including by trying to address the refugee problems. No real harm was done by harsh words in the Australian elections. The two democracies can, and must, work together. In 2002, Indonesia and Australia jointly hosted the first regional conference bringing together countries involved in, or affected by, the regional refugee problems: Australia as the main country of destination for these refugees, the south and central Asian countries from where they escape, and intermediary countries like Indonesia. Called the Bali Process on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime, this event helped raised awareness that the refugee flow was a problem that must be tackled together. These joint efforts were, however, abandoned in 2013 after Abbott decided to go it alone and began turning refugeefilled boats back to Indonesian waters, sometimes even paying them money to go. His decision may have won plaudits at home, especially since it successfully lowered the number of refugee arrivals, but it became a bone of contention for Indonesia that inevitably would affect overall relations. The policy of going it alone virtually destroyed any work the two countries invested in the Bali Process. Two other areas indicating that relations were expanding and growing stronger in the first decade of this century were, first, Australia-Indonesia collaboration in fighting terrorism in the wake of the October 2002 suicide bombing in Bali that killed many tourists, including Australians; and, second, major joint disaster relief operations in the wake of the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck the western Indonesian island of Sumatra in December 2004. As in the case of refugees, these two issues produced joint initiatives between Indonesia and Australia. In defence and security, Indonesia began to warm to the idea of a more comprehensive collaboration that fell short of a security alliance with Australia but involved greater consultations and transparency. In 2006, the two countries signed the Lombok Treaty, which is symbolic of their commitment to

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work together to address common security problems and challenges. President Yudhoyono personally contributed a great deal to this strengthening of ties, often going out of his way to support Australia and even going against mainstream domestic public opinion in Indonesia, which is always sceptical about Canberra’s intentions. Yudhoyono made four visits to Australia as president and during the last trip in 2012, he was criticised at home when, in a speech in Canberra, he called nine Australian servicemen and women, who died during humanitarian operations in the earthquake-struck Indonesian Nias Island, ‘heroes’ of Indonesia. No other Indonesian leader had gone as far as Yudhoyono did in building relations with Australia. This is why he took Australian’s espionage operations in Indonesia personally, and responded the way he did. Relations turned for the worse after the events just described. The espionage revelation and Abbott’s poor handling of it severely damaged relations and undid a lot of the hard work that had gone into building ties. The mutual trust painfully built over the years, most particularly during Yudhoyono’s ten years of rule, was almost wiped out overnight. It is unlikely that relations will return to the level seen in much of the first decade of the century any time soon. Neither Abbott nor Widodo, who replaced Yudhoyono in October 2014, have displayed the same commitment to the relationship that Yudhoyono and earlier Australian prime ministers showed. Without the personal commitment of their leaders, it will be hard for both countries to rebuild trust. No one can accuse them of not trying. Abbott made a point of attending Widodo’s inauguration in October, even though he was not formally invited. And Widodo reluctantly went to Brisbane a month later to attend the Group of 20 summit hosted by Abbott. But the atmosphere had changed and it affected the relationship. Abbott’s decision to go it alone in dealing with asylum seekers, while hugely popular at home, became an open invitation for Indonesia to retaliate in other fields. Widodo’s decision to execute the Australian drug traffickers may not necessarily be related but that was how it played out in Indonesian public opinion. When Indonesia announced a new policy granting visa-free entry for tourists from more than 30 countries in March 2015, Australia was conspicuously absent from the list, even though it is a major source of tourists, particularly for Bali.1 These tensions raised questions in Canberra and Jakarta about how much importance they should attach to the bilateral relationship, and how much should they invest in building the ties. The foreign policy community in Australia, for example, now questions whether it needs to hold on to the foreign policy mantra that ‘no relationship is more important to Australia than Indonesia’, embraced by every single prime minister since the 1990s until Turnbull. It remains to be seen how Turnbull’s election will impact the relationship. But if their first encounter, in Jakarta in November 2015, is any indication, he and Widodo appeared to have hit it off well. The two men went on a blusukan, the walkabout visit that has become the Indonesian leader’s trademark, meeting and greeting ordinary people in a crowded market in Jakarta. In March 2016, Indonesia 1 

Australian tourist arrivals in Indonesia are discussed in ch 6.

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finally included Australia in the updated list of countries granted visa-free entry for short visits. As two large, next-door neighbours, Indonesia and Australia certainly have many common strategic interests, and know that their futures are tied together. But recent turns of events have compelled them to review how they approach the other. In Jakarta, an overhaul of Indonesia’s foreign policy became imperative as the country struggles to come to terms with its long-held ambition to play a bigger role in shaping the world, particularly in Asia. Indonesia’s economic development, which, as mentioned, has accompanied the democratisation process since the start of the century, has given Indonesia greater confidence about its place in the world. The election of Joko Widodo as president in 2014 ushered in a reorientation of Indonesia’s foreign policy. His election manifesto also included a vision of Indonesia as a maritime nation and an Indo-Pacific power, although the substance of this idea was not made explicit. Under its new president, Indonesia stills needs to translate what all this means, particularly in terms of its foreign policy.

Is Indonesia Punching Below its Weight—Or Above It? Indonesia marked its 70th Independence Day anniversary in August 2015 with a powerful foreign policy statement to its neighbours: It sank 38 boats that its navy had seized for illegal fishing in its waters. The boats came mostly from neighbouring countries like Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia. One of the foreign policy objectives of President Widodo’s maritime nation vision for Indonesia is the exercise of full sovereignty over its vast territorial waters. Fishing boats from neighbouring countries have been plundering its fishing resources for decades, with Indonesia unable to stop them. Widodo has estimated that as much as US$20 billion worth of fishing resources are stolen from Indonesian waters each year. Indonesia still does not have enough boats to patrol all its waters and protect its maritime borders, so the sinking of the impounded ships was more of a statement that no one, not even neighbours, should mess with Indonesia and that those caught could expect no mercy or leniency. This translated into blowing up the vessels. But for Independence Day, only five were blown up; others were scuttled to sink to the bottom of the sea. ‘We have to be able to show that we can be triumphant on the sea because the sea is the future of our nation’, Minister for Maritime and Fisheries Susi Pudjiastuti said at the ceremony to sink the ships. Whatever happened to the spirit of solidarity with neighbours? Also undermined was the spirit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), of which Indonesia is the largest member. Most of the sunken boats came from fellow ASEAN members but Jakarta simply ignored protests by their governments. Never mind the fact that ASEAN was planning to usher in an ASEAN Community

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at the end of 2015. Under President Widodo, exercising sovereignty comes first, even if this comes at the cost of undermining relations with friends and neighbours. It was the same attitude he showed when Prime Minister Abbott and other foreign leaders pleaded with him to spare the lives of their citizens on death row from being executed. Indonesia was exercising its laws as a full sovereign nation, Widodo responded. No one should interfere. As this suggests, Widodo has been quick to discard the ‘thousand friends and zero enemies’ foreign policy mantra introduced by his predecessor, Yudhoyono. On various occasions, Widodo has said that the extent of Indonesia’s relations with other countries would, from now on, be defined by what his nation can get out of them. In other words, it is strictly business. As a former furniture trader, he knows a thing or two about exports, and he ordered all Indonesia’s ambassadors abroad to become the country’s leading salespersons. In his travels abroad, he always beseeches host governments and business communities to invest and trade more with Indonesia. The newfound self-confidence that Indonesia is displaying in pursuing its foreign relations may come across as arrogant or even cocky to neighbours and friends, but it was something that did not just happen after Widodo assumed office in October 2014. It is the result of more than a decade of sustainable economic development, along with the democratisation that Indonesia has undergone since the turn of the millennium. Widodo simply came out with a more bold and assertive foreign policy than his predecessors. Indonesia, the fourth most populous country in the world, now basks in many accolades that give it increased stature and respect on the global stage. In their speeches, Presidents Yudhoyono and Widodo have tirelessly reminded their audiences at home and abroad of accolades now widely used to describe Indonesia, sometimes all in a single breath: it is the largest democracy in the world after India and the US; the largest democracy among Muslim-majority countries; the largest ASEAN member; the largest Southeast Asian economy; and a member of the G20 group, which includes the 20 largest economies in the world. Officials sometimes jump ahead of themselves by announcing that, at the present trajectory, Indonesia’s current rank as the sixteenth largest economy in the world will rise to the top 10 by 2024, and top five by 2040. On any reading, however, Indonesia is now an emerging market economy and an emerging democracy, with all the problems and challenges this implies. Its economic rise went almost unnoticed, however, because it was eclipsed by the more impressive growth of China and India. Yudhoyono at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2011 reminded an audience made up mostly of CEOs of top global corporations that there was a lot more to Asia than China and India: When we think of Asia, think also of Indonesia and ASEAN. Indonesia is the world’s third largest democracy and the largest economy in Southeast Asia, and it is the key area of the world economic growth and we will soon become the most productive manpower in Asia. Indonesia will play a key role in the Asian rising.

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Indonesia has long harboured ambitions to play an active role in the global stage commensurate with its size. The government is actually mandated by the preamble of the 1945 Constitution to play a role in world affairs to help promote global peace and prosperity. Its ability to live up to this task is obviously limited by its economic capacity. Indonesia can nonetheless take pride in the glories it has enjoyed on the world stage during the nation’s 70 years of existence. Under President Soekarno, for example, Indonesia hosted the Asia Africa Conference in the West Java town of ­Bandung in 1955, bringing together leaders of newly independent countries in the two continents. This event became the precursor of the Non-aligned Movement five years later, offering nations an alternative to the two competing blocs of the Cold War. Indonesia under Soeharto also played a leading role in founding ASEAN in 1967, helping transform Southeast Asia from a region of conflicts to a region of peace and development 30-40 years later, and ASEAN became one of the most successful models of regional organisation (see chapter ten). Indonesia used its stature through ASEAN to help put together the peace deal in 1991 to end the civil war in Cambodia. Indonesia has also played a role in mediating conflicts in the southern Philippines and southern Thailand. Indonesia was instrumental in the creation or development of various regional forums, including the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) which was an Australian initiative. Through ASEAN, Indonesia likewise helped give birth in 2005 to the East Asia Summit (EAS), the members of which have now agreed that it will be the vehicle of choice in creating the larger Asia-Pacific community. Indonesia may, however, be a rising power but a reality check is in order. Although it has risen to become a middle-income country, and even a member of the elite G20 club, it is still a developing country, like China and India, with a very sizeable number of poor people. Officially, the number of people below the poverty level has fallen to around 10% of the population but this still translates to a staggering figure of well over 25 million people. Unlike other countries that have traditionally been defined as a ‘power’, Indonesia does not have the luxury of dispensing foreign aid as part of its foreign policy toolkit for winning friends and influence. Indonesia still relies on foreign aid, including from Australia, particularly for poverty alleviation and building public skills and capacity, as well as for meeting basic needs like access to clean water. Indonesia also lacks the military capability usually associated with powerful nations. The military is not even capable of protecting its own territorial waters and aerospace because for decades under Soeharto it was used more as a tool to sustain his rule and less as a means to protect borders or beef up national defence. This is changing, albeit slowly. The military, or TNI (Tentara Nasional Indonesia), has embarked on a major spending spree to modernise its largely antiquated weapons systems, with a 2024 deadline. Neighbours need not be alarmed as all this is done transparently and with the goal to ensure that TNI will have what it calls the Minimum Essential Force needed for Indonesia to fully exercise its land, maritime and aerospace sovereignty.

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Without economic aid and military power at its disposal, Indonesia will be a mild Asian power at best, for the foreseeable future. It is never short of soft-power initiatives, however, and its military and economic shortcomings never stopped Soekarno and Soeharto from trying to play a more ambitious role in the world. It is unlikely to stop other leaders after them, including Widodo, because it is a constitutional mandate. Under Yudhoyono, Indonesia launched several diplomatic initiatives worthy of note, including various bilateral and regional interfaith dialogues that allowed Jakarta to highlight its success and share its experiences in building a democratic nation with diverse ethnicities, cultures and faiths. Indonesia also launched the Bali Democracy Forum in 2008, an annual intergovernmental gathering of Asia-Pacific countries, including non-democratic states, to discuss and share their experiences. Widodo quickly scored a diplomatic feat by hosting the sixtieth commemorative anniversary of the Bandung Asia Africa Conference in April 2015, just six months into his presidency. He used this as a stage to criticise the domination of global financial systems by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, and called for their reform. Indonesia is now warming to China’s initiative of launching the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) to challenge the domination of the IMF and World Bank, two institutions controlled by the US and Europe. Indonesia was among the first four recipients of AIIB’s first financing projects, worth a total of more than A$500 million, along with Tajikistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan, announced in June 2016. The project in Indonesia, an urban slum improvement project, sits well with Widodo’s economic policy focus on developing infrastructure facilities. Widodo will continue Yudhoyono’s policy of Indonesia playing an active mediating role to resolve the disputes in the South China Sea involving China and several Southeast Asian countries. While Jakarta is not a party to any territorial dispute with China, at least for now, it views the tensions building in the South China Sea with great concern. Recent skirmishes there between China on the one hand, and Vietnam and the Philippines on the other, have compelled Indonesia to take an active part in seeking a solution, either through ASEAN or by individually approaching China. Indonesia pins its hopes on diplomacy and engagement with China in resolving territorial disputes in the South China Sea. When the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague in July 2016 ruled in favour of the Philippines in its dispute with China over the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, Jakarta issued a carefully worded statement appealing to all countries to respect international rulings but without mentioning China. Indonesia had its own brushes with China throughout 2016, with Chinese fishing boats entering the Natuna seas on the pretext that the area was a traditional fishing ground. Part of the Natuna Sea falls inside China’s ‘Nine-Dashed Line’ of areas it claims in the South China Sea. After three episodes of skirmishes involving their patrol and fishing boats, and intensive communications between Beijing and Jakarta, the two countries agreed to cool things off, at least for now.

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Indonesia has its own national interests at stake in the South China Sea. An open conflict between Southeast Asian countries and China would have serious implications for the security of the country. Indonesia shares the region’s concerns about the changing geopolitical security caused by a more powerful and increasingly assertive China, but has declined invitations from Australia, Japan and the US to join in their security alliances to counterweigh China. Instead, Jakarta has entered into security cooperation with a range of individual countries in order to safeguard its national security and defence. These arrangements are not exclusive, and include China. Protecting Indonesia’s territorial waters and defending its maritime borders are part of President Widodo’s vision of Indonesia as a maritime nation and power. Rather than seeing itself simply as the largest ASEAN member, Indonesia under Widodo is seeking to become an Indo-Pacific power. Indonesia’s foreign policy is, in fact, undergoing a major overhaul under Widodo. His vision of a maritime nation requires a change to how Indonesia sees itself in the region and in the world, and consequently, how it will pursue relations with other countries, including, most importantly, its closest neighbours and major trading partners. The move away from relying heavily on ASEAN is likely to be one of the biggest changes to foreign policy under President Widodo, and it is warranted. For years, ASEAN has been regarded as the cornerstone of Indonesia’s foreign policy, meaning that Jakarta would pursue most of its foreign policy objectives through ASEAN. This was based on the thinking that, collectively, ASEAN has a much more powerful voice in the global stage, and hence offers opportunities for Indonesia to be heard, as its largest member. While Indonesia is not about to discard ASEAN, it is likely to shift some of its focus and diplomatic resources to other areas to the larger Asia Pacific region. Critics say that making ASEAN the ‘cornerstone’ of Indonesian foreign policy smacks of a Jakarta-centric approach. For regions in the east—Bali and beyond—the most important relations are with their nearest neighbours, including Australia, Timor-Leste and Papua New Guinea, none of whom are members of ASEAN. Lest politicians in Jakarta forget, Indonesia is a large country, like the US, which claims to be both an Atlantic and Pacific power. The Widodo maritime nation vision also seeks to straddle two oceans, and offers the opportunity to develop a foreign policy paradigm more attuned to the twenty-first century. If neighbours, including Australia, find themselves second-guessing the direction of Indonesia’s foreign policy under Widodo, they are not the only ones. Indonesians too are still puzzled about where the president is taking the country. While the general direction may have been stated, the public need a blueprint or roadmap for how Indonesia will achieve its new goal of becoming a maritime nation or power in the Asia-Pacific region. In the absence of a national white paper, Indonesia’s foreign affairs will likely continue to be dictated by the moods of the president, the foreign minister and other power centres involved in foreign policy making, including the defence minister and the TNI. Their decisions are likely to continue to be unpredictable and reactionary, as reflected in the way Indonesia has sunk foreign boats for illegal fishing and Widodo’s response to international pleas to stop the execution of drug traffickers. This is likely to be the pattern for how

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Indonesia conducts its relations with neighbours, including Australia, for now at least. If Indonesia is not careful and does not watch its step it may soon be punching dangerously above its weight.

The Economic Ties that Should Bind Indonesia and Australia are strongly dependent on one another when it comes to the live cattle trade. Rising incomes mean a rapidly growing demand for meat by the Indonesian middle class, and Indonesia is the biggest market for Australia’s live cattle trade export. Estimated to be worth US$1 billion a year, it employs thousands of people. Despite this, the Australian government banned the export of live cattle to Indonesia in 2011, following an ABC TV documentary showing the cruel way cows were being slaughtered. This policy quickly backfired and hurt the Australian beef industry. The ban may have punished Indonesian consumers, who had to pay more for their meat, but it also devastated the beef industry in Northern Australia, the biggest supplier to the rapidly growing Indonesian market. Farms were closed down, and farmers and thousands of others involved in support service industries lost their livelihoods. Critics in Australia called this short-sighted decision one of the worst and most stupid decisions any Australian government has made. Prior to this incident, the Australian government had been pouring money in to help Indonesia develop its own cattle and beef industry, including by introducing less cruel methods for slaughtering the cows in Indonesia. The export ban came in response to an Australian public outcry after the ABC aired the documentary. Indonesia said the slaughterhouses shown in the film were selected to produce the intended reaction but did not necessarily represent the entire industry. When the Australian government realised the implications of its actions, it was too late. Indonesia had already taken its own initiative to cut back on Australian beef imports, even at the cost of angering its own middle-class consumers. Australian unilateral action had taught the Indonesian government one thing: Australia is not a reliable supplier. This belief persisted under the Widodo government, and has even become stronger. Although Indonesia is far from becoming self-sufficient in beef, the government is determined to make Indonesia become more self-reliant, meaning not only less dependent on imports but also less dependent on Australia as a single big supplier. The government has therefore started to look at alternative suppliers like India, Brazil and Russia more seriously, to make up for shortfalls in the market. Whatever trust and understanding Indonesia and Australia had built over the years in developing Indonesia’s beef industry had now been wiped out and distrust has become the norm. Although Australia’s beef exports to Indonesia have since resumed, they remain highly susceptible to unexpected disruptions. In July 2015, for example, the Indonesian government announced that it was slashing cattle imports from

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Australia to 50,000 for the third quarter of the year, down from 250,000 in the second quarter. The move took Australia completely by surprise. In the absence of an official explanation from Indonesia other than that it wanted to become self-reliant, it prompted speculations that the decision might have been linked to the earlier row over the execution of two Australian drug traffickers in April. In August, however, the Indonesian government issued licences to import another 50,000 cows from Australia to ease prices in the local markets. The live cattle trade is one of only a few economic areas where Indonesia and Australia are strongly dependent on one another. Another is the large number of Australian tourists visiting Indonesia, more specifically, Bali. Australian tourists still count as the largest group of visitors to Bali, although now we are also seeing an increasing number of Chinese and Russians. Some hotels and bars in Bali still cater exclusively for Australians. Like the cattle trade, the tourism industry in Bali is susceptible to political tensions between Canberra and Jakarta. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop warned Indonesia in February 2015 that Australians might boycott Bali if Indonesia executed the two Australian drug traffickers. When the execution went ahead, there were, however no reports of Australians boycotting or cancelling their holiday in Bali. In Jakarta, the Widodo government dismissed Bishop’s boycott threat lightly, pointing out that Bali did not depend so much on Australian tourists anymore, believing that Australians who wanted to go to Bali would likely ignore their government’s call. For good measure, when Indonesia introduced a visa-free entry facility for more than 30 countries in March 2015, Australia was, as mentioned, excluded, even though Australian tourists still represented a sizeable number. By August, when the list had been expanded to more than 50 countries, Australia was still conspicuously missing, in spite of talk of including it. What was the official response when asked about Australia’s exclusion? Australians will come anyway, immigration officers said. As already noted above, it was not until March 2016 that Australia made it to the list. This dismissive attitude towards Australian tourists may represent the view of the Jakarta elite who make these immigration policies but for hoteliers and restaurant and bar owners in Bali, the Australian tourist trade is the source of a significant steady income stream. It was Bali Governor I Made Mangku Pastika who asked Jakarta to conduct the execution of the two Australians for drug trafficking outside Bali, fearing the impact it would have on tourism trade on the island. The executions were, in fact, carried out in a high security penitentiary island off the southern coast of Java. Jakarta’s attitude towards the Australian tourist trade today is a throwback to the sudden ban on Australian tourists in 1986 on the orders of President Soeharto, after he took great personal offense at an article in The Sydney Morning Herald comparing him with Philippine’s dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The ban lasted only 24 hours but planeloads of Australian tourists heading to Bali were told to go back home before they even arrived. If the Australian government could hurt Indonesia by banning the beef trade, Indonesia could hurt Australians by changing its visa policies. In both episodes, neither side felt the need to consult one another beforehand. They have turned

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their mutual interdependence in these two areas into tools to punish one another, rather than seeing them as factors that could bring them closer together. In fact, the economy is the weakest link in the relationship between Indonesia and Australia, even if the two countries have expanded and intensified their relations in other areas since the start of the century. Both countries became entangled in the economic globalisation of the 1990s and 2000s, so that their economies and growth have become dependent on the state of the global economy. They have benefitted from globalisation but, at the same time, have become vulnerable to the periodic economic downturns. Strangely, this growing interdependence did not enmesh Australia and Indonesia, at least not to the extent that it could have, given their geographical proximity. Australia went through an economic boom in the first decade of the century thanks to its growing economic ties with Asia, but it virtually bypassed Indonesia, instead trading more with China, Japan, South Korea and India. Even smaller Southeast Asian countries, like Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, have closer trade links with Australia. In 2015, Indonesia ranked as only the eleventh largest export market for Australia and its twelfth largest trading partner. On the other hand, Indonesia’s economic rise, which has been sufficiently impressive to earn it a place in the G20 elite club, took place with little contribution from Australia relative to its potential as a large economy just next door. Yes, Australia’s aid remained important throughout these years but it was almost invisible in Jakarta, with Canberra shifting most of its development assistance programs to eastern Indonesia where it is needed the most. Indonesia was the largest recipient of Australian foreign aid, and for Indonesia, Australia ranks as the fourth largest source of foreign aid. In other words, in spite of Indonesia’s economic rise, the country is still dependent on foreign aid from donor countries, including Australia. In any case, trade with Australia, and investment by Australian companies in Indonesia, have never been as large as they could be. Australia ranks ninth as an export market for Indonesia, while most foreign direct investment from Australia has focused on the capital-intensive mining sector, with limited impact on jobs, and some services, including banking and finance. Few investments are made in the manufacturing sector. Some 400 Australian companies have operations in Indonesia, with cumulative investment totalling A$5.4 billion in 2015, according to the Austrade office. This figure pales in comparison to the foreign direct investment coming from Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia and the US. In other words, Australia is missing out in terms of business opportunities right under its nose, as its companies expand operations to other parts of Asia. It is losing out to investors from many other countries, including distant Europe and the US, who see the potential of a large and booming economy of more than 270 million people. Trade and investment will be the main drivers in the relationship between Australia and Indonesia in the future, just as they are for any two countries of more or less equal economic strength. While Australian aid will likely remain important for the foreseeable future, particularly for eastern Indonesian provinces, unless the two countries strengthen and broaden their trade and investment ties,

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the mutual interdependence that characterises globalisation will remain weak, if not negligible, between these two nations. Why are Australia and Indonesia not trading with, and investing in each other, more? This is a question that always haunts the Australian Indonesia Business Council (and its Indonesian counterpart, the Indonesia Australia Business Council) at their annual meetings. In Melbourne in 2015, its members noted that something was badly amiss, given Australians invest more in New Zealand, a country with a population of only 4.7 million, than Indonesia, which has over 250 million people and a rapidly expanding middle class with growing spending power. Some point to a lack of complementarity between the two economies, with both countries essentially dependent on export commodities to drive growth. Others blame ignorance on both sides about economic potential and business opportunities. Ultimately, business is driven by profit, and Australian companies are simply following their business instincts to go where the money is—yes, even to New Zealand. Australians investors are not wrong to point to the poor legal environment and the uncertainty of doing business in Indonesia, complaints often heard from investors from other countries. But perhaps the biggest stumbling block to closer economic cooperation is the attitudes and policies of their own governments. In spite of rhetoric about the need to forge closer economic relations, neither side appears to want to put their money where their mouth is. What few important economic links the two countries have, such as beef and tourism, are all subject to the unstable politics between Jakarta and Canberra.

The Agenda Ahead Indonesia and Australia need to change the way they approach one another, and they need to take into consideration the changing geopolitical and economic realities of wider Asia. Recent tensions indicate they have yet to come to terms with the new, fast changing, reality. There is no question they need to strengthen their relationship simply because it is in their mutual interests as two large countries living in proximity to one another. In particular, they need to rebuild the confidence and restore the trust that is now in huge deficit. This will undoubtedly take time but, in the meantime, they could also try to engage more economically. If two countries were deeply economically engaged and dependent on one another, politicians would have to think twice before they adopt policies that will hurt relations. That interdependence is too weak now to matter that much to politicians. As early as 2013, the expression ‘Beef, Boats and Bali’ has been used to describe the three issues that seem to have defined much of the relationship between Indonesia and Australia this century. Indeed, these three have been the most contentious issues in the bilateral relationship. Many, including leaders in both governments, believe the relationship between the two countries must go beyond these three issues. The turmoil in the relationship in recent years tells us, however, that both countries

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have failed to shake off these three curses. There is no indication that Australia will stop its unilateral approach to the boat people, since it seems to have succeeded in stemming the flow of asylum seekers through Indonesia. Jakarta now uses beef to punish Australia, even as it punishes its own consumers. The execution of drug traffickers in 2015 added another difficult dimension to the Bali factor on top of the Australian tourist trade. The only positive thing that can be said about the current state of affairs is that it has, at least, moved beyond just a single issue. East Timor once defined the entire relationship between Indonesia and Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. There is no doubt however that the two countries are still drifting apart, and ties remain very vulnerable still to unexpected shocks. Leaders of the two governments have contributed in no small measure to this state of affairs. Abbott and Widodo are equally guilty of exploiting issues to prop up their domestic standing at the expense of the relationship — the boat people in the case of Abbott, and the execution of the Bali Nine duo in Widodo’s case. But populism is a game played in all democracies. Leaders are elected (and re-elected) because they go more for what is popular, and not necessarily what is important. That is a reality in both countries, and Indonesia must accept whoever Australians vote in as their prime minister, just as Australia must accept whoever Indonesians elect their president. In fact, relations between the two countries should not depend too much on their leaders, as important as their role is. Others outside the government, from academics and social organisations to the media and the business community, can—and should—help drive relations to a healthier level to deliver mutual benefits. Indonesia and Australia need to move their relationship to the twenty-first century, to take into account changing geopolitical and economic environments. The rise of China and India as Asia’s economic powerhouses have dramatically changed the region and the world. Indonesia’s own moderate rise also has implications for the region’s balance of power, and certainly for the way it pursues foreign policy, including its relationship with Australia. It is questionable whether Indonesia has made the necessary adjustments in its foreign policy and its approach to other countries to reflect its newfound place in Asia and its ambitions for the future. The nationalistic overtones expressed in government statements and policies often smack of xenophobia. This, if anything, has exposed Indonesia’s sense of insecurity, its inferiority complex. The feeling that Indonesia is constantly under threat or being exploited by outside powers, including big multinational companies, pervades attitudes and policy formation in Jakarta. Indonesia’s economic rise over the last decade has made it even more chauvinistic, and at times it comes across as arrogant. The decision to blow up illegal fishing boats from ASEAN countries, in spite of protests, and President Widodo’s rebuff of Abbott’s plea for clemency for the two drug traffickers, are not the stuff that make a nation a ‘great power’. Indonesia still has a lot to learn about its newfound power and its place in the world, and the responsibilities that come with this status. Jakarta needs to realise that Indonesia is a large country straddling the equator, linking the Asian landmass and Australia, and spread between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. President Widodo got it right when he envisioned Indonesia as a maritime and

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Indo-Pacific power but he still has to translate this into concrete policies. Once this concept sinks in, Indonesia will realise that the countries on its eastern and southern flanks are as important as those to the west and north. ASEAN is important for Jakarta and people in Java, Sumatra, Borneo and Sulawesi, but for Bali, the two Nusa Tenggara provinces, Maluku and Papua, their most important foreign relations are countries to the south and east of Indonesia, including Australia, New Zealand, Timor-Leste, and Papua New Guinea and other western Pacific countries. One can only hope that the learning process for Indonesia as a rising power will not be a protracted one—for Indonesia’s own sake as well as that of its friends and neighbours. Australia also needs to change to adjust to Asia’s twenty-first century realities. One issue that Indonesia finds particularly problematic is Australia’s decision to maintain, or even strengthen, its old security arrangements with the US. While an alliance with the US may be important to hedge against the rise of China, some of the security institutions are clearly dated and counterproductive to relations with Indonesia. Retaining the Five Power defence arrangements with Britain, New Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore—a legacy of the Indonesian Confrontation against Malaysia of the 1960s—sends the wrong message to Jakarta about how Canberra sees Indonesia. The revealing of the work of an Australian espionage network in Jakarta in 2013 also exposed the work of the Five Eyes (FIVY) intelligence sharing mechanism involving the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, a Cold War relic the five agree to maintain, despite Indonesia’s concerns. Australia’s future, and its prosperity, is clearly tied to Asia now that it is trading more and more with the region, and with China in particular. Sooner or later, Australia will have to review its security arrangements to reflect where its national interests lie. At the moment, Australia treats China as its ATM, and the US as its security guard. Indonesia may have its own concerns about the rise of China, and like everyone else in the region, it is hedging in its own way against the possibility of a menacing, powerful China. In spite of their common security concerns, however, it is unlikely that Indonesia will be convinced of Australia’s entreaties. The Five Power defence arrangements and the Five Eyes intelligence mechanisms are now seen in Jakarta more as revealing hostile intentions on the part of Australia. No one in Indonesia now believes that its relationship with Indonesia is Australia’s most important, a foreign policy mantra echoed in Canberra since the 1990s—not that this ever mattered to Jakarta, since Indonesia would never reciprocate the sentiment. The relationship with Australia is important to Indonesia, but no one in Jakarta would ever say it is the most important. Indonesia was particularly dismayed at the 2013 disclosure of Australian espionage activity directed at President Yudhoyono and his inner circle, and even more disturbed by Prime Minister Abbott’s response. What is so tragic about this is that Australia will probably never have another Indonesian leader as committed as Yudhoyono was to building the bilateral relationship. He was one of Australia’s best friends in the region, and certainly the best among past Indonesian leaders. He built relations between the two countries to what was probably their historic best by 2013. No other leaders in the foreseeable future, and certainly not President Widodo, are

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likely to treat Australia in this way. The espionage episode marked a turning point for the worse in bilateral ties. The trust that had underpinned relations, painstakingly built over many years, almost disappeared. What is left is a relationship almost devoid of trust between the two countries and their leaders. This begs the question of how should Indonesia and Australia pursue relations under these unfortunate circumstances. There are no short cuts, for sure, but that should not prevent the two countries from pursuing confidence-building activities. Regular summits and meetings between the prime minister and president and between their Cabinet members would certainly help. Joint projects to address particular problems, for example, to tackle the asylum seeker problem, disaster relief management, and counter-terrorism, could also go a long way to restoring confidence and trust. But all of these would depend very much on the leaders of the two countries and their attitudes. Any hope for better relations must probably wait for the next round of elected leaders in Jakarta and Canberra but one area where work can begin immediately is greater economic engagement, which as I have already pointed out, is the weakest link in the overall relationship between the two countries. This is something that relies less on governments and more on the initiatives of business players. The task of the government is simply to prod them and facilitate their collaboration, although even here the two governments have fallen short because they are too preoccupied with other aspects of the relationship. Turnbull’s ascent to power sent the right signals for this relationship, although one should never rule out sudden bumps or even set-backs, as they always happen. Negotiations over the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement stalled for two years, primarily because of the ‘Boats, Beef and Bali’ disputes. In contrast, the Abbott government concluded similar deals with China, Japan and South Korea within a year of coming to power. Talks resumed not long after Turnbull’s visit to Jakarta. A 200-person Australian business delegation planned in March 2015 had to be cancelled because of the row over the execution of the drug traffickers in Indonesia. The mission, which would have been symbolic of the importance Australian business give to Indonesia, went ahead a few months later. Yet, the potential is certainly well recognised by both sides and all agree they can do much better than the A$11.8 billion (US$9.2 billion) trade volume reached in 2014. Much of the initiative will, however, have to come from the private business sector, discovering or creating the complimentarity that would allow them to collaborate and profit at the same time. Indonesia has a desperate need to build its economic infrastructure—ports, toll roads, bridges, and power plants—to sustain high economic growth rates. It needs both the investment and the technical knowhow that foreign companies, including from Australia, can provide. Indonesia also needs to strengthen its agricultural processing industry to ensure greater food security, including in cattle farming, an area where Australia has great expertise. With the economic expansion, Indonesia also needs to improve many of its services industries, including in the financial and banking sectors, an area where Australian business companies can also help. Last but not least, one thing that Indonesia would insist on in any free trade negotiations is the inclusion of a capacity building clause that requires the partner country to help Indonesia develop its human resources

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through education and training. Many elite families in Indonesia already send their children to study in Australia, undoubtedly the first choice because of the combination of quality and proximity to Indonesia. Again, education and training is an important area where Australian companies can assist. What would Australian companies get in return? Access to a huge and rapidly expanding market of more than 250 million people, with insatiable demand and real spending power. More and more Indonesians spend their holidays abroad— and not just out of town. More and more own their homes and have access to credit facilities to buy vehicles and other consumer goods. These are the clearest indications of a growing middle class, whose spending power helped to sustain the Indonesian economy through various economic crises, including the global financial recession of 2008–2009. Unlike China, and Japan and South Korea, which face an ageing population, Indonesia is at the start of what is called the demographic dividend, whereby the proportion of its productive working age population is at its highest. This means more productive capacity, which if employed to the maximum, would further accelerate the nation’s economic growth. In short, there is never any shortage of opportunities for increased business collaboration that is mutually profitable for companies in Australia and Indonesia, and also beneficial to their countries and peoples. And there is never any shortage of interest from the two business communities, as reflected by the huge turnout at the 2014 Australia Indonesia Business Council biennial conference in Melbourne.

Conclusion Relations between Indonesia and Australia are too precious to be left to the whims and moods of their leaders and politicians but this is exactly what has happened in the last few years. Instead, the two countries should work closer and engage with one another more across all sectors—politics and security, culture and economy. That would be mutually beneficial as well as profitable. Geographical proximity is one factor but it is more important that our geopolitical and economic interests also overlap much more than we often care to recognise openly. The rows over the handling of asylum seekers, beef trade and the tourist trade in Bali have often got the better of our leaders. Until they recognise growing shared interests, attitudes in Jakarta and Canberra are likely to continue to be counterproductive to relations. They will need to change first for relations to blossom once again. If we agree that relations should not depend entirely on their governments, then other sectors, particularly the business sector, can take the initiative, and engage more to create the mutual dependence that is needed to make the AustraliaIndonesia relationship a growing and more sustainable and one.

16 Our Man in Indonesia MICHAEL BACHELARD

In the lead-up to the 2014 presidential election in Indonesia, I wanted very much to interview Joko Widodo (Jokowi). He was a newcomer on the Indonesian political scene, a virtual unknown, but apparently the candidate of a new Indonesia. He represented a decisive break from past military leaders, the best chance Indonesia had of preserving and improving its democracy and fighting endemic corruption. I wanted to know more about him, and I believed the Australian people, my ­readers, should too. But the then-Jakarta governor was notoriously difficult to pin down. I began by standing with the large Indonesian media pack, first outside his residence in Menteng from 5am, hoping to press my case before he got to the office. Later I sweltered on the veranda of Jokowi’s office, and later still outside his presidential campaign headquarters. Several times adjutants promised an interview; twice he personally invited me inside. Both times he left the building before I could speak to him. My Indonesian fixer, Karuni Rompies, and I spoke by phone to a passing parade of staff members and volunteers rumoured to be running his campaign. Many promises were made, none came to fruition. I wasn’t the only Australian correspondent experiencing such difficulties. So frustrated was George Roberts, the ABC correspondent in Jakarta during my term, that he penned a Correspondent’s Report on the subject for Radio National. ‘Every week, his media advisors seemed to change and none of them knew about the supposedly approved interview [with the ABC]’, Roberts reported. ‘Each new advisor asked for a formal request. We kept resending the same letter.’ (Roberts 2014). Then, after Jokowi’s election victory, and shortly before his inauguration, I tracked down the person who could help me—a senior member of Jokowi’s staff, acting as press attaché. He met me in one of central Jakarta’s glitziest malls, Plaza Indonesia, and we ate pizza. I asked why it was so difficult for me to get an interview with the president-elect, as he then was. I pointed out that the Al Jazeera correspondent had met him several times and the New York Times and London’s Financial Times had both done interviews but no Australian journalist had been so lucky, despite the oft-stated importance of neighbourly relations.

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The answer from Jokowi’s adviser was that Australian journalists had a bad reputation. We were too aggressive, too blunt in our language, too critical and prone to sensationalism. Even among our fellow western journalists in Jakarta, I was told, this was the impression. I was surprised; and a little insulted. I had tried my best over two-and-a-half years to that point to present a realistic picture of Indonesia. Covering the legislative and presidential elections, and doing so comprehensively, was part of this project. More than that, I had grown to love Indonesia and its people. I was guided by the words of a former boss who suggested I focus as correspondent on what life was like for ordinary Indonesians in this massive and fast developing country. I had tried to get out of Jakarta as often as possible—and not only to Bali—to look at life as ordinary Indonesians lived it. I asked questions about the country’s society and economy, its development, its environment, religious tensions, politics and corruption. Despite the difficulties, I travelled twice to West Papua to try to un-knot and explain what is often presented in Australia as a simple narrative of good and evil. Like most of the national and international journalists, I was intrigued and curiously excited by this odd, new, slightly awkward and uncommunicative ­ president-elect from the back blocks of Solo’s mayoral politics. Yet here I was, confronted by the persistent perception in the office of the president-elect that Australian journalists are uncouth, even as compared to other members of a notoriously disrespectful profession. This perception persists despite any available counter-factual evidence. Ultimately I said enough of the right things for Jokowi’s aide to ask me to send in a sample of my work. What I presented was, in turn, sufficient to get me approval for an interview, on condition that I fly in a senior reporter from Australia, Fairfax’s then Asia Pacific editor John Garnaut, to accompany me. The suspicion in Jakarta of Australian journalists has its roots—as so many otherwise inexplicable Indonesian policy positions do—in events that took place years or decades ago. It is also strongly related to the broader theme of the fractious relationship between the two countries. As Australian National University academic Ross Tapsell points out in his book By-lines, Balibo and Bali, the ­Australian media’s relationship started off well enough with Indonesia’s nationalist forces, with general support for the independence effort against the Dutch. The first president, Soekarno, was familiar enough to call correspondent Peter Barnett ‘Mr ABC’ (Tapsell 2014: 27), however, that relationship foundered over time. Australian journalists’ tough-minded reporting of the deaths of their f­ellows at Balibo and the East Timor campaign generally; their similar approach to the alleged Act of Free Choice in Papua; and then the infamous David Jenkins report in The Sydney Morning Herald in April 1986 (which called out the corruption of the Soeharto family) all stand as proud testaments to the quality of Australian journalism in Indonesia. At the same time, however, they were seen by Indonesian government officials as negative, and at times damaged the bilateral relationship.

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Nearly 30 years after Jenkins’ story, which saw most of the Australian press gallery bundled out of the country and which kept The Sydney Morning Herald out for a decade, some ordinary Indonesians still remember the name of that particular masthead as somehow associated with scandal. For my Indonesian fixer, Karuni, however, it was Jenkins and the ability of the media to speak truth to power, even when Soeharto’s power was so overwhelming, that inspired her to become a reporter herself—that and her close reading of Tintin as a child. By comparison to this long and florid history, my mild attempts to understand the real Indonesia and relate it to my readers over three busy years apparently barely rated in the new president’s mind. What, though, at present, is an accurate account of the state and tenor of Australian reporting of Indonesia? And where should journalists stand when it comes to the regular diplomatic tensions between the two countries?

Bombs, Beef, Bali, Boats Outside a committed few organisations, the coverage of Indonesia by the­ Australian media focuses on purely Australian preoccupations: terrorism; the misadventures of tourists and drug traffickers in Bali; asylum-seeker boats; and, recently, diplomatic disputes over beef or spying scandals. Many of the reporters covering these issues are based in Australia, occasionally making flying visits— what is sometimes known as parachute journalism. But in an era of straitened editorial budgets, the fact that Australian media organisations maintain as many as four full-time bureaus in Jakarta is a remarkable testament to the importance placed upon it. In addition to the Fairfax bureau, during my time in Jakarta between late 2012 and early 2015, and since, the ABC has had two correspondents. The Australian, Rupert Murdoch’s antipodean ­flagship, maintained its Jakarta bureau even as it abandoned Tokyo. Australian Associated Press also had a correspondent, although their bureau has subsequently closed. Channel Nine employed a full-time Indonesian fixer in Jakarta, whose job was to keep an eye on stories that Australia-based correspondents could fly in and cover. A number of media organisations, including the News Limited tabloids, The ­Australian and Channel Seven, had permanent arrangements with freelance journalists in Bali to provide news on an as-needs basis. Most of these stories involved covering crime, court stories and misadventure. I was told repeatedly by Fairfax that, in the event of any future budget cuts, the Indonesia bureau would be the last of its international network to shut. (In 2017, Fairfax merged the Indonesia and Southeast Asia correspondent roles, with the merged position remaining Jakarta-based.) This is because, despite the cost, having instant access to an informed Indonesia correspondent (with a work permit and residency visa) returns remarkable value for a ­serious Australian media organisation. Value, as news organisations understand it,

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is the ability to attract and hold readers; to make our news product more interesting, relevant and important to as many people as possible. As a result, even among the ‘serious’ contingent of Indonesian correspondents, the four Bs (bombs, beef, Bali, boats) took a considerable amount of time and attention because, quite simply, these were the stories that were most of interest to our readers. In journalistic terms, an international news story needs to fulfil one of two criteria to be promoted from the relative backwater of the World pages to the news section (and thus attract many more readers). It needs to be either of global scale, or have a strong, direct Australian connection. Feature stories are judged by slightly different criteria, but there are limited slots for long-form stories purely relating events that happen to people with whom Australian readers feel little connection. These are old truths, but they have become even more relevant with changing technology.

New Technology, New Techniques Journalists have always worked under pressure but the pressures on the current crop of reporters have changed fast, and will continue to change with technology. In the past decade, there have been two profound shifts in the way news is gathered and disseminated. The first is the availability of technological fixes for filing content. In his review of Tapsell’s book, Hamish McDonald, a former Fairfax correspondent, pointed out that when he was in Indonesia in the 1970s, ‘Jakarta then had less than 50,000 landlines, scarcity pushing connection fees sky-high, and exchanges got overloaded in working hours. Knowledgeable sources would not talk on the phone anyway’ (McDonald 2015). Getting the story then involved a lot of legwork (and time spent in hotel bars, if contemporary reports are to be believed). Filing it to the news desk in Sydney meant, according to McDonald, ‘taking a typed version down to the public telecom office and handing it to a telex operator in the hope of speedy dispatch, or making a reverse-charge call from a public phone booth … and dictating it to a copy-taker’. A trip outside Jakarta to Timor or Kalimantan meant ‘we could be out of touch for a week or more’. Tapsell tells of a Herald correspondent in the 1950s, James Mossman, who was declared missing, presumed dead, because he’d been gone so long (Tapsell 2014: 152). He eventually emerged to protest that he’d only been in Sulawesi researching a story. Now, virtually universal mobile phone coverage (as patchy as it sometimes in Indonesia) means the days of a correspondent going ‘off grid’ are long gone. In 2012, I covered a major breaking Schapelle Corby story by phone from the edges of peat forest in Aceh, three hours’ drive from the capital, Banda Aceh, and about as far as you can get from Denpasar while still being in Indonesia.

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I was balanced on a fallen tree over a patch of burned peat when I was alerted by a Sydney radio station to the story that Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono had granted a five-year cut to Corby’s sentence. The station was ringing me for my comment. I quickly established the facts from my fixer in Denpasar, then did the interview. I wrote and filed my own story from a laptop in the car, and did a half a dozen further radio interviews as we drove, or from the side of the road, as my two fixers and I set about calling our contacts, trying to confirm further angles in Jakarta and Bali. The more the Corby story consumed media interest over the following days, the less time I got to spend in the Aceh forest. I was there, incidentally, to shoot video, also on my mobile phone, for a major investigative feature I was writing on deforestation and climate change. Technology enables feats of news gathering and filing that were unimaginable to the old ‘Asia hands’. Newspaper journalists now compete directly online with wire services to get the story up first, and then follow it up with analysis or comment (‘breaking views’) as well as further news angles and pictures. The demand for video content is skyrocketing, so I was encouraged to shoot, script and voice video content as well as writing stories. Fairfax employs an editor in the US to cover the overnight hours when nobody is rostered in Sydney and Melbourne, so there was no time of day or night when I could ignore the imperative to file for online. The 24-hour news cycle means correspondents have created an ever-wider set of expectations about what they can deliver, and when they deliver it. In addition, Australian radio and TV stations were always seeking (without offer of payment to Fairfax or me personally) to borrow my credibility to enhance their own on stories that interested them. The pressure on both our journalistic skills and our phone batteries is intense. The second technological shift is equally important. The online delivery of news and the explosion in social media gives editors and reporters instant access to data about what people are actually reading. We now know what interests our audience, while in earlier times we could only really guess, relying on instincts we reporters liked to call ‘news sense’. News sense differed between different media outlets. The old values that created and defined one organisation’s brand as broadsheet newspapers—being papers of record, detailed analysis, important rather than splashy stories, sober language— differed from, for example, how tabloid outlets presented news. These old values now regularly butt up against what actually attracts readers and the demands faced by news organisations trying to survive commercially. The distinction between broadsheet and tabloid styles has become less sharp as all news organisations find themselves facing the same dilemma: trying to capture and monetise a mass audience. This is no academic exercise. Technological change urgently threatens the ­budgets that support newsrooms, including expensive professional correspondents with the freedom to travel and inquire. Knowing in prospect which stories will work online and attract an audience is not always easy. But in the first instance, the emphasis is a strong focus on big news

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delivered fast. The second is on relevance to our readers. Journalists have long referred to a story with a flashy angle that raises the heart rate as ‘sexy’. Now, before even pitching a story, correspondents must answer (even if only to themselves) the question: will that attract eyeballs? You can no longer fudge the answer to this with an indulgent editor: the true situation shows up in real time in the number of unique browsers clicking on your story, and their ‘engagement’—how long they stay there. Descriptions of the fascinating inner workings of Indonesian politics, the movements and opinions of its elites and their internecine power plays—the stuff of some of the legendary correspondents of yore—do not usually attract an online readership, no matter how much we might wish they did. This does not mean that broadsheets have abandoned the old values entirely. At Fairfax, all reporters and editors know that our brand remains tied inextricably to notions of quality journalism, and, as correspondent, I was given remarkable freedom to pursue my own interests and my own stories, even if they were of a somewhat niche nature, simply because it was still deemed important to publish these things. Nevertheless, both technological shifts—the demand to file quickly across ­different mediums and the pressure to maintain readers’ interest—have increased the demands on a dwindling cohort of correspondents. And the changes are still underway. Both require experimentation and learning-by-doing. I decided early to resolve any conflict between sexy and quality, between Australian-focused stories and those that better explained Indonesia, by trying to do both jobs. I kept my eye out for feature and investigative opportunities while following closely the political and social ructions in Australia and Indonesia, to keep filing the news that would break out of the World page. I’d feed the hungry beast, then find time to explore and explain the rest of Indonesia. One of the reasons that the Indonesia bureau was so valuable to the organisations that maintained a correspondent was that events kept happening that sparked enormous news interest in Australia, and not only the ‘four Bs’. There was also, for example, the row over Australia’s phone tapping of the Indonesian president; the crash of Air Asia flight QZ 8501, with the loss of all on board; and my own particular passion: getting access to, and trying to explain, the situation in Papua. But two of the ‘four B’ stories were recurring themes: asylum seekers and Australians in trouble in Bali.1 In their different ways, both are worth dwelling on to illustrate the role international journalists can, and must, play if their positions are to survive the current shake-out in media organisations.

1 

See ch 6 for a discussion of Australians in Bali.

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Asylum Seekers A month before I arrived in Jakarta in January 2012, two boats packed with asylum seekers had sunk off the southern coast of Java, killing perhaps 230. It came a year after the tragedy of Christmas Island had opened the eyes of Australians to the serious dangers of the passage south. What to do about boats ranked with the carbon tax as the number one story of the year in Australian federal politics. It was one of the heaviest bludgeons the Liberal-National Coalition was using to force the Labor government from office. From my first asylum seeker story—a boat load of men returned unwillingly to Indonesia and refusing to disembark from their rescue ship—until virtually the time I left Indonesia, when shifts in Australian policy had marooned thousands in penury in Jakarta and the Indonesian detention centres, the travails of asylum seekers and refugees took a massive amount of my attention. In my early days in the post, I found that, no matter the dangers of sinking, of capture by Indonesian authorities, or of being ripped off by people smugglers, those waiting for a berth were not deterred. The town of Cisarua, in the hills near Jakarta, became a turnstile for the desperate, the dispossessed and a growing number of economic migrants, many from sanction-struck Iran, who were looking for a better life and finding the risks of the journey worth the price. Their numbers were growing fast. In the year before I arrived, just over 5,000 people had made the journey, mainly from Java’s southern coast on the familiar route to Christmas Island. In 2011–12 it was 7,300. In 2012–13, 18,119 people took the journey, an increase of 250%. In the lead-up to the election that Tony Abbott won convincingly in 2013, boats were leaving daily, sometimes multiple times a day. As the demand increased, so did the supply of smugglers wanting to make a buck. For all their cynicism, the old smugglers had reputations to protect and were interested in repeat business. The new crop, by contrast, were fly-by-nights, chasing maximum profits. The quality of the boats fell as their number increased. Mid-tier smuggler Dawood Amiri told me from Cipinang prison, where he was sentenced for human trafficking, that his boss had responded to the competition by trying to send a bigger, more overcrowded boat as a marketing ploy. It sank in June 2013, killing almost 200 people (Amiri 2014: 69). These regular tragedies did nothing to deter new passengers nor shame the smugglers. In 2012, there were eight sinkings; and in 2013, 14 more boats went down with some or all on board dead. These are only the ones we know about. The consensus now appears to be that 1,200 people drowned during this period. In August 2013, I reported the fate of 10-year-old Omid Jafary. He’d watched his father, his uncle and his cousin die around him, sinking beneath the waves as he clung to the flotation device of another passenger. Almost 100 died that day. It is rarely remembered that the Labor government attempted when ­possible

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its own form of ad hoc turn-back. The bereaved survivors on board Omid’s boat had been transferred mid-ocean from an Australian rescue ship to an Indonesian vessel and returned to the port of Merak in Banten, West Java, by agreement with the Indonesian government. Under the hammer of the Abbott opposition’s ‘Stop the Boats’ mantra, Labor’s asylum policy lurched from one faux toughening to another. Nothing convinced the asylum seekers they were serious. Eventually, thanks to the High Court’s 2011 ruling knocking out the ‘Malaysia solution’, and Abbott’s repeated political gamesmanship in parliament, Labor’s attempts to have any stance at all eventually sputtered out entirely. And still they came. The ocean was littered with death. Under Labor, this put Indonesia regularly on the front page in Australia. The stories were about the drownings themselves, revelations of the actions of the people smugglers (and their inevitable corrupt connections with Indonesian police and security forces) and the effect all this had on the diplomatic relationship between the two nations. The public debate in Australia turned increasingly negative towards Indonesia. Why were they not doing more to ‘stop the boats’, asked the right-wing commentators. Abbott made sure to keep the issue front and centre during the 2013 election campaign. His promises of turn-backs, transit ports and the village boat buyback scheme were ridiculed, both in Indonesia and Australia, even while Abbott claimed he could ‘fix’ the relationship with Jakarta. In Indonesia, though, these policies were taken as another example of Australia’s habit of acting like a colonial bully. Ken Ward, in his paper, Condemned to Crisis?, refers to comments in the Indonesian national legislature about the policy that it was ‘crazy’, ‘degrading’ and ‘offensive to the dignity of Indonesians’ (Ward 2015: 70). In Australia, though, Abbott’s pose served its political purpose. In the ­Federal election of September 2013, he became prime minister. He appointed Scott Morrison as his immigration minister, and following Morrison’s ruthless enactment of the policy (though without some of its sillier components, such as the village boat buy-back) became my number one priority. Abbott made Jakarta his first foreign port of call as Prime Minister, and extracted from the outgoing president Yudhoyono, a generous promise to consider a ‘bilateral’ (as opposed to a multilateral) solution to the asylum seeker issue. But Morrison quickly found how difficult that would be to achieve. Twice he was snubbed when seeking a meeting with his ministerial counterpart, coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs Djoko Suyanto. Instead he met justice minister, Amir Syamsuddin—once in Australia and once in Indonesia. Amir, however, had no power to actually make a decision on the matter. Commentators such as Tapsell suggest the technological changes that mean correspondents must respond to any demands from home to serve an Australian agenda, such as Abbott’s boats policy, contributes to a ‘tendency by reporters to not look beyond the immediate situation, and to have time to examine only one or two aspects of the story’ (Tapsell 2014: 165). On boats, in particular, he says:

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‘These stories are important for Australians, but they do not dominate events in Indonesia’. The latter point is true: this was always a bigger story in Australia than in ­Indonesia, where it was an annoyance (and increasingly so as the turn-back operation continued) but not a matter of national security as it was portrayed in Australia. To downplay the significance of these stories would be wrong, however. They were absolutely core to the highest responsibility that journalists have of serving our readers, and the Australian polity more generally. Because of the situation that prevailed at the time, Indonesia correspondents were some of the few people who could credibly do this. Under the semi-military guise of Operation Sovereign Borders, the new Abbott government shut down any flow of information from Australian authorities about boat movements. No longer would the Australian Maritime Safety Authority put out releases declaring when a boat had been rescued mid-ocean, or had arrived in Christmas Island. For a period, this meant the Australian correspondents, and the Indonesian sources we dealt with, were forced to act as Australia’s eyes and ears. We became the only source of reliable information on the issue that had partly fuelled a change of government in Australia. Indonesian authorities themselves were notorious among correspondents for telling contradictory stories when it came to the finer points of on-water ­matters, which made the journalistic skills of seeking out information, finding reliable sources, and cross-checking and verifying all the more important. And the demand for reliable information was relentless. Covering the asylum seeker issue meant that I travelled routinely to Cisarua and maintained a network of contacts there willing to talk about what the smugglers were up to. We cultivated a number of different sources within the Indonesian search and rescue agency, Basarnas, and in the office of minister Djoko Suyanto. Along the way there were several diplomatic flash-points that gradually ratcheted up the seriousness with which the Indonesians regarded the issue—and ratcheted down their respect for Abbott and his government. A mid-ocean stand-off over a distressed boatload of asylum seekers caused enormous tension at the 2013 Bali Democracy Forum, which would otherwise have been a content-free opportunity to showcase international relations between foreign ministers. And then the phone tapping controversy of November 2013 stopped the diplomatic relationship entirely, including, explicitly, negotiations for a bilateral position over people smuggling. Indonesia chose to end cooperation here because they believed it would hurt Australia most—even the semblance of discussion over boats ended. This was clearly a significant diplomatic setback for Abbott, who had wanted not just to become close to Jakarta but ‘intimate’. Morrison, though, seized it as an opportunity. He ordered that the Australian navy start pushing boats back to Indonesian waters, no negotiation required. From the point of view of deterring asylum seekers, this was a very effective technique, but several times it meant

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Australian navy vessels crossed over into Indonesian sovereign waters. This caused serious annoyance to an already irritated Jakarta, despite Australia’s apologies. Out of this phase of Operation Sovereign Borders there also emerged the allegations of Australian navy personnel deliberately burning the hands of asylum seekers. The reporting of this in early 2014 put the ABC bureau in Jakarta under significant pressure from the government, which questioned its loyalty and first prompted the suggestion that the national broadcaster should clearly identify whose side it was on. The second phase of the turn-back operation was the appearance of the bulbous orange lifeboats. When the first of these dumped its dizzy cargo back on a remote beach in Java in January 2014, I interviewed its passengers as soon as they’d made their way back to Cisarua. Through my contacts in Cisarua and elsewhere, I was also aware of, and reporting, the increasingly unrealistic, and sometimes dangerous, schemes with which smugglers were trying to coax more money out of their clients. These included boats to New Zealand, travelling with false visas by plane to Australia, and even seeking berths on cargo ships inside containers. As far as I am aware, no asylum seeker died as a result of a boat pushback (despite a report claiming this in the News Limited tabloids). I was, however, told by one group that four men fell off a boat in heavy seas, and the Australian navy, which came later and pushed the boat back to Indonesia, had failed to search for the missing men. This was denied by the Australian navy. Left-wing observers in Australia were desperate for news from us. Those on the right, however, often took me to task on social media for having the temerity to tell the stories of asylum seekers, and the events surrounding boat turn-backs. ‘Where were you when people were drowning?’ was a regular refrain. The ABC came under even more fire for covering these issues, bearing the implicit and sometimes explicit accusations from the Prime Minister of the day that they were somehow ‘disloyal’. But without Indonesia-based Australian correspondents, reporting on this issue would have been sporadic and piecemeal, and the knowledge of what was being done in our name would have been sketchy at best, and entirely reliant on an over-controlling government public relations strategy. Doing this job seemed to me core business for a journalist anywhere, whether or not it directly reflected on Indonesian life and politics.

Bali Since the Bali bombing in 2002, Schapelle Corby’s arrival with 4.2kg of cannabis in her boogie board bag in October 2004, and then the Bali Nine’s ill-fated attempt to traffick 8.2kg of heroin out of the country the following year, a significant part of the work of Australian correspondents became a ‘courts and police’-style round out of Denpasar.

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Being the correspondent a decade after these seminal events meant I r­ evisited each of them in turn. I covered the 10th anniversary of the Bali bombings, interviewed bombers who had been released or never jailed, and attended a large commemoration ceremony hosted by then Prime Minister Julia Gillard. I covered Corby’s release on parole, and, in my final week in Indonesia, the rejection of Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan’s plea for clemency from the death penalty. For these stories, the mainstream Australian media turned its full attention on Indonesia. This included a large number of ‘parachute’ journalists flying in on temporary (sometimes tourist) visas, and exercising their ultra-competitive drive for fresh and different (often wrong) angles. This was true particularly of the tabloid TV shows. When a Sydney-based Channel Seven reporter failed in late 2013 to account for the agonising grind of Indonesian bureaucracy and reported a rumour that Corby would be released ‘this week’, a jumpy, competitive press pack went on high alert. Seven’s morning program, Sunrise, even hired an outside broadcast van and conducted increasingly desperate live crosses from the carpark in front of ­Kerobokan prison in the dark every morning for a week to chew over the rumour, until even they had to admit it was false. The Corby story was the purest example of this kind of journalism.2 None of the Australian press corps based in Jakarta particularly liked following the Corby saga. Most of us regarded it as a distraction that demanded enormous amounts of time and yielded little satisfaction. There was also, on this story, the added embuggerance of a committed bunch of online-based conspiracy theorists, allied with the Corby family, who apparently delighted in attempting to thwart Australian journalists, harassing them on social media, launching legal action, and lodging Press Council complaints against them. In some ways, though, Corby’s story, and that of the Bali Nine, were opportunities to illustrate the vast gulf in understanding that remains between the two countries. Over a decade, she has been a potent symbol of some of the strains in the Australia-Indonesia relationship. In 2004, when Corby was first arrested, a huge number of Australians believed her innocent. As celebrities and media organisations jumped onto the biggest story of the year, Corby came to be seen as an unwitting victim of a quixotic and either corrupt or incompetent Indonesian legal system, with its exaggerated fear of a relatively harmless drug. On this theory, she had been singled out for harsh treatment because she was a helpless young Australian woman. By 2010, however, polls showed a solid majority of Australians now believed she was guilty as charged (Allard and Gordon 2010). But most also thought she had served enough time in jail, and generally supported her release. People had come to think of her as guilty

2 

See also ch 6 for a discussion of the Corby and Bali Nine cases.

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but also as the victim of forces—her own family, the Indonesian prison system, mental illness—that were larger, stronger and more threatening than herself. In Indonesia, Corby was a potent representation of the opposite. She was seen as a Machiavellian drug queen and corruptor of the young. There was also the widespread belief, spread by the anti-drugs activist group GRANAT (‘grenade’), members of the national legislature, and some media outlets, that she had been treated leniently by the Indonesian justice system because she was Australian. The five-year reduction to her sentence through clemency, which Yudhoyono granted in late 2012, was seen as a symbol of how craven the then president was, how beholden to Australian pressure. In Ken Ward’s terms, her case invoked in the Indonesian imagination the ‘coolie’ self-image. The sentence reduction rendered Corby eligible for parole. Her family took more than a year to apply but, when they eventually did, it again sparked the old controversy. The Indonesian bureaucracy initially retreated into pettifogging behaviour. The corrections department rejected the Australian embassy’s first attempt at writing a letter guaranteeing her behaviour. Then began a long and complex series of negotiations between the corrections and immigration departments, causing further delays. When she was finally released on 10 February 2014— with Law and Human Rights Minister Amir Syamsuddin insisting that his decision to authorise her parole was no more than the ordinary exercise of her rights3—the scene outside Kerobokan prison was chaotic. Australian news agencies had each hired a number of local crew members to make sure they missed nothing; everybody had a fleet of motorcycles on standby to try to keep up with Corby’s escort vehicles. Hundreds of people were jostling for images. Corby and her entourage, paid for by Channel Seven’s Sunday Night program, with whom they had already made an exclusive deal, strived to thwart them. Schapelle covered her head with a hat and her face with a veil to preserve the exclusivity of an interview. The elaborate, three-stage release procedure in different locations around Denpasar took place with media crews in hot pursuit on the back of motorcycles, jostling on roads and in the corridors of official buildings, seeking a chink in Corby’s mask. Then the whole family was hustled into an exclusive Bali resort, where the crew led by TV legend Mike Willesee was already booked-in and waiting. What has become mundane in Australian commercial TV media circles—the paid interview—infuriated the Indonesian government, which stepped in once again. They banned the interview on pain of her parole being revoked, on the grounds that it would cause ‘public disruption’ and launched inquiries into whether the family stood to gain financially. Seven denied it planned to pay them. Their response to the government ban was to air a program in Australia in early March 2014, featuring footage of Corby without having interviewed her.

3 

For a discussion of Corby’s parole from an Indonesian perspective, see ch 13.

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They did, however, get comment from sister, Mercedes, which once again provoked the Indonesians, who said the family and the TV station had been ‘sneaky’. Mercedes compounded the wrong by saying in the interview that the drugs in the boogie board bag ‘could have been from Indonesia’—suggesting Schapelle was set up by unnamed Indonesians. Local TV stations—notably Metro TV, owned by political candidate Surya Paloh—ran a hard-line anti-Corby campaign, invoking the alleged ‘special treatment’ she’d been afforded by the Indonesian president. Metro TV’s morning show presenter Najwa Shihab editorialised on Metro Hari Ini that the Justice Minister should ‘toughen up’ and return Schapelle to Kerobokan prison. ‘It’s the only way to shake the impression that Indonesia is under … the armpit of Australia and unable to uphold the sovereignty of our own laws,’ she said (Bachelard 2015). From the beginning to the end of the Corby saga, the Australian parachute media demonstrated insensitivity and a lack of interest in the Indonesian point of view of this story. This does not necessarily mean the Indonesian point of view should have been excused—Metro TV was at least as guilty of cultural blindness and nationalism as was Channel Seven. But understanding what is going on enables journalists to explain it, and, outside the Indonesia-based correspondents, there was a distinct lack of understanding, or interest in understanding, either side of this story over a decade. Corby’s arrest and imprisonment, and the media interest in it, did significant damage to relations between Australia and Indonesia, and to the ability to argue on behalf of two other Australian prisoners for whom the stakes were much higher. Better, more informed reporting could have mitigated that.

Chan and Sukumaran In an interview in August 2015, former Indonesian constitutional court Chief Justice Jimly Asshiddiqie said that Corby was a factor making it more difficult to save the lives of death row drug smugglers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran: SBY [Former president Yudhoyono] once gave clemency to Corby, and … she still spoke very badly about Indonesia. She never showed her thanks, or expressed any thanks to Indonesia. This created a very bad impression among the Indonesian public. (Bachelard 2015)

In April 2015, both men were put to death, along with six others from around the world. One woman, Mary Jane Veloso, from the Philippines, was granted a lastminute reprieve. The multinational nature of the executions showed that much more was going on than any simple antagonism between Australia and Indonesia. But Australia’s reaction to the death penalty seemed to have uniquely irked the Indonesian authorities.

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Chan’s and Sukumaran’s Australian lawyers had been aware for many years of the political pitfalls of appearing too aggressively to push their clients’ cases. They had insisted both in their legal documents and their interactions with the media on focusing on the positive—the powerful, redemptive story of rehabilitation, of Sukumaran’s artistic, and Chan’s religious, activities. Without trying to sugar-coat the situation, the lawyers were careful not to inflame the kind of suspicion and prejudice in Indonesia that had attached to Corby’s case. Perhaps as a result, there was limited knowledge of the case among most Indonesians, and little interest from the Indonesian media. After Joko Widodo suddenly decided in December 2014, that all 64 drug convicts on death row in Indonesia must have their sentences carried out, the campaign to save Chan and Sukumaran became more urgent, and significantly more delicate. Many of the Indonesia-based correspondents, including me, had come to know the men from visits to the prison. Whereas Corby was elusive and self-contained, they were available and open. Where she stayed inside her cell and attended to her own problems, they engaged and positively changed the life of the prison. Where she had a large, aggressively vocal, ignorant, well-funded and litigious support crew, they had their quiet, partly non-English speaking families and a legal team. As a result, their plight, which also involved the larger moral question of the death penalty itself, was treated more seriously by the correspondents than had Corby’s. According to Professor Asshiddiqie, there might have been little the Australian government could have done to save Chan and Sukumaran, even without Corby’s comments. Jokowi’s view on the rightness of executing drug traffickers was set and encouraged by the anti-narcotics agency and public opinion. When the men’s clemency accusations were officially denied in early January 2015, the campaign to save the Australians stepped up, and was fought particularly hard, provoking familiar feelings of animosity between the two countries. Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s interventions began with a statement that he would not do anything to damage the relationship with Indonesia. He then did precisely that by hinting that Indonesia should give Australia some kind of expression of gratitude for the A$1 billion of aid provided after the 2014 Boxing Day tsunami: ‘I would say to the Indonesian people and the Indonesian government: we in Australia are always there to help you and we hope that you might reciprocate in this way at this time.’4 The ham-fisted comment prompted a social media backlash in Indonesia under the hashtag #KoinuntukAbbott, or Coins for Abbott, whose proposition was that ordinary Indonesians collect coins to repay Australia its A$1 billion (in reality, A$500,000 of this total was a loan and had, in fact, long since been repaid). This, in turn, prompted the Indonesian mainstream media into another fury of recrimination—precisely not what the campaign for clemency required. 4  Tony Abbott, doorstop interview, Gold Coast, 18 February 2015. www.pm.gov.au/media/201502-18/joint-doorstop-interview-gold-coast.

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When Chan and Sukumaran died on 29 April 2015, the Australian people, and the media, mourned, albeit briefly. The Indonesians, perhaps chastened by what they had done to the morale of their neighbour, apologised quickly through their Australian embassy, and a long pause ensued before Indonesia conducted a further round of executions in July 2016. For these men, it seems to me, the die was cast by factors outside the control of any Australian politician or journalist.

Lessons for Journalists A regular question asked of journalists and the media working in Indonesia is whether we should tailor our reporting to the sensitivities between the two countries in the attempt to foster a better relationship, or even to try to bring a better outcome in a case such as Corby’s, or Chan and Sukumaran’s. Tony Abbott has even hinted that he thinks the media, particularly the ABC, should be an arm of Australian foreign policy. ‘I think it dismays Australians when the national broadcaster appears to take everyone’s side but our own, and I think it is a problem’, said Tony Abbott in January 2014, after the ABC’s controversial story broke about asylum seekers allegedly having their hands deliberately burned by naval personnel. ‘You shouldn’t leap to be critical of your own country and you certainly ought to be prepared to give the Australian Navy and its hardworking personnel the benefit of the doubt.’5 While this argument was particularly directed at the ABC, similar pressure by the government was sometimes also applied to independent media organisations. Tapsell points out the long tradition of this kind of view in government, observing that this history was so well established by 1989 that it invoked no surprise when the then foreign minister Gareth Evans said that the Australian media should be more ‘constructive’ in their coverage (Tapsell 2014: 98). In my time as correspondent, the pressure to speak with the government’s voice was less noticeable for the commercial media, including Fairfax. More noticeable, in fact, was the relative lack of official help from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. On the record comment on any subject had to come from Canberra, and it often took hours, if not longer, to get a response—an aeon in the fast-paced world of news. The government were even less help when trying to accurately identify Australian victims of misadventure in Indonesia. Diplomats and bureaucrats protested that they were restricted by the provisions of the Privacy Act from even confirming the correct name of a person we had obtained from a separate source.

5  Interview with Ray Hadley, 2GB Sydney, 29 January 2014, www.pm.gov.au/media/2014-01-29/ interview-ray-hadley-2gb-sydney.

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More often the comments about my reporting came from ordinary ­Australians via social media, or email, and I was regularly asked by both Australians and Indonesians why reporting from Indonesia was so negative. Why did we focus on the disputes, they asked, the criminals, the corruption, the things that were going wrong in the relationship? The question suggests that not only do ordinary people and Indonesia-watchers hold the news media partly responsible for the parlous state of the relationship, but that journalists bear a measure of the responsibility to fix it. Compounding this subtle pressure to perform better as an ambassador for the relationship was the widespread impression among Indonesians that the ­Australian media was some kind of carrier for our own government’s line—not something I daresay the Australian government at the time would have agreed with. For example, in my attempts to get into Papua legally, my assistant and ­Fairfax’s long time ‘fixer’ in Jakarta, Karuni Rompies, related conversations she’d had with bureaucrats in which they effectively accused her of disloyalty to her country, speculating that she, and I, were Australian spies. This was not the only time Runi had to endure this lecture. These conversations were conducted with a soft voice but not a light heart. Another example of when my journalism was mistaken as an instrument of Australian foreign policy position was when, after nine months, the Australian and Indonesian governments finally settled their dispute over revelations that Australian security agencies had spied on the president, his wife, Ibu Ani, the vicepresident, and their inner circle. The agreement was called the Joint Understanding on a Code of Conduct and officially sat as a two-point addendum to the Lombok Treaty. Despite all the sound and fury, this agreement, signed in Bali in August 2014, in no way inhibited Australia from spying on its neighbour. I opined in print that Australia had ‘won’ the dispute. Asked later by Indonesian media about my report, foreign minister Marty Natalegawa conflated my opinion with the official view of the Australian government, retorting: ‘If they (Australians) want to see it as a win, then please feel free, go ahead and keep dreaming’ (Dewi 2014). But the idea, no matter where it originated, that journalists either are, or should be, instruments of the national interest of any country, or should bear any of the weight of improving or maintaining the bilateral relationship, seemed to me a fundamental misunderstanding of our role and responsibilities. Tapsell quotes a number of Australian politicians, including prime ministers, saying correspondents took an unduly negative line towards Indonesia because we were ‘embittered’ by the deaths of the Balibo Five (Tapsell 2014: 106). To the extent that this was ever true (and I doubt it), it is risible to make the suggestion that this has any lingering effect today. I saw my role very specifically as serving the public interest—which is quite distinct from the national interest—and doing it in a journalistic way. This meant making an honest as possible account of Indonesian society in stories

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that were interesting enough to attract an audience (online, in print on social media). I was not negative towards Indonesia, and I hoped our two countries could achieve a better, more even-tempered relationship. But the journalist’s means of accounting honestly for an issue is, axiomatically, to focus on the negative: the areas of conflict, the problems, the victims, how government policies, or culture, or economics, affect people. This is the nature of news journalism. It seems unlikely to change, despite the changes in technology, and I would argue it should not. An additional thought also drove me: my awareness of persistent, almost ­wilful, ignorance among many Australians about Indonesia. I wanted to do my bit to address that. Even when I was writing about parochial stories, the four Bs, I tried to see them as ways to explain or give insights into something interesting about Indonesia. When covering the bombers, I tried to ask: what were the attitudes in Indonesia to radical Islam? At other times I asked why did Australian drug smugglers incite such dislike in the Indonesian population; and what drove Indonesian attitudes to asylum seekers; and how did the beef issue relate to the Indonesian preoccupation with food self-sufficiency? In that educative task, my attempts, I fear, failed. By mid to late 2014, Indonesia had undertaken its legislative election, the biggest one-day exercise of democracy in the world—what the Indonesian media dub the Pesta Demokrasi (Festival of Democracy). It was followed three months later by an even bigger deal, a lively and fascinating presidential election campaign between two sharply differentiated candidates. I wrote often about this, travelled with candidates, profiled the presidential players, and provided news and analysis over about 12 months of reporting. Seeing Indonesia tussling with democracy and demography and geography was the highlight of 2014 for me. And yet, after all my reporting, and that of the other Jakarta-based correspondents, the 2015 Lowy Institute poll came out, showing still that only 34% of ­Australians recognised Indonesia as a democracy (Oliver 2015: 11). This begins to look not just like casual, but wilful, ignorance. With such a thin base of knowledge or willingness to learn about Indonesia in Australia, it is little wonder the relationship lurches from one crisis to another, fuelled often by cultural and historical ignorance and misunderstanding. What journalists can do about this is unclear. I believe big changes in the education system, political engagement, and the economic and cultural (particularly pop cultural) exchanges between the two nations are required to shift attitudes. And, over time, I believe that the truth, including the messy, unpleasant parts, is good for all societies, and ultimately good for relationships between two countries. It is particularly good for democracy, because the truth allows people to decide for themselves using good information. It may be uncomfortable, but it is necessary, and it is the best role journalism can strive to play.

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References Allard, Tom and Gordon, Josh (2010) ‘It’s Time to Bring Corby Home: Poll’ Sydney Morning Herald, 15 August, www.smh.com.au/national/its-time-tobring-corby-home-poll-20100814-1247r.html. Amiri, Dawood (2014) Confessions of a People-Smuggler (Melbourne, Scribe Publications). Bachelard, Michael (2014) ‘Schapelle Corby: Pawn in Indonesian Political Shadow Play’ Sydney Morning Herald, 7 March, . Bachelard, Michael (2015) ‘Schapelle Corby Made it Harder to Save Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran’ Sydney Morning Herald, 12 August, . Dewi, Ni Kumara (2014) ‘Australia Merasa Menang atas COC, Marty: S­ ilakan Bermimpi’ Viva News, 30 August, . McDonald, Hamish (2015) ‘Shooting the Messengers: Journalists and Indonesia’ Sydney Morning Herald, 19 April, . Oliver, Alex (2015) ‘The Lowy Institute Poll 2015’, . Roberts, George (2014) ‘Chasing a Medium Rare Interview with the President of Indonesia’ ABC Correspondents Report, 21 September, . Tapsell, Ross (2014) By-Lines, Balibo, Bali Bombings: Australian Journalists in Indonesia (North Melbourne, Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd). Ward, Ken (2015) Condemned to Crisis? (Sydney, Penguin).

17 Beyond Cultural Diplomacy: The Artistic Nuance in Australia-Indonesia Relations JOSEPH MITCHELL AND LYDIA TEYCHENNÉ

Is cultural engagement between Australia and Indonesia at an all-time high? In the first quarter of 2017, a significant number of performing arts events took place across Australia celebrating Indonesian culture and Australia-Indonesia collaboration. At the Sydney Opera House, five young female dancers from a remote community of West Halmahera performed Balabala, deconstructing male war dances that broke down assumptions of cultural and gender hierarchy. In Melbourne’s Hamer Hall, a 20-piece gamelan orchestra shared the stage with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, performing a live score to a silent film Satan Jawa by Garin Nugroho. At WOMADelaide in Adelaide’s Botanic Park, Australian dancers and Indonesian musicians performed Attractor, a fusion of Javanese trance, contemporary dance and ritual. These examples are just a handful of Australian-Indonesian artistic exchanges that took place in 2017, part of the momentum of cross-cultural collaboration that is driven by artistic curiosity. Today, more and more Australian artists are energised by contemporary expression emerging from Indonesia. Since the New Order era, increased exchange between Australia and Indonesia has led to cross-cultural and collaborative explorations of mediums, techniques and approaches to the creation of new artistic work. Indonesian performing artists operating in contemporary arts practice are given a presentation platform in Australia at mainstream arts centres and arts festivals—a discernible shift away from the grass-roots traditional representations facilitated by Indonesian governmental agencies such as its Ministry for Tourism. New opportunities for Australian and Indonesian artists to engage and work together are the result of a long advocacy effort by key industry figures in the ­Australian arts and cultural sector to help Australians better understand their cultural identity in the twenty-first century, by deliberately removing Australia’s Eurocentric lens and engaging more broadly with Asia. New opportunities to engage with Asian artists are also a response to a broader international context: the rise of Asia’s economy; lower transportation costs; improved communication through enhanced technology; and a genuine desire by artists to explore and

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engage beyond the traditional structures of Western performance. As a result, artistic works are better equipped at reflecting Australia’s multicultural demographic and embracing its heterogeneous culture in terms of race, ethnicity, ­religion and different historical experiences. Yet in both Australia and Indonesia, the arts remain vulnerable to the politics of the day because both nations lack an enduring cultural policy. For Indonesia, absence of a cultural policy equates to inadequate government funding. What support remains drives a top-down approach to tourism-led art envoys abroad, with emphasis on traditional arts. This construction of a formal cultural identity linked to Indonesia’s focus on inbound tourism masks the realities of modern day, contemporary Indonesia. In Australia, artists typically accept the financial burden of intercultural projects with Indonesia, and seek support through public diplomacy programs designed to improve intergovernmental collaboration and promote national interests and identity. Consequently, artists can be required to conform to policy language and drive outcomes that align with diplomatic strategies to serve key bilateral relations goals. Although Australia’s cultural capital lies with the artist, the government controls the dollar. Australia is as well placed as it has ever been to build deeper engagement with Indonesia, yet opportunities are missed due to a lack of long-term commitment to fully integrate arts and culture within domestic and foreign policy. Despite the efforts of a handful of Australian arts leaders to support more Australian-­ Indonesian focused programs, resources for meaningful long-term exchange and greater cultural engagement remain inadequate. Intercultural collaborations are gradually becoming more common, recognised for their contribution to regionalisation processes essential to improving bilateral relations through social connections and identity construction. The effectiveness of cultural engagement to turn strangers into neighbours, and regard each other with interest and relevance, is, however, an often-neglected nuance. What follows is a survey of the contemporary arts landscape in Australia and Indonesia, with particular focus on varying levels of engagement, from grass roots cross-cultural collaboration to larger, state-supported initiatives and festival programming. This chapter draws from direct interviews with artists, producers and curators from Australia and Indonesia to provide a first-hand account of the challenges and successes they have faced in cross-cultural exchange. Real-life case studies are used to identify the intersection of artistic engagement and cultural diplomacy. The chapter seeks to reflect the perspectives of those working within this sphere and represent industry recommendations for strengthening the important role of arts and culture within Australia-Indonesia bilateral relations.

Australian Cultural Engagement in the Asian Century Cultural interaction between Australia and Indonesia has long historical roots. Australian Aborigines on the north coast of Arnhem Land and trepang ­fishermen

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from Makassar witnessed each other’s music and dance in ceremony and ritual (Scott-Maxwell 2013: 3–19). From the inception of the trepang industry in the early seventeenth century to its demise in the early twentieth century, these ­fishermen created and maintained regular contacts between northern Australia and their homeport on southern Sulawesi. Although this trading encounter ended, the contact had lasting consequences, with aspects of Macassan culture still found within Aboriginal Yolgnu culture (Macknight 1976). In South Sulawesi today, independent cultural operators are creating ways to encourage organic exchange opportunities for artists to explore the historical relationship. The Rumata arts space, a DIY self-funded and community-driven creative space in Makassar, is, for example, seeking an Australia counterpart with which to create exchange residencies and archive this little-known shared history. The history has also been celebrated in Darwin with the landmark Indigenous opera event Trepang, performed over four nights at the 2000 Darwin Festival to a combined audience of over 70,000 people. Today, many contemporary artists in both countries are working hard to define and celebrate their culture and identities within the rapidly globalising twentyfirst century. Australia’s drive for cultural engagement with Indonesia is evolving as Australia widens its outlook beyond its Eurocentric focus of the past century to reorient itself towards a more confident understanding of its geographic location within the Asia-Pacific region. The twenty-first century is projected as the ‘Asian century’, a term primarily championed by government and framed through the lens of economic opportunity with an emphasis on diplomacy. Indeed, the two objectives fit hand-in hand; business has the chance to thrive and diplomatic strategy plays a supporting role, ensuring positive relations in all levels of ­Australian engagement to increase levels of influence in the region. This is a neat and clean rhetorical package but what, precisely, is the role of the arts in it? Business and trade is about economic gain, framed in the 2012 White Paper Australia in the Asian Century as ‘Australia can be a winner in the Asian century’ (Australia in the Asian Century Task Force 2012). The arts industry doesn’t respond to this way of thinking—there are no ‘winners’. Artists tell stories because of personal and emotional reasons, they look at complex societal matters and mine unresolved issues far removed from economic or diplomatic reasoning. Topics explored by artists may even be taboo at government-to-government level of international engagement. Since the establishment of the Australia Council for the Arts as a statutory body in 1975, Australia’s cultural priorities have aligned with Europe. This is explored in Alison Carroll and Carrillo Gantner’s April 2012 Platform Paper, Finding a Place on the Asian Stage, which draws attention to Australia’s ‘derivative culture’ that consists of ‘largely Western derived, practices’ (Carroll and Gartner 2012: 4). The paper outlines the major shift towards Asian engagement that occurred in 1991 when the Australia Council dedicated 50% of its international funding to Asia. The Asian engagement trajectory was set to continue with the Keating government’s announcement of its Creative Nation policy in 1995. Under the Howard government years from 1996, support and policy diminished, however, resulting in

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Australia-Asia engagement dwindling to 10 to 20% of the Council’s international expenditure, with very little of that directed to Indonesia (Carroll and Gartner 2012: 25). Ironically, this withdrawal happened at a time when other Australian sectors, such as business, education and tourism, were turning to Asia. Today, neither Australia nor Indonesia has a national cultural policy. In 2013, Australia’s Labor government attempted to implement Creative Australia—the first major cultural policy proposed in Australia since Creative Nation. It was dumped, however, just days before passing through the Senate. While the tabled Creative Australia generally met with arts sector acclaim, it had become a victim of the operatic turmoil of Australian Labor Party politics in the Rudd-Gillard era. Following the return of a Liberal-National Party government, now led by Tony Abbott, Creative Australia was quickly swept under the rug. What followed had little to do with Creative Australia, as then Arts Minister George Brandis outflanked the cultural sector in an overnight raid, re-appropriating millions of ­dollars of Australia Council funds without any reasonable sectoral consultation. In early 2017, a decision was made by the federal government, led by Prime ­Minister ­Malcolm Turnbull, to return the majority of arts funds back to the ­Australia ­Council, although large portions of the funds taken for the Ministry of the Arts’ ­Catalyst Program have been committed through to 2019. As this sequence of events suggests, the Australian arts and cultural sector continues to be a victim of domestic politics. Lack of enduring governmental policy to culturally engage with Asia has seen Australia Council priorities drift back towards a European and North ­American focus in the post-Keating years. Consequently, Australian support for intercultural arts funding with Asia now rests largely with the International Relations Grants Program managed by the foundations, councils and institutes (FCIs) within the Australian government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). Their levels of funding are nowhere near that of the Australia Council; some have only a few hundred thousand dollars of uncommitted funds available annually and this must account for a variety of soft-diplomacy priority areas such as education, sports, science, innovation, arts and culture. The competition for these small FCI grants is intense, with only around 10% of applicants being funded in some cases. For projects involving Indonesia, support is sought from the Australia-Indonesia Institute (AII) and, to a lesser extent, through the newly established Australia-ASEAN Council (AAC). Their key objectives include tailoring medium-term strategic plans that advance the government’s foreign and trade policy in the context of the specific bilateral or regional relationship for which they have responsibility. According to DFAT’s Public Diplomacy Handbook (Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (2015: 58)), a key benefit of FCIs is that they work at arms-length from government, and are led by governmentappointed boards of eminent Australians who have expertise in the relevant country or region. FCI programs support projects that enhance Australia’s cultural diplomacy objectives, with emphasis on people-to-people and institutional links.

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To achieve this, arts and cultural exchange projects are woven into g­ overnment diplomacy efforts across the Asian region. This contrasts significantly with the Australia Council for the Arts’ emphasis on artistic relations unrestricted by cultural diplomacy objectives. However, the priorities of the Australia Council in the twenty-first c­entury have been to direct the majority of funds for international opportunity and engagement towards Western countries such as the UK, ­Germany, France, US and Canada. The arts sector therefore has no choice but to resort to seeking alternative avenues for intercultural projects with Asia. For the Australia Council, Asia is, sadly, still a low priority in the Asian century. Despite the Australia Council’s wavering focus on Asia, individual champions continue to cultivate Australian-Asian arts exchange and focus. We offer here only a few examples of these leaders, all outstanding in their leadership. In 1993, the Queensland Art Gallery, under the leadership of Doug Hall, founded the inaugural Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, a program that continues successfully today. In 2007, the Adelaide Festival Centre CEO and Artistic Director, Douglas Gautier, initiated OzAsia Festival, still Australia’s only annual international arts festival focusing on Asia and Asian-Australian relations. During the tenure of Andrew Ross at the Brisbane Powerhouse (2006–13) there was a concerted focus on increased programming and activity from Southeast Asia and Indonesia. Under the careful watch of arts leaders Carrillo Gantner and Rosie Hinde, the Kenneth Myer Asian Theatre Series likewise cultivated an Asian arts program at the Arts Centre Melbourne. This has since evolved to a wider national and international platform, with 2017 launching the inaugural Asia-Pacific T ­ riennial of Performing Arts (Asia TOPA). Asia TOPA celebrates Australia’s relationship with contemporary Asia, and seeks to provide new ways of understanding the deep connections across the Asia-Pacific region (Arts Centre Melbourne 2016). Its Creative Director, Stephen Armstrong, admits a motivation for establishing Asia TOPA was to address the weakness in Australia’s support for bilateral relations through the arts. Armstrong (who is also the former Chair of the Theatre Board of the Australia Council for the Arts) explains: The Australia Council was for so long not in a position to support Asian artists coming to Australia, and its focus was always on export, export, export. There was no genuine sense of reciprocity. The work of Asialink was really important, but there’s a whole generation of arts administrators and artists, mostly arts administrators, who have fluency, or the beginning of a fluency in cultural relations, but simply nothing to back it up. It doesn’t go anywhere and there is no focus for it. Pragmatism and the political whimsicality is how government has responded to arts and cultural opportunities. They are simply picked up and dropped according to the politics of the day—there’s no long view. I think that is changing. I think there is now every will on the part of the Australia Council to be more flexible with its support for artist projects that are international, and there’s certainly been a fantastic response from DFAT to what we’re doing, and to what OzAsia Festival is doing as well, so it feels like it’s a good moment.

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Indonesian Arts in the Post-New Order Era In Indonesia, the period since the fall of Soeharto in 1998 witnessed the emergence of a contemporary arts scene where artists openly explore the difficulties and challenges their communities faced under the New Order regime. Issues such as government corruption, violence against ethnic minorities, urbanisation in Java and decentralisation across the archipelago are explored and presented through the creation of new work with a contemporary bent. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, a new wave of artistic voices gained prominence on the international arts scene. These included the renowned collective Teater Garasi, performance artist Melati Suryodarmo, choreographer and film director Garin Nugroho, Papermoon Puppet Theatre, and choreographers such as Jecko Siompo and Eko Supriyanto to name a few. All of these artists have now begun to receive invitations to present work in major arts festivals across Europe and Asia to both critical and audience acclaim. To give one example of this, Abdi Karya, Operational Director at Rumata Arts Space in Makassar, describes the opening up of arts and culture in South Sulawesi in the post-Soeharto Reformasi (reformation) period: During the Soeharto era, development policy focused on Java and only a little bit on non-Java. In terms of art, this also happened. [But] when Indonesian entered Reformasi, the whole non-Java and non-Jakarta [community] celebrated their “local autonomy” … influencing the way local governments treated policy relating to culture and arts. Artists in the eastern part of Indonesia realised the need for change. Indonesia is not just Java and Bali. Movements happened. Independent festivals happened. A monumental festival in Makassar in 1998 and 1999 enabled the Makassar Arts Forum. This was a moment when lots of artist from Sulawesi, South Sulawesi and Makassar started to develop their networks, work in process and collaboration, independently, collectively and institutionally. Before this happened, the arts scene was still dominated by tourism. During the early 2000s, I saw many performances in Makassar. The artists involved, the audience who watched … they were excited … they were curious at what happened, what kind of art they just saw … young artists and young audiences started to develop their knowledge and their networks by keeping updated with the issues surrounding art all around the world.

While artists in Indonesia were telling new stories and reflecting on recent history, they did so with little governmental support. Indonesia lumbered along with a proposed cultural policy that has been held up in bureaucracy for—incredibly— almost 35 years. In fact, the only major cultural policy in Indonesia is a minimal one; it appears in Article 32 of its Constitution of 1945: (1) The state shall advance the national culture of Indonesia among the civilisations of the world by ensuring the freedom of society to preserve and to develop cultural values. (2) The state shall respect and preserve local languages as national cultural treasures.

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During the New Order era, there was an attempt to create a more detailed and practical cultural policy for the country. Although created in 1982, the Draft Law on Culture has never been agreed to by the legislature and government. It has, in fact, become the oldest bill in the country. In the interim, Indonesia’s arts and ­cultural sector has been managed by the Ministry of Education and Culture, with sectoral policy handled at the ministerial level. The former Head of Program for the Jakarta Arts Council, Helly Minarti, has been part of efforts to reform the Council and improve conditions for the making of quality artistic work. She recognises that the absence of a cultural policy is a major issue holding back opportunities for more contemporary awareness of culture in Indonesia: Basically, the Indonesian government still doesn’t have a cultural policy. Their outlook still tends to be out-dated, stifled by the bureaucrats who run the ministry … It sounds like a long shot but a country’s artistic reputation can be transformed into a soft power for a country. The Indonesian government doesn’t realise this … even if they seem to have some inkling of it, they are still clueless on how to exercise it.

Under President Joko Widodo (Jokowi), there are, however, some signs of change in Indonesia. The implementation of his election promise to develop and instigate a dedicated strategy for the creative economy has begun to show signs of a positive road forward. In the first year of Jokowi’s presidency, Indonesia’s first dedicated Creative Economy Agency, Badan Ekonomi Kreatif (BeKraf), was founded. To avoid the time-consuming legal process required for it to be established as a ministry, BeKraf was, instead, set up as an agency reporting directly to the president. Although it is too early for analysis, there is hope that the removal of the cumbersome bureaucracy that weighs down ministerial portfolios may allow BeKraf to become a nimble alternative, able to support a healthy arts ecology across all areas of the creative economy. There has also been renewed momentum to push the retitled draft Law on Cultural Advancement through the national legislature, the DPR (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, People’s Representative Assembly) (DPR 2017). Not all the developments are positive, however. During his opening remarks on 2 February 2017 at the Conference of Indonesian Rectors Forum at the Jakarta Convention Centre, President Widodo announced that Indonesian arts and culture could be made into a platform for developing tourism. The President added that the Rectors Forum was expected to create systems that could improve the nation’s outlook and compete with other countries (Antara News 2017). To achieve this, the Indonesian government announced funding for culture should be seen within the framework of investment, that is to create a new basis for economic development based on culture (DPR 2017). Yudi Ahmed Tajun, co-founder and director of Teater Garasi, a contemporary performance company based in Yogyakarta, says that, as this suggests, the priorities of government towards cultural exports remain rooted in the attitudes of the past. Since the first years of the Independence, the government has always exported the type of arts and culture that falls into the category of “traditional arts”, that is, forms of art

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acknowledged by the state as representative of Indonesian cultural identity construction. This is the problem. The state’s identity construction, through arts, is a formal and nostalgic identity. It does not represent other realities that are “informal” and happening today, which are perhaps rife with conflict and negotiation. Contemporary realities are an on-going cultural identity in the making. Contemporary arts can actually serve as a representation of this but it seems the Indonesian government is not yet able to accommodate contemporary arts ideas and forms as part of the construction of new identities.

Many exported cultural programs featuring traditional arts are facilitated by ­Indonesia’s Ministry of Tourism under the brand of ‘Wonderful Indonesia’ and usually align with tourism trade shows or community cultural events in capital cities around Australia (as well as in other priority countries around the world). The sole purpose of these missions is to promote Indonesia as a tourist destination. These events do little to promote a modern understanding of Indonesian cultures for Australian audiences. Although both the Australian and Indonesian governments lack an official cultural policy at the time of writing, the opportunities for financial support for contemporary arts and international exchange in Australia are, for all their limitations, significantly better than those available in Indonesia. Nevertheless, there are similar levels of determination among artists and arts managers in both ­countries to find ways to overcome differences in producing infrastructure and advance artistic ties. There is mutual recognition that close neighbours with vastly different cultures and histories have a lot to learn from each other, and that greater artistic exchange can play a major role in deepening the dialogue and understanding between the two countries.

Shifting Perceptions Understandings of Indonesia through the lens of arts and culture are often challenged by Australian misperceptions of Indonesia, its culture and its people. The popularity of Bali as a holiday destination can have the unfortunate side effect of filtering Indonesian culture through the narrow prism of Balinese tourism. The general negativity of news cycles propagated by both the Australian and ­Indonesian media, political tensions and historical events also play a role. ­Australian performing arts director Ian Pidd has been engaged in cross-cultural collaborations with Indonesian artists for the past 15 years, working with Australia’s Snuff Puppets and local artists in villages throughout the Special Region of Yogyakarta and collaborating with Indonesian architect and artist Eko Pawoto. Pidd is frustrated with perceptions of Indonesia as dangerous, fears he attributes to a lack of balanced media coverage in Australia. Everyone’s got this idea that because Indonesia is a Muslim country, there’s a whole lot of terrorists there, end of story. That’s what the majority of Australians read about, hear on the radio and see on the television. We are not hearing about what an extraordinary

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cultured place it is. About what a kind of astonishing achievement it has been to go from dictatorship into functioning democracy … it’s the most optimistic political story just about on the planet for the past twenty years and no one is talking about that.

Teater Garasi’s Yudi Ahmed Tajun, acknowledges Indonesian perceptions of ­Australian culture are also inaccurate or unclear. I have to say that I, and perhaps most Indonesians, do not know much about Australian culture. We tend to perceive Australian culture as “similar” to European or American culture. Perhaps because the mental representation of Australia for most of Indonesia is related only to white Australians. Of course, we hear about Indigenous culture—the Aborigines—and resistance in Australia, but more as a minority movement, meaning not an official cultural representation. The fact that Australia is actually multicultural is often obscure. This is, again, due to the lack of knowledge about, and exposure of, Australia in Indonesia.

During times of crisis, the image of Australia becomes a simplistic reduction of what the country has to offer, just as does that of Indonesia in Australia. Political crises also affect day-to-day working relationships and activities within the arts sector. West Java arts producer Satria Akbar found, for example, that his working relationship with Australia was dependent on the stability of the bilateral relationship. As we know, the relationship between Indonesia and Australia is like a “husband and wife” relationship, it always goes up and down. As a person who worked in art practice, sometimes it’s hard to persuade people that we do not deal with politics. An art project should be between art and art, that’s it. However, when we were in a process of sending artists to the 2015 OzAsia Festival, there was an execution of Bali 9 [narcotics smugglers] in Bali. The media exposure was so bad, and it affected the artists’ inclination to attend the festival. Some of the artists wanted to cancel their participation. It was difficult to persuade them that there’s no correlation between the Bali 9 and our festival. Back then, I was also persuading our artists to act as our ambassadors, to convey the clear image of Indonesia through our art form. From this event I realised that when political relations are stable it could foster better cooperation with the artworks.

Arts and culture are not separate from the life and events that surround them. They are not immune to the effects of diplomatic and political bumps. However, concentrated investment in arts and culture as part of a joint effort to represent a country can go a long way to remedy the misperceptions created by tourism, and curb media sensationalism through a strengthening of personal relationships, mutual knowledge and understanding.

Soft Diplomacy At the 2016 Australia-Indonesia Dialogue (a ‘second track’ diplomacy meeting involving non-government representatives from each country), the Sultan and Governor of Yogyakarta Special Region, Sri Hamengku Buwono X, raised the

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question, ‘are Australia and Indonesia, with their two different cultures, Asian and European cultures, destined to have a non-harmonious relationship?’1 He declared the role of arts in diplomacy to be a ‘cultural mission’, suggesting that the state alone was no longer sufficient for conveying diplomatic messages. Instead, ‘international relations are no longer viewed as merely relations between nation states, but also between citizens of the world’. Relations benefit from broader public involvement to open up ways for negotiations between states, as well as points of view on a problem. The Sultan recommended the Indonesia-Australia Dialogue be used as a framework to increase national branding and soft power abroad, through arts and culture. However, as it was not set up or funded to have any such role, alternatives must be sought. As the Sultan suggests, arts and culture are generally recognised as a mechanism for governments to enhance their soft diplomacy power. This official function of strengthening a country’s influence and reputation abroad is, however, in contrast to the less formal process by which artists, producers and presenters actually create work. For the arts sector, cross-cultural engagement is motivated by an artistic curiosity and achieved through the long-term development of mutual trust and understanding. Soft diplomacy unabashedly seeks to build bilateral relationships to influence international agendas and harness soft power assets for diplomatic advantage. Needless to say, although the pursuit of soft diplomacy is not a driver for cross-cultural collaboration, many Australia-Indonesian cultural engagements invariably rely on the financial support of DFAT through its FCIs and Public Diplomacy Program, often simply because there are very few other funding sources for bilateral arts and culture projects. It is therefore useful to consider federal government policy when studying how arts and culture fits into bilateral relations. According to DFAT’s Public Diplomacy Handbook, (Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (2015)) public diplomacy acknowledges the ways in which second track activities, including those involving artists and cultural organisations, can act as an avenue for advocating Australia’s interests and social values. This includes capitalising on the relationships and social capital of non-state actors to avoid what can otherwise be an obvious and sometimes futile exercise in soft diplomacy in the form of a government-led, one-way dissemination of information. More compelling however is its acknowledgment in the Handbook of the importance of collaboration to reach DFAT’s goals. There is mounting evidence that by focusing on collaborations and co-creations that align with our social values and by supporting local culture and leveraging local voices, we help promote normative public policy agendas such as human rights, democracy and trade liberalisation, collective security and development assistance.

Arts and culture thus has an undeniably natural place within a diplomatic strategic viewpoint of bilateral diplomatic linkages. More specifically, cross-cultural 1  Sri Hamengku Buwono X, ‘Welcome Remarks’. Australia-Indonesia Dialogue, 29 August 2016 ­Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

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collaboration is seen as a benefit for DFAT’s public diplomacy category, ‘Longerterm profile raising and relationship building’. This category encompasses a need to create a ‘generally favorable atmosphere or impact, rather than to manage a specific issue’ and promote ‘a better understanding of Australian culture, values and capabilities’ (Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (2015: 9)). Governmental support for cultural exchanges, visit programs, exhibitions, films and other general public diplomacy events also sits within this broad approach. As the Acting Director of DFAT’s Southeast Asia Division and Secretariat for the Australia-ASEAN Council, Julia Landford, puts it, cultural engagement is an integral part of Australia’s public diplomacy: It is the most important avenue that bridges cultures and provides opportunities to promote a better understanding of contemporary Australian culture and contemporary Southeast Asian culture. That’s been demonstrated through the wealth of performances and artistic interpretations that have been brought together by major arts festivals in Australia that operate in NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Northern Territory particularly. Australians have the opportunity to learn a lot more about the diversity of our own culture but also understanding and building links and relationships with the countries that are represented in these performances through these big festivals and other activities that we are funding. Government funding gives the sector credibility and highlights the importance of the work being done.

Although public diplomacy benefits from cultural exchange, and artists benefit from a dedicated avenue for project funding, there is some friction in the strategic alignment of the two. Proposals for funding are assessed on their ability to facilitate positive messaging on behalf of government rather than artistic merit. This can risk superficial cultural engagement, a flaw that is exposed when uncertainty or a public relations crisis arises. In 2014, for example, Indonesia was the designated focus for OzFest, a festival delivered by DFAT’s Australia International Cultural Council (AICC). It was anticipated that Indonesia’s 2014 OzFest would follow the success of India’s 2012 OzFest, a four-month long showcase of contemporary Australian culture across 18 cities in India. The OzFest planned for 2014 was consistent with the objectives of Australia in the Asian Century White Paper, to focus on Indonesia and ‘strengthen cultural diplomacy and exchange to build trust, understanding and confidence in our cultural, political, security and economic relationships.’2 However, during the lead-up to Indonesia’s OzFest in 2014, a bilateral diplomatic issue arose as a result of Edward Snowden’s release of documents revealing Australia’s monitoring of private phones of the I­ ndonesian president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, his wife Kristiani Herawati and their inner circle. Protests took place at the Australian embassy in Jakarta, and Indonesia recalled its ambassador to Australia. A month out from the opening of OzFest, the program was effectively cancelled, replaced with a lower-profile, year-long 2  See Australia in the Asian Century Task Force (2012). For information regarding F ­ oundations, Institutes and Councils, see ; for information on the Australian ­International Cultural Council, see .

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­ rogram of events that were given little publicity. As a program led by diplomatic p staff, the cultural content was always second fiddle to the very matters that cultural diplomacy is meant to overcome. Outside diplomatic ventures, however, Australian arts organisations and festivals are becoming increasingly multifaceted in their approach to programming. They are now, in fact, leading the way in establishing meaningful arts partnerships alongside strong diplomatic ties with Indonesia’s central and provincial governments. It is in the arena for artists, arts festival and personal relations that real soft diplomacy can happen, in an open, meaningful and long-term manner. To demonstrate, we will now look in more detail at one such event.

Case Study—2015 OzAsia Festival3 Established in 2007, OzAsia Festival is Australia’s only annual international arts festival focusing on Asia, with a program of theatre, dance, music, visual arts, film, and community events. A significant amount of activity involves guest artists from countries across Asia, as well as Australia-Asia artists and international collaboration. Since 2009, the festival program established an annual ‘country of focus’ strategy, building close relationships with different countries each year to mobilise relationships with both artists and producers, and cultivate local audiences. Relationships are maintained as the program grows and expands year to year, allowing for long-term engagement with a multitude of countries across the region. In 2015, the focus year was Indonesia. The 2015 OzAsia Festival was the largest showcase of arts and culture from Indonesia ever presented by an Australian arts festival. The works presented were a diverse curated series of events, rather than a cultural showcase. In total, there were 20 different events that were either directly from Indonesia or involved collaboration between Australians and Indonesians. There were more than 100 artists from Indonesia engaged to be involved with the festival program. The local ­Indonesian community of South Australia was also heavily involved in programs and events. When establishing the program, the OzAsia Festival team looked at contemporary culture from Indonesia, as well as culture and tradition from specific areas and regions that had less engagement or exposure in Australia. From Yogyakarta, companies such as Teater Garasi, Papermoon Puppet T ­ heatre and contemporary art collective Mes56 were invited to present works. From Solo, internationally renowned performance artist Melati Suryodarmo was commissioned to create a new durational performance and exhibit a retrospective of her collection. Several of Indonesia’s most highly regarded visual artists, including FX Harsono and Eko Nugroho, were invited to plan and exhibit works. Looking

3  The authors were closely involved in this event. Joseph Mitchell was Festival Director and Lydia Teychenné was Manager of International Partnerships for the 2015 OzAsia Festival.

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beyond Java, choreographer Eko Supriyanto presented his stunning dance work Cry Jailolo, involving male dancers from North Maluku transforming elements of their traditional culture into a modern contemporary framework. A special programming focus was built around the province of West Java, which had a dormant sister-province partnership with the State of South Australia. The unique cultural identity of West Java was identified through the music of Bandung collective Samba Sunda, who introduced audiences to the uplifting and fast paced rhythm of Sundanese gamelan. Topeng dancers from the northern coastline of West Java likewise demonstrated the unique Slangit and Losari styles, and a special exhibition of 100 topeng masks from the historic city of Cirebon were displayed in a special exhibition. Collaborative projects facilitating Australia-Indonesian partnerships also featured prominently in the programming, with Adelaide-based group Gamelan Sekar Laras performing with Yogyakarta artists Anon Suneko and AR Swastiastuti. Tutti Arts, an organisation based in Adelaide for young artists with disability, also partnered with a Yogyakarta-based community arts organisation for people with disability, Perspektif. Many other programs and events from Indonesia featured as part of the festival program including live music, education workshops, films, exhibitions, community programs and more. Although the Festival was presented as a major artistic program for audiences in Australia, there were extensive layers of governmental engagement that involved a comprehensive array of partnerships across Indonesia and Australia. These partnerships played a key role in supporting the artistic program as well as further strengthening intergovernmental relations. At the state-to-state (or, rather, stateto-province) level, the relationship between West Java and South Australia progressed in a positive way, with the official signing of a renewed ‘sister province/ state’ Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) as part of the opening night celebrations. This aimed to revitalise cooperation in the field of relations between the government, the community and the economy, particularly in the industrial and tourism sectors. There was existing interest from both the West Java Provincial authorities and the state government of South Australia in reactivating their dormant formal relationship, but it was the creation of a West Java cultural program at the OzAsia Festival that offered them the platform to do so. The MoU was signed by the Premier of South Australia, Jay Weatherill, and the Vice Governor of West Java, Deddy Mizwar, and the official ceremony included a showcase of West Java arts and culture. Following the signing of the MoU in September 2015, the sister governments have developed a sector-wide work plan and maintained annual joint working group meetings in both West Java and South Australia. Significant two-way progress has been made in areas of arts, culture, fisheries, education and tourism. Both governments also continue to provide support in areas of arts and culture as part of the annual OzAsia Festival, as well as other year-round projects taking place in both West Java and South Australia. West Java-based arts producer Satria Akbar has reflected on how the connection between West Java arts community and Adelaide’s OzAsia Festival led to a model for increased state-to-state government collaboration that marked the beginning

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of increased support from the West Java provincial government to its local arts private sector: In 2015, we decided to bring 60 artists from various styles of art to perform in what was our very first OzAsia Festival. This whole initiative was developed between us, with no financial support from West Java government. However, in the process we began working collaboratively with the West Java government, who began to see the value in this relationship as it progressed. During this first year of attendance at OzAsia Festival, we developed models for working collaboratively (between the government and private sector in West Java) in an international project. It was quite a unique and new approach for the West Java government to have private sector involvement to help support a governmentto-government program conducted by West Java and South Australia. Our first program was successful, and it now continues with upfront involvement and support from the West Java Government.

The artistic exchange between West Java and South Australia continues with further opportunities in each subsequent annual OzAsia Festival program, as well as year-round ‘knowledge sharing’ in arts management and arts festival organisation between South Australia and West Java. Satria Akbar sees this as directly beneficial to his work. It was interesting for me, to know that Adelaide Festival Centre (AFC) is an arts centre that belongs to the government but has an autonomous body and independence to run its program. It is a model that we haven’t had in West Java. Since then, I decided to learn from AFC and connected with its programs in hoping to develop a better understanding in art practice in my home-town.

In 2017, new exchange initiatives and joint arts projects are being developed. A reciprocal invitation has been extended to South Australian artists to participate in the West Java World Music Festival and SeniBandung#1 (an annual city festival in West Java’s capital, Bandung). The West Java government has also recently initiated a joint public arts project in Bandung involving South Australian artist Steve Cybulka and West Java artist Arin Dwi Hartanto. Beyond West Java, OzAsia Festival developed comprehensive partnerships with the Ministry for Tourism in Jakarta and the Special Region of Yogyakarta. As a result, the Governor of Yogayakarta, Sultan Hamengku Buwono X, and senior representatives of the Ministry of Tourism attended OzAsia Festival in an official capacity, meeting key representatives from South Australia and forging ties in the areas of education and agriculture. Both partnerships assisted in the support of arts exchange, and in particular, the showcasing of contemporary arts and culture from Indonesia to audiences in Australia. To prepare for extensive Indonesian engagement within the OzAsia Festival, artistic content was first considered, then suitable government partners in Indonesia were identified to ease the financial burden associated with the presence of a large number of Indonesian artists in Australia. When establishing these partnerships, the OzAsia Festival team could not rely on any assumptions, nor trust Australian perspectives to be relevant in Indonesia. Initial conversations with

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Indonesian governmental staff involved a careful clarification of who was responsible for approving cultural funding and explaining the difference between what Australians wanted to experience from Indonesian arts and culture as opposed to what Australians engaged with while on holiday in Indonesia (Bali particularly). As many tourism and cultural government leaders witness hundreds of thousands of Australians engaging directly with traditional Balinese and Javanese culture in Indonesia, it became necessary to explain the context of an Australian major arts festival and the interest of an Australian-based audience in contemporary ­Indonesian culture. For example, the work of FX Harsono, exploring the tragedies inflicted on Chinese-Indonesians, may not be a relaxing holiday experience for many Australians enjoying the sun on a beach in Bali. However, in the context of arts festivals and galleries back in Australia, Harsano’s challenging video art and installation have an important place in Australian arts dialogue as it provides a more expanded understanding of Indonesian culture that extends beyond the cultural experiences of a Bali holiday. Ultimately though, these governmental partnerships required an element of trust to be built by OzAsia Festival, with the help of local Indonesian producers. Bringing international partnerships on board increased OzAsia Festival’s capacity to attract Australian governmental support and coordination. DFAT’s Australia-Indonesia Institute provided funding to support many presentation expenses of the program, with emphasis on contemporary arts and programs that included collaboration and exchange. The OzAsia Festival also worked closely with the Indonesian Embassy in Canberra and the Indonesian Consul General for New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia to help facilitate the hosting of both the Sultan of Yogyakarta and the Vice Governor of West Java during their time in South Australia. Invited artists or members of the Adelaide Festival Centre were present at almost every governmental luncheon and VIP networking event. Business events and international forums were held in the Adelaide Festival Centre involving the State Government of South Australia and organisations such as the Australia Indonesia Business Council, the Australian-Indonesian Association of South Australia and Flinders University, who have a strategic focus on ­Indonesian engagement. The Festival also hosted a Board Meeting, for DFAT’s Australia-­ Indonesia Institute during the Festival, setting a precedent for integration of its deliberations within an artistic program. The overlapping web of governmental, business, education and community-based meetings, and networking opportunities existed because of the artistic program, permitting cultural exchange to set the tone for a series of positive gatherings and ongoing and improved relations. The Indonesia-focused program of OzAsia Festival in 2015 received outstanding responses from audiences, media and VIP guests. After 2015, OzAsia Festival maintained key partnerships and developed new relationships including the Agency for Creative Economy (BeKraf) and Indonesia’s Ministry for Education and Culture. Provincial partnerships were expanded, with Riau Province supporting the presence of Riau Rhythm Chambers as part of the 2016 OzAsia Festival program. Maintaining these relationships allows OzAsia Festival to grow ­Indonesian

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engagement in the future. From 2017, reciprocal projects have commenced, with OzAsia Festival now initiating collaborative projects in Indonesia including live music performances and a major public art installation in West Java. In regard to soft diplomacy, the benefits of developing partnerships with the government organisations in Indonesia are multifaceted. Governmental networks are expanded through linkages with key agencies such as Indonesia’s Ministry for Tourism, BeKraf and the Ministry for Education and Culture. While direct or indirect support from government agencies can involve assisting with international presentation costs such as airfares, greater cultural value is found in opportunities to promote contemporary arts and culture from Indonesia and the facilitation of high-level governmental diplomacy through participation. OzAsia Festival’s engagement with Indonesia contributed to the dissemination of constructive, positive messages, with its wide-reaching publicity campaign promoting the value of arts and culture exchange in both countries. In the lead-up to the 2015 OzAsia Festival, the Festival and Indonesia’s Ministry of Tourism co-funded journalists from Channel 7 News and News Corp to travel to Indonesia and interview local artists involved in the program. The journalists visited Jakarta, Bandung, C ­ irebon, Solo, Yogyakarta and Jailolo (North Maluku). The outcome included three prime time news television stories and feature weekend print articles. The stories revealed the diversity of Indonesia and provided positive cultural messages to an ­Australian audience. ABC International, which has a dedicated television channel in Indonesia, also attended the Festival and compiled multiple news stories for broadcast back in Indonesia.

Other Significant Programs While there have been several Australian artists and arts managers who have promoted and engaged with Indonesian arts over many years, the last few years has seen an increased willingness by major festivals and venues to collaborate and exchange. The Melbourne Arts Centre has developed and presented AustralianIndonesian arts collaborations as part of their Supersense Festival and AsiaTOPA arts programs. Major new productions include the aforementioned Satan Jawa, which features a live musical score fusing gamelan with Western orchestra by ­Australian composer Iain Grandage to accompany a major new film by acclaimed Indonesian filmmaker, Garin Nugroho. AsiaTOPA’s Associate Director and longtime producer of cross-cultural collaborations, Kate Ben-Tovim, observes that there is an Australian audience for Indonesian performance and arts, if they are presented in the right context. I think there is an audience for really great work presented to the right audience by the right presenters. When we showed Kuda Lumping, an amazing ritual process from ­Indonesia, you wouldn’t normally think there would be an audience for that but it was unbelievably well received because we presented it in the right context, to an audience that was ready to receive it, and it was a fantastic piece of work.

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The trickle-down effect that stems from larger Australian arts centres engaging with Indonesian arts, such as Adelaide Festival Centre and Melbourne Arts Centre, is the creation of a broader audience nation-wide, as other arts centres and festivals follow suit. Since 2015, Cry Jailolo by Eko Supriyanto has, for example, been presented at Darwin Festival, OzAsia Festival, Sydney Festival, Melbourne Arts Centre, the Tivoli Theatre Brisbane, and WOMADelaide. Very few international presentations ever receive six seasons at different major arts centres or festivals in Australia. Furthermore, the success of Cry Jailolo resulted in both Sydney Festival and Melbourne Arts Centre contributing to the co-commissioning and presentation of Supriyanto’s new dance piece, Balabala. Indonesian performer Rianto has also developed comprehensive artistic relations in Australia in recent years. He presented a development showing off his solo dance work Softmachine: Rianto at Artspace in Sydney in 2014. This was followed by full productions of the work in 2016 at both OzAsia Festival and then Liveworks Festival in Sydney. In the same year, Rianto was given the opportunity to present his new work Medium at Darwin Festival and is currently developing a new collaboration with Dancenorth Artistic Director, Kyle Page, in Townsville for presentation in 2018. Page shares his thoughts and interest in developing a new collaboration with Rianto: The idea is based on the desire to both work together and explore and learn from each other. We both have really varied experiences as performers and makers and for me that’s the greatest and most exciting inspiring part of collaborating with our Southeast Asian neighbours—working with people who come from a different experience of the world, different histories, different cultures, different perspectives … Rianto and I are very different, with very different physicality and creative interests, but I think that coming together can create something quite special. The resonance, that collision, is really exciting to the two of us so we both really felt like we had something to offer to the creative partnership.

Other artists such as music group Senyawa, arts collective Mes56, performance artist Melati Suryodarmo, visual artist Eko Nugroho and Papermoon Puppet Theatre have all had multiple invitations to perform, exhibit and present at a variety of arts festivals, galleries and venues across Australia in recent years. Since 2015, ­Australia has much more seriously engaged in contemporary arts from Indonesia and the people involved all demonstrate a long-term commitment towards exchange.

Indonesia’s Engagement with Australia: An Australian Cultural Centre? Given Indonesia’s lack of a direct funding source for artistic development and contemporary performance, Indonesian support for collaboration with Australia is usually non-financial. In its place, artists and arts producers contribute their knowledge, skills, time and venues to support exchange. The bulk of any financial

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support usually rests with funding avenues back in Australia. Artistic Director Sue Giles says, for example, that Polyglot raise all the money for their cross-cultural children’s puppet projects through Australian funding bodies, with no reciprocal money available. One of the biggest things is there is no funding in the country for professional arts, there just isn’t. Nobody gets paid unless they make their own money, so there is the realisation that everyone is an entrepreneur, everyone has their own small business as well, they are all looking for ways to make their art actually earn the money. The merchandise at Papermoon [puppeters] is massive, that’s how they earn a lot of their bucks, as well as lot of international collaboration stuff. Those guys work so hard.

There have been occasional invitations for Australian arts companies to present work in Indonesia but that is rare indeed. Indonesia does not have the same wellestablished arts funding structures as Australia and the few people engaged in international programming initiatives have limited allocated budgets. The majority of programmed content in these festivals tends to be Indonesian, with only a few slots and limited budget for international artists. Touring an ­Australian work to Indonesia is often accomplished on the back of a tour to larger and more affluent arts festivals in the region, such as the Singapore Festival or the Hong Kong F ­ estival. There are only a few reasonably well-established Indonesian arts centres or festivals that have a track record in programming professional contemporary arts from Indonesia and abroad. These include the privately-owned Komunitas Salihara in South Jakarta, which has a year-long program of generally local programs, as well as dedicated annual arts festivals held in November that includes Indonesian and international programs. In central Jakarta, the acclaimed ­Indonesian Dance Festival is held once every two years, in November. Australia, however, is simply not a high priority for international invitations to the few curated arts ­festivals in Indonesia, for a range of reasons. Indonesia Dance Festival curator Helly Minarti did solicit a dance work from Australia to be a part of the 2016 program, despite her reservations about Australia. I admit I still have to fight my own set of prejudices against Australian cultural policy, or even identity. I tend to be overly critical about it. I know that Australia has some superb artists, but I believe they tend not to stay in Australia. Discovering an artist like Antony Hamilton brings fresh air.

There is the possibility of a revitalised Art Summit Festival in Indonesia, with consultation, planning and funding review currently underway. The intention is to commence both Indonesian and international artistic programming from 2017 onwards, with the support of the Ministry of Education and Culture. Teater ­Garasi’s Yudi Ahmad Tajudin is co-curator for Art Summit Festival. Although he has visited Australia several times, he too has reservations. The biggest barrier is the lack of knowledge about the other culture. And the stereotyping that follows, hampering communication because of the simplistic assumptions. There is a need to have more contacts and meetings to learn about each other’s culture and

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c­ omplexity before collaboration … Indonesia and Australia’s geographical distance is actually not that far but the cultural distance is something we need to overcome.

There is a long way to go before perceptions of Australia are improved in I­ ndonesia, both within and beyond arts circles. Recommendations to remedy this include the establishment of an Australian Cultural Centre in Indonesia. Australian artists operating in Indonesia praise the impressive visibility and engagement with local communities of the Goethe Institute and the cultural events and programs led by the British Council and Institut Français d’Indonésie. These have built strong regional ties to Jakarta, Bandung, Surabaya and Yogyakarta but have also been integral to establishing connections between Europe, Asia and Australia. ­Australian theatre-maker Ian Pidd has explained the value of an in-country cultural centre from an industry perspective: Art is deep in the culture. Sticking an Indonesian opera into a big Arts Centre in Australia is fine but it isn’t engagement. We need to be spending more money on cross-cultural partnerships, on creating work together, on spending time together, on eating together, and perhaps a little less money on putting on spectaculars in arts centres. The French Cultural Centre in Yogyakarta is a perfect example of that. They have an art gallery, a recording studio, a couple of nice theatres, and there are constant collaborations between Indonesians and French artists taking place, on a small scale, not making a big thing, making many small things. We should be doing that.

For intergovernmental purposes, an Australian cultural centre could provide an axis point for cultural engagement activities, and help government agencies to identify public diplomacy opportunities that emerge from artistic pursuits, rather than being led by key messages. Such a centre could provide public avenues for advocacy, improve coordination between government and the arts sector, business and philanthropic agencies, and benefit from the entrepreneurship in both countries. It could also offer a focal point for positive media exposure to alter the balance of coverage. The Acting Director of DFAT’s Southeast Asia Division and the Secretariat for the Australia-ASEAN Council, Julia Landford, agrees there is a place for an Australian Centre with a focus on arts, culture and language. I think it would be a real asset for building relations between Australia and the countries of Southeast Asia. I strongly believe that arts is an area that is often underestimated in terms of its important role in society and I would strongly support the establishment of any institution that can promote and build links through arts and culture.

Many artists attribute their cross-cultural success with Indonesia to the support of, and invitations from, international agencies such as the Goethe Institute or the British Council. So, for example, Australian choreographer Gideon Obarzanek’s relationship with Indonesia stemmed from an invitation from the Goethe Institute in Jakarta as part of the 2009 Regional Dance Summit. Participation in the summit connected Obarzanek to Jakarta’s most established (and privately-funded) contemporary performing arts centre, Komunitas Salihara, where Obarzanek returned in 2010 to present his contemporary dance production Glow by Chunky Move.

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Becoming more familiar with Indonesia after presenting at Komunitas Salihara, Obarzanek travelled to Yogyakarta to work with music group Senyawa and performers from remote eastern Java to create a new trance tribal performance Kuda Lumping for Melbourne’s 2015 Supersense Festival. These experiences opened up yet more new opportunities for Obarzanek, who recently created another new work featuring Senyawa performing with dancers from Dancenorth titled Attractor, which Obarzanek co-choreographed with Lucy Guerin. This new production has featured in Asia TOPA and WOMADelaide, and is scheduled for the Brisbane Festival in late 2017 before touring to the US. Each project that reunites Obarzanek with Senyawa deepens their contemporary exploration of Javanese ritual, and connects the work with new audiences. Obarzanek admits he has missed out on many years of possible connection with Indonesia and wants to make up for it. I was quite surprised that I was already in my forties before I had some deeper involvement with Indonesia and Indonesian artists. When I first started, I felt like I had missed out on so much, so many years and it’s not anyone’s fault except mine, in a way, or is it? I didn’t grow up in a society and an education system that alluded to what was going on in Indonesia, and engage with Indonesia. So I didn’t engage with Indonesia and, in fact, it took a German cultural organisation, Goethe Institute, not an Australian organisation, to connect me with Indonesia. I’ve had that connection ever since.

The idea of an Australian Cultural Centre in Indonesia is not new. During the 1990s, the Sultanate of Yogyakarta was involved in discussions with the ­Australian Embassy on the possibility of establishing an Institute of Australia-Indonesia Cultural Study in Yogyakarta, and it has also been considered at different times by DFAT’s Australia-Indonesia Institute. Despite a lack of enthusiasm from both governments, the idea endures. Polyglot’s Sue Giles argues that an Australian Cultural Centre in Yogyakarta would benefit from the region’s openness and willingness to collaborate. She says it would provide Australians with a better understanding of people in the region, provide assistance to specific communities, and promote Australia as more than just trade, business or politics. In this respect, an Australian Cultural Centre would provide opportunities for learning and understanding that extend beyond intermittent exchange. Giles says that: The best thing artists learn by working in Indonesia is how we grow through that engagement. It’s not about us coming in and imposing something on another culture, we are learning from that exchange. The idea that nations can grow from exchange, we don’t have to say our “way is right, therefore we don’t understand what you’re doing”. There’s something about the personal that’s involved in the arts practice that is about real people at the grass roots, understanding a culture from the base, and the Australian government could really learn from us in that way.

Australia cannot wait for an Indonesian cultural policy to reflect the same ideals for cross-cultural engagement with Australia. Australia simply is not a priority for President Jokowi. The viewpoint of Indonesian arts houses towards Australia is still quite negative, and many of them remain far more interested in European

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work—when it comes to the international arts scene, most leading Indonesian artists look north, not south. If Australia wishes to strengthen its soft diplomacy mechanisms using arts and culture, it has no choice but to take the initiative to establish a suitable cultural house and programs within Indonesia. With a committed in-country presence in the arts that is independent of mainstream diplomacy and the local embassy, Australia would be able to cultivate stronger connections with Indonesia through direct cultural engagement, and harvest the relationships of independent entrepreneurs, artists and curators. Ironically, Australia may again look to Europe for a model, with well-embedded cultural houses such as Goethe Institute, British Council and Institut Français d’Indonésie achieving great success in developing long-term bilateral relations with many leading contemporary artists from Indonesia, despite the absence of support and serious engagement from the Indonesian government. The model is clear, so it is hard to understand why Australia is so reluctant to adopt it.

Conclusion There is a positive momentum among artists and arts leaders across Australia and Indonesia, demonstrated through increased support and presentation of contemporary arts from Indonesia in Australia at high-profile arts centres and arts festivals. At the time of writing, Australian arts projects and cultural initiatives remain better positioned financially than Indonesian counterparts. However, due to a lack of national cultural policy and drastically deflated Asian engagement on the part of the Australia Council, arts engagement has primarily been supported via the limited resources available within the sector itself and DFAT’s Australia-Indonesia Institute. In Indonesia, it is too early to assess the potential impact of BeKraf but there is hope that a demonstration of how Indonesia’s creative sector contributes to economic growth will lead to an increase in Indonesian governmental support for cross-cultural exchange and collaboration. Spurred on by the momentum created by recent arts sector initiatives, including OzAsia Festival, Asia TOPA and Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and artistically energised by the contemporary arts sector, Australia is as well-placed as it has ever been to build a better profile within Indonesia and take advantage of Indonesia’s increased interest in artistic exchange. However, to encourage ­Indonesia to look south to Australia for these opportunities requires a dedication of resources and long-term commitment by the Australian government to ­integrate arts and culture fully into Australian foreign policy. Engagement with Indonesia requires increased financial support for Australian artists and cross-cultural projects that respect the arms-length principle, respect artistic autonomy and, above all, legitimise the essential role that Australian artists and cultural operators play in connecting Australia to its Indonesian neighbour. That we would applaud!

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References Antara News (2017) President Officially Inaugurates Conference of ­Indonesian Rectors Forum’, 2 February, . Arts Centre Melbourne (2016) ‘Asia TOPA: Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts, 13 February—6 March 2017’, www.artscentremelbourne.com.au/ discover/seasons/asia-topa-2017>. Australia in the Asian Century Task Force (2012) ‘Australia in the Asian Century: White Paper’ (Canberra, Australia in the Asian Century Task Force). Australia. Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (2015) ‘Public Diplomacy Handbook’ (Canberra, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade). Carroll, Alison and Gantner, Carillo (2012). Finding a Place on the Asian Stage, Platform Papers, No 31 (Strawberry Hills, NSW, Currency House). DPR (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat) (2017) ‘DPR dan Pemerintah Sepakat Sahkan RUU Kebudayaan 27 April 2017’, 22 February, . Macknight, CC (1976) The Voyage to Marege’: Macassan Trepangers in Northern Australia (Carlton, Melbourne University Press; Forest Grove, Or). Scott-Maxwell, Aline (2013) ‘Creating Indonesia in Australia: Bridges, Communities and Identities through Music’ 35 Musicology Australia 3.

18 Inside Indonesia: Taking on Australia’s Disinterest, Ignorance and Isolationism JEMMA PURDEY

It is a cliché to say that Indonesia is Australia’s closest large neighbour. But it is one of those clichés which has attracted no comment at all. All the rhetoric about needing to learn and understand about this close neighbour has remained hollow. IRIP—the Indonesian Resources and Information Programme—has been set up to try to make some inroads into this lack of interest, ignorance and isolationism. We will be working to counter this propaganda and shallow analysis that is presently about the place on Indonesia. We want to bring Indonesia alive to Australians. Not just as a society of ‘victims’ under the rule of an authoritarian regime but as a society of individuals actively struggling to change their situations, or, at the very least struggling to maintain their dignity in the face of exploitation and repression. (Lane 1983) It might well be that understanding is a dangerous thing, that more knowledge, more understanding might lead to further grounds for suspicion … the very peak of AustraliaIndonesia relationships, their highest point, was at the very beginning when neither side knew anything at all about the other. (Legge 1979)

When the first issue of Inside Indonesia (II) was published in Melbourne more than three decades ago, the magazine’s founders would never have imagined that Australian government representatives in Indonesia would one day celebrate it. Inside Indonesia was established in the 1980s as a dissenting voice against the pragmatism of Australian government engagement with the authoritarian New Order regime, under an editor who been removed from his position at the Australian embassy in Jakarta for translating banned Indonesian literary works. Over the next thirty years the magazine developed into an authoritative source of news and analysis on Indonesian politics, society and culture. It has become less focused on the bilateral relationship but respected for the high quality of its content, and it increasingly focused on a worldwide readership. In April 2016, a digital archive of the 89 printed quarterly issues of the now online magazine were launched in Jakarta with the assistance of the Australian embassy, the Australia-Indonesia Institute and the University of Indonesia. The digitisation

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project with the National Library of Australia was made possible in part by the availability of government funding. This chapter will examine the role within the Australia-Indonesia relationship of II, as an Australian publication on Indonesia. First, it will describe its origins in Melbourne in the early 1980s when, on the one hand, the government-togovernment relationship was becoming stronger while, on the other, public sentiment in Australia towards Indonesia was overwhelmingly hostile. As will be shown, II was established in response to Australian government policy on Indonesia in the late 1970s and early 1980s and its engagement with Asia more generally. Initially the magazine sought explicitly to contribute to the debate on policy and influence Australians’ opinions about Indonesia. The second part of the chapter will focus on the magazine’s evolution over more than three decades, charting shifts in editorial emphasis in response to both external and internal influences, including Indonesia’s political situation, Australian policy, and its own organisational decisions. These shifts, over three decades, lessened the magazine’s focus on the Australia-Indonesia relationship.

Origins We are a pro-Indonesian group. We support solidarity with the Indonesian people. And we are an Australian group. We want to know how Australia is involved in affecting Indonesia, and vice-versa … We want to bring Indonesia alive to Australians. (Lane 1983)

By the early 1980s, a repressive authoritarian regime was firmly entrenched in Indonesia. In January 1974 the government had shut down voices of dissent and curtailed press freedom.1 The 1977 elections dispelled any remaining illusions of political freedom (Aspinall 2005). Indonesia’s annexation of East Timor in 1975 gained international acceptance, as nation after nation sided with Indonesia against East Timor’s petitions to the United Nations for self-determination. By the end of 1978, the Australian government under Malcolm Fraser, keen to settle its Timor Gap Treaty with the Indonesians, had recognised de jure Indonesia’s annexation of East Timor, maintaining a pattern of prioritising engagement with Indonesia over concern for human rights that successive Australian governments followed in their relations with Indonesia. Public sentiment in Australia remained extremely hostile to Indonesia, which was seen as expansionist and aggressive. The killing of Australian journalists in East Timor by invading Indonesian forces in late 1975 and the plight of the East Timorese people dominated public discourse, perpetuating generally negative sentiment towards Indonesia to this day (Tapsell 2015; Sobocinska 2015). 1  In January 1974, 11 major publications in Indonesia were closed down and journalists, student and civil society leaders detained after demonstrating their growing discontent with increasing corruption and failure to implement development programs.

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Indonesia’s invasion and occupation of East Timor and the Australian government’s acquiescence to the annexation was the trigger for II’s existence, but it was not the reason for its existence. In broad terms, the magazine was a product of the tensions arising in the late 1970s and early 1980s from a growing awareness of Australia’s need to engage with Asia. It became apparent that there was a need to balance a strategy of engagement with Asia’s authoritarian governments, including the Indonesian government, with commitment to some form of human rights diplomacy. From 1975 onwards, the East Timor question was the issue that led these two often-conflicting streams in Australian foreign policy to meet head-on (Dutton 2003: 86). The magazine’s founders, Pat Walsh and John Waddingham, were Melbournebased activists who had promoted East Timor’s right to self-determination since the Indonesian invasion in December 1975, and particularly since 1978 (Henry 2014: 52–69). In that year, they established the Timor Information Service, based in Melbourne, to bring news about Timor to the outside world. Both Walsh and Waddingham had come to East Timor through their earlier interest in, and connections with, Indonesia, and, as Waddingham has since commented, ‘the “anti-Indonesian” charge commonly levelled at East Timor advocates in the 1970s and 1980s was especially galling to us and many others’ (Waddingham 2013). Walsh and Waddingham saw two challenges: first, to tackle the charge that being pro-Timor made you anti-Indonesian; and second, to combat what they saw as the ‘narrowly-based and largely impenetrable Jakarta-Canberra official relationship’. In a somewhat incongruous, but quite wonderful, twist of logic, their response was to look for ways to bring ‘Indonesia’ closer. … it became increasingly clear to us that we needed to build more links with Indonesian civil society. Such links could facilitate Indonesian understanding of Australian community knowledge and attitudes (including on East Timor) and conversely inform Australians about the lives, experience and aspirations of ordinary Indonesians. (Waddingham 2013)

Against this backdrop, the magazine’s founders wanted to tell Australians stories about the Indonesian people and their struggles against the Indonesian regime. In part, the motivation was to show that Indonesians and East Timorese faced the same oppressor—the New Order and its military complex. The primary aim though was to connect the peoples and civil societies of Australia and Indonesia directly. Given more recent rhetoric of public diplomacy and people-to-people connections in Australian foreign policy, Waddingham and Walsh can be seen as being ahead of their time in their vision of the relationship between the two countries three decades ago. In October 1982, the duo began exchanging letters with Max Lane, an Indonesia analyst from the Department of Foreign Affairs, in which they fleshed out ideas about the possibility of a journal or information service of some kind. Such bulletins had been tried before and largely failed, so they knew that to attract readers their attempt would need to be distinctive. Lane had recently been removed from his position at the Australian embassy in Jakarta because of his

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work translating the writings of writer and former political prisoner, Pramoedya Ananta Toer. As a middle-ranked staffer in the Embassy, Lane began translating the novel Bumi Manusia (The Earth of Mankind), banned by the government, in his spare time. As he later explained it, ‘the Ambassador and the Australian Government saw it as an undiplomatic activity. Bumi Manusia had been banned by the Suharto regime in 1981. So I was in effect publishing a banned book’ (Fawzi and Bahrawi, nd). Lane’s close connections with Indonesian opposition movements and voices, including Pramoedya, made him a good fit for the aims of the collective. Between October and December 1982 the idea for a magazine began to take shape. With Lane on board as a potential editor for a journal, it had an advisory group by late November 1982 that included Jim and Barbara Schiller, Herb Feith, Peter Britton and Di McDonald, plus a working group with Lane, Djin Siauw, Chris Dureau, Walsh, Waddingham, and others. Together they drew up the broad outline for an Indonesian Resources and Information Centre, which would collect, research and disseminate information on issues including human rights, trade unions, community development and popular culture in Indonesia.2 By April 1983, the Indonesian Resources and Information Programme (IRIP) had taken shape, with Lane listed as General Editor of a journal that would include a lead article, news clippings, an NGO profile, reviews, Indonesian documentation, and a cultural piece. Names for the new journal were also being tossed around, with the group considering Indonesia Quest, Indonesia Papers, Indonesia Insight and Indonesian RiceRoots, among others, before finally settling on Inside Indonesia. Initial funding for IRIP came from left-leaning non-government organisations and labour unions including Australian Freedom from Hunger, Waterside Workers, Community Aid Abroad, Australian Catholic Relief, Australian Council for Overseas Aid (ACFOA), Australia-Asia Worker Links, Asia Bureau Australia, and individuals and other organisations with whom IRIP members had some connection. In-kind support was provided by Action for World Development, where Walsh was working at the time, including such things as the use of the office for meetings. It was clear from the outset, however, that they would need to rely largely on volunteer labour. Planning coincided with a period of intense work for Walsh and Waddingham in their East Timor advocacy, when some hope remained for changes to Australia’s policy.

Observing and Reporting Indonesia from Australia, 1974–1983 Walsh and Waddingham were ‘at the heart of the Timor issue in Australia’ (Walsh 2007), as members of a small group from the Australia East Timor Association working with the Victorian Branch of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) on an 2 

Minutes, IRIC meeting, 24 November 1982, Monash University Archives, MON 1169.

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early draft of the policy opposing Indonesian annexation and supporting selfdetermination that was adopted at the ALP’s Conference in 1982.3 At successive biennial ALP National Conferences after the Indonesian invasion of East Timor (ALP, 1982: 81), support for the right to self-determination of the people of East Timor was explicit (Salla 1995: 207–22). Following the election of the Hawke government in March 1983, however, any hopes that East Timor activists in Australia may have held were swiftly crushed.4 While publicly refusing to dismiss the ALP’s position on East Timor altogether, the new Cabinet had moved very swiftly to retract the policy. A submission to Cabinet, dated 23 March 1983, from the new Minister for Foreign Affairs, Bill Hayden, stated the new government’s position clearly: In essence, an inflexible application of National Conference Resolution on East Timor would result in a dreadful shambles in a key area of our foreign policy, alienating major regional neighbours and causing damage that would take many years, probably decades, to repair. (Australia. Cabinet 1983: 12)

Cabinet adopted Hayden’s recommendation on 29 March and confirmed the decision to pursue good and friendly relations with Indonesia and acknowledge its presence in East Timor, while pushing for better aid and access to the province. As the IRIP team prepared the first edition of II, Foreign Minister Hayden visited Jakarta in April, followed by Prime Minister Bob Hawke in June on his first overseas trip as Prime Minister. Both promised the Indonesians they would review the ALP’s policy on East Timor and pushed for access to the province. In July 1983, a delegation of Australian MPs, led by Bill Morrison, travelled to East Timor as guests of the Indonesian government. They aimed to see for themselves the situation in the restive province and provide an assessment that could form the basis for future ALP policy on Timor. Under consideration was a shift in ALP’s policy of support for East Timor’s submission to the UN for self-determination. The delegation’s visit to East Timor from 28 July–1 August 1983 included Australian journalists—something rare in the post-1975 period (Canberra Times 1983: 1). With the murder of the five journalists at Balibo still uncomfortably fresh, several Australian journalists had been backlisted from the mid-1970s, and a blanket ban on Australian news agencies imposed. This remained in place until the early 1980s (Tiffen 2000: 39; Tapsell and Eidenfalk 2013: 576–92). The delegation’s four-day trip was tightly managed by the Indonesians and its occupying forces in East Timor. The Indonesian military commander in Timor assured the Australians that there had been no shooting since January, and Indonesia had shifted to a

3 ‘Australia’s new Labor government, March 1983’, posted on Timor Archives (CHART) blog, March 2013, ; see also ‘Draft Policy on East Timor for the Australian Labor Party’ AETA, 1982, . 4  For detailed report on the debate on Timor at the 1984 ALP National Conference, see Walsh (1984: 18–22).

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‘hearts and minds campaign’ to settle the conflict with the left-wing resistance front, the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor or Fretilin (The Age 1983: 8). On their way home the delegation visited Jakarta, where they were met very warmly by Indonesian officials. As Fairfax journalist Leigh Mackay described the meeting, ‘The smiles, handshakes and pleasantries that greeted the three Labor and two Liberal MPs on their arrival were noticeably broader, firmer and warmer when they rounded off their visit yesterday.’ As Mackay explained, this warm welcome was no wonder considering the glowing report Morrison gave of the delegation’s visit, including that they had found the people of East Timor well catered for in terms of food and health provisions, and that ‘most East Timorese considered that they had never been so well off ’ (Mackay 1983: 7). On 19 August, as the delegation prepared its report, Radio Australia, ABC Radio and The Age published extraordinary reports detailing inaccurate interpreting of conversations between the Australians and the East Timorese during their visit. The interviews had been facilitated by the Indonesians, who had provided two interpreters—one to translate from Portuguese to Indonesian and the other to translate from Indonesian to English. Four armed Indonesian soldiers had accompanied the delegation.5 Back in Australia, Radio Australia’s translators listened to the audio recordings made by journalists on the trip and revealed that the Indonesian officials’ interpreting was extremely inaccurate and skewed the answers in favour of the occupation.6 The revelations shocked, but did not surprise, those in Australia closely watching Indonesia. Such restrictions on foreign media were very much in line with the heightened suppression of the Indonesian press from early 1974 onwards, following the Malari (Fifteenth of January Disaster) protests and riots.7 Thus, it was in a climate of suppression of the press and dissident voices in Indonesia, and of heightened suspicion of the Australian media on the part of Indonesian authorities, that the Inside Indonesia team prepared its first edition.

Working Outside the Mainstream Media IRIP learned lessons from earlier, mostly short-lived, efforts in the 1970s and early 1980s to provide better sources of information about Indonesia and Southeast Asia to interested Australians. Among these was the Timor Information Service,

5  The misleading nature of this visit has been documented elsewhere, including in a report on the delegation’s visit by John Waddingham (1984). 6  See Forbes (1983). On Radio Australia and Indonesia’s accusations about its work, see Tapsell 2015: 103–04). 7  Peristiwa Malari, an abbreviation of Malapetaka Lima Belas Januari (Fifteenth of January Disaster) took place in Jakarta from 15 to 16 January 1974. Coinciding with the visit of Japan’s Prime Minister, what began as student demonstrations against corruption, inflation and foreign investment concessions turned into rioting instigated by provocateurs. The government used the riots to clamp down on dissent and bring about significant changes in military leadership and economic policy. See Crouch (1978: 306–317) and Hill (1994: 37, 154).

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with its particular focus on East Timor but there were others with a broader mandate, such as the Sydney-based Indonesia Bulletin, published every few months from April 1974–June 1975 by the Indonesia Action Committee. The Bulletin was a response to the crackdown on the free press following the Malari riots in January 1974. As Herb Feith wrote in its third edition in October 1974: the effect of the new pressure on the surviving publications has been to reduce the levels of critical comment to what many see as an all-time low. The Indonesian press has certainly less critical content than at any time since the late Sukarno years. (Feith 1974)

Its mission was also, ‘to publicise Australian initiatives in whatever form, in an attempt to alter the impact Australian already exerts on Indonesia and Indonesians.’ During its short life, the Indonesia Bulletin condemned Australia’s economics-first policy approach to Indonesia. It published speeches by Australian business leaders and academics on Indonesia’s economic development program in an effort to highlight what it saw as the callous disregard of the way in which the New Order program was leaving many behind and forsaking any commitment to human rights and liberties. At around the same time, a group named the Indonesian News Service (INS) emerged in Melbourne.8 Its organising committee was similarly named the Indonesia Action Group and it was run primarily by Indonesians based in Melbourne and academics concerned with the plight of political prisoners in Indonesia.9 When Indonesia invaded East Timor in December 1974, it expanded its activities to include this issue. The aims of the Indonesian News Selections Bulletin, published from 1977 to 1981, were to create awareness of human rights, economic and political repression in Indonesia and of foreign complicity, especially Australian complicity, in supplying the New Order regime with military aid. The bulletin included translations of news sources from Indonesia and international news outlets, as well as bibliographies of reports and statements of interest. The content was organised around topics such as Dissent/Political Unrest, Political Prisoners, Irian Jaya/West Papua, Poverty, Corruption, Foreign Policy, and Australia–Indonesia Relations. As the next in this sequence of publications to focus on informing Australians about what was happening in Indonesia at a time of increasing government repression of dissident voices, IRIP’s Inside Indonesia was intent on producing something different. The output of previous ventures and the various Timor news services was read mostly by concerned individuals who subscribed to the newsletters.10 II’s aim was to speak to a mass Australian public. As Walsh and Waddingham have since explained, it was an audacious project—to publish a magazine of high quality and 8 

Personal communication with Tiong Djin Siauw, December 2015. INS members included Tiong Djin Siauw, whose father, Siauw Giok Tjhan, had been in detention since 1965, Herb Feith, Ian Bell, John Barnard and Lenore Ryan, the National President of Amnesty International. The group provided Amnesty International with information on political prisoners and campaigned locally for their release. 10 For a list of newsletters and bulletins about East Timor from 1974–99, see . 9 

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substance about Indonesia that could be sold from the shelves of bookstores and newsagents across the country (Walsh 2007; Waddingham 2013).

Unlocking the Potential of Australia’s Indonesia Expertise By the 1970s and 1980s, Australian academics were among the world’s leading scholars of Indonesian politics, history and economics (Purdey 2012: 1–16; Purdey 2011). Centres for the study of Southeast Asia with an emphasis on Indonesia had been formed in the 1960s at Monash University and the Australian National University (ANU) (Aspinall 2012: 53–74). For action-oriented and ‘connected’ people like Waddingham and Walsh, it made no sense that Australia’s Indonesia experts should lead the world while the general Australian population knew so little about their closest neighbour. As Walsh put it: Frankly, it also amazed us that Australia was home to world-class experts on Indonesia but the majority of Australians were ignorant of Indonesia. We felt that an information service could bridge that gap. As well as filling that information vacuum, such a service might also help foster people-to-people relations. (Walsh 2007)

It was not, however, as straightforward as simply harnessing this knowledge for the IRIP mission. Australia’s Indonesia scholars were by no means united in their views on the New Order regime or on Australia’s priorities for the bilateral relationship. Tensions between the so-called ‘Indonesia lobby’ of academics in Canberra, who supported Australia’s pragmatic approach to its relations with the New Order government,11 and others more critical of the regime would cast a shadow over Australia’s community of Indonesians for some time. It certainly played out in the pages of II’s early editions, at least until the fall of the Soeharto regime in 1998. By the 1990s, however, Indonesian expertise from within the Australian academy was successfully harnessed and the magazine’s editorial and writer cohort was dominated by scholars and students of Indonesia.

Content and Form Understanding the story of II in the context of the Australia-Indonesia relationship and of its evolution as a not-for-profit magazine requires unpacking its organisational structure and operational procedures over more than 30 years, as much as it calls for analysis of its editorial persuasions or ideology in the context of changing in Australia’s foreign policy. 11 

See Aspinall (2012); Hadiwinata (2012: 77–96); and Kalidjernih (2008: 72–93).

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In some ways, the magazine’s ideological position is most easily explained. From the beginning, II stated its adoption of the universality of human rights, recognising and supporting the struggles of so many Indonesians for those rights, and making clear the obligation of people in richer countries like Australia to understand and assist Indonesians in those struggles.12 Operational process, personalities and readership and, most importantly, the changes in Indonesia itself have been most influential in shifting the direction of the magazine. The analysis below will demonstrate the relative consistency of the magazine’s content and intent throughout its 32 years of publication. An exception to this consistency, however, lies in the way the magazine has interrogated Australian policy on Indonesia. In recent years this has all but disappeared as a focus of the magazine, not because the Australia-Indonesia relationship is any less vital for both countries, but because its editors, writers and readers are no longer necessarily Australian. As has long been established, Indonesians are far less concerned about the relationship between the two countries.13

People and Processes Since 1983 II has gone through three or four significant operational shifts. The first came relatively early, as the not-for-profit magazine struggled to find its financial feet. Max Lane was sole editor of the first five editions of the magazine before an editorial committee was formed, with Lane as a leading member. Records of minutes from the early years of IRIP show that, without doubt, this decision related to access to adequate resources to pay an editor, and simply sharing the load.14 For the magazine’s first year, IRIP had raised funds to cover Lane’s living expenses and costs plus the estimated cost of its publication. Despite readers’ early enthusiasm for the magazine, its founders realised once it was underway that they had not fully accounted for the production workload and expense, and financial pressures became evident early on. The five issues of the magazine that Lane edited alone were significant and succeeded in introducing readers to the range of themes and types of stories II would make its focus. Lane’s approach to the New Order regime was far from gentle, and the first issue featured a photo of one of Indonesia’s most powerful and feared military men, Benny Moerdani, with the heading ‘Climate of Fear’. It certainly caught the attention of policy-makers in both Australia and Indonesia, as did its high production values, which belied the fact that it had very little financial backing. Walsh later reflected that putting Moerdani on the cover meant that ‘The sceptics immediately concluded that, though the magazine looked good, 12 ‘Inside

Indonesia: vision and mission’, . See, eg, Goenawan Mohamad (1979). 14  IRIP files, Monash Archives, MON 1169, (1982–84), 07/23/001. 13 

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underneath it was just another solidarity rag, a wolf in lamb’s clothing’, which took some time to shift (Walsh 2007). For the dissident movement in Indonesia it sent a clear message about the magazine’s anti-New Order position and its fearlessness. The topics covered in those first editions are in great part echoed three decades later. There were profiles of people in Indonesian NGOs and articles about organisations for workers’ rights, legal rights and so on. Lane introduced a permanent section called ‘Free Spaces’ that introduced Indonesian organisations working for change. There was poetry, analysis of Indonesian politics and a focus on dissent, women, and the urban poor, as well as a critical reading of Australia’s approach to Indonesia. After Lane’s first editorial, in which he outlined the aims and mission statement of the magazine—‘to bring Indonesia alive for Australians’ (Lane 1983)—his next four editorials pulled no punches, attacking the Indonesian state and military, as well as Australia’s foreign policy and those supporting it. With the shift from the sixth edition to editing by committee, the editorial became less prominent and less opinionated. The committee restated II’s mission to bring Australians a new perspective on Indonesia: Many otherwise concerned people have a mental block about Indonesia. What is it that turns them off? … The problem would seem to be that many cannot find anything positive to relate to … One should not conclude that Indonesia is a thriving democracy. It is not … But neither is Indonesia a faceless society empty of drive and ideas. It is on this level we believe people can relate. (Inside Indonesia 1985)

These early editions featured articles under the thematic headings, Politics and Human Rights, Social Conditions and Economy, Australia-Indonesia Relations, The People’s Culture, and Free Spaces. For many years, the magazine included a substantial section dedicated to clippings translated from Indonesian newspapers, as well as pieces from English language news agencies and other sources. From 1985 to 1996, Walsh coordinated the editorial team, and he and Waddingham and their loyal volunteers published the next 40 editions of the magazine as a labour of love. Walsh’s work at ACFOA gave II a physical ‘home’, first in Gertrude Street and then in George Street, Fitzroy, but volunteers who helped mail out every edition collected for that task at the Northcote home of Walsh and his wife and II volunteer, Anne Keogh. The editorial committee of Walsh, Waddingham and Christine Wheeler was augmented by a team of consultants who were also regular contributors to the magazine and included postgraduate students from Monash University, Krishna Sen, David Hill, David Bourchier, academics Keith Foulcher and Helen Jarvis, and journalist Robin Osborne. Edition 10, issued in April 1987, shows the magazine entering a period of consolidation, with its contributors reflecting not only the tone and range of II themes but also the growing strengths of its editorial cohort. Its lead article by David Hill on the general elections has the title ‘Whose festival of democracy?’ and it carries a profile of the dissident Petition of 50 group by David Bourchier, an article by Robert Cribb on the politics of conservation of Java’s forests, and a profile of women in Javanese theatre by Barbara Hatley. Two further articles focus on the Australia-Indonesia relationship. One by editorial committee

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member and student, Brian Brunton, is a report on the ANU’s Indonesia Update, a critique of Australian academic discourse on Indonesia. The other, by Michael Leigh and Lyn Fisher from the University of Sydney, surveys the limited and hostile coverage of Australia in the Indonesian press. In subsequent editions, dissident poetry and stories about workers’ rights, the mass killings of communist and suspected communist sympathiser in 1965–66 and the social impact of forest fires sit alongside political analysis in equal weight. This successful operational model continued for another five years, during which there was very little change in membership of the editorial board and its team of consultants. An increasing number of contributors were Australians living in Indonesia for work or study, as well as activists who sought out II. A former Australian volunteer working in Indonesia and, later, First Lady of East Timor, Kirsty Sword, recalls how, as a university student in Melbourne, she was first introduced to the ‘real’ Indonesia through II and its community of NGO people, activists and scholars in Indonesia, Australia and around the world (Sword Gusmão 2003: 29).

On Australia-Indonesia Relations: Issues and People From the beginning, II’s founders made explicit their aim to bring about better understanding between Indonesians and Australians and the relationship between the two countries. The mission statement adopted in 1983 makes clear too that achieving this aim need not involve governments, but could be done through connecting people and organisations. The bilateral relationship was on II’s list of themes regularly covered in each edition and was regularly commented on in the editorial but articles on this topic were rarely prominent. In the first 31 editions of the magazine published between 1983 and 1991, 26 articles featured analysis and critique of Australia’s policy on Indonesia, which was comparable to the number on political analysis (33), the environment (22), and aid and development (11). From its first edition, II tackled head-on the problem of getting Australians to see Indonesia beyond Bali (Foulcher 1983: 32–34; Goodfellow 1993: 4–6). By the mid-1990s, this content was becoming less conspicuous and mostly reactive, for example in articles responding to a new diplomatic appointment, or related to Australians in Indonesia (Inside Indonesia 1995; Maresh 1995). From its earliest editions, II regularly covered issues of particular sensitivity within the Australia-Indonesia relationship, often in ways that neither the Indonesian press nor even the Australian media could have done. West Papua (Irian Jaya) featured extensively in the magazine in the 1980s, largely due to the contribution of highly experienced journalist and editorial committee member, Robin Osborne, who provided a steady stream of rare reportage and commentary. In 1986, two Australian publications on the Soeharto family and its wealth brought the bilateral relationship to a new crisis point. David Jenkin’s article for the Sydney Morning Herald on 10 April, ‘After Marcos, now for the Soeharto billions’,

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saw him blacklisted. It also coincided with the banning of Australian Indonesianist Richard Robison’s book Indonesia: The Rise of Capital. The furore over these publications reportedly spurred Indonesia to cancel Australian air force landing rights in its territory (The Age 1986). In response, II’s May 1986 editorial reminded its readers, ‘such displays of official displeasure are not aberrations or temporary lapses reserved for Australians’ (Inside Indonesia 1986). It went on to cover the recent bans of two novels by Pramoedya Ananta Toer. The December 1986 edition ran ‘The rise of capital’ as its cover story, a review by David Bourchier of David Jenkin’s Cornell Modern Indonesia Project monograph, Soeharto and his Generals, and analysis of the Pramoedya book bans. As the founders had intended, although articles on East Timor were regularly included in the magazine, the annexation was dealt with as one among various stories of New Order repression.15 In late 1991, II decided to ‘hold the presses’ and run an entire special edition on the 12 November 1991 killings at Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, resulting in the publication for the first time of more than one or two articles on Timor in a single edition. The killings struck very close to the heart of the II community, not just because of its strong connections with the Timor cause. As the editors of the special edition explained: This issue is dedicated to Kamal Bamadhaj and the East Timorese who were massacred by Indonesian troops … Death the great leveller makes no distinctions … We felt compelled to single out Kamal by name because … we knew him personally as a colleague and friend. (Inside Indonesia 1991)

Kamal, who was half-Malaysian and a New Zealand citizen, was a member of the magazine’s Sydney committee. An Indonesian language student at the University of New South Wales, he was in Indonesia and East Timor with a Community Aid Abroad team, led by Bob Muntz, to identify project assistance needs. Kamal was near the Santa Cruz cemetery when he was shot, and he later died from severe blood loss. This edition, an extraordinary collection of eyewitness accounts and analysis, exposed the pressures that II, as a quarterly magazine run by volunteers, was increasingly feeling, particularly in a period when events in Indonesian politics were moving at such a rapid pace. The editors apologised for the delay in the magazine’s release, explaining that, ‘Three of us who happened to be in Jakarta at the time were immediately called on to mentor, advise and network. In Australia, many of us have spent countless hours translating, assisting the media, conferencing with NGOs and politicians’ (Inside Indonesia 1991). The magazine’s people (academics, journalists, Indonesia-watchers) were increasingly also resource people for NGOs and the press in both Australia and Indonesia. In early 1996, as Australia headed towards the election of the first Coalition government since the magazine began, the unique or ‘special’ friendship formed between Prime Minister Keating and President Soeharto, and the Security Agreement signed by the two countries in December 1995, were on the public 15 East Timor featured as the cover story only twice (No 20, October 1989 and No 25, December 1990) before the December 1991 special issue.

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agenda. During this period, analysis of Australia’s Indonesia policy did not feature prominently in II, indicative of the extent to which its priorities had shifted since its early years. An exception was the March 1996 editorial, which described the policy to engage Indonesia and the region more broadly as ‘more like a hesitant nudge’ than a push. In this, his first edition as editor, Gerry van Klinken’s tone is strikingly similar to that of Lane’s first edition: At Inside Indonesia, on the contrary, we never hesitated in our push into Asia these last 12 years. To us, Indonesia is more than a repressive regime, and more than a high-profit, risk-taking economy. It is a society—trite perhaps but true—of nearly 200 million fellow human beings … We see them as people with self-respect, trying against the odds to win a little control over their destiny. (Inside Indonesia 1996)

The same edition included a powerful piece by an Australian recently returned after living in Indonesia for three years, containing accounts of imprisonment and torture from his East Timorese friends and tales of horror from inside Timor (King 1996). By now, as the magazine’s founders had hoped, its mostly Australian readers were familiar with the poetry of Rendra and Widji Thukul, Arief Budiman’s activism, Goenawan Mohamad’s commentary and the work of Todung Mulya Lubis’ Legal Aid Institute. Profiling key individuals from the democratisation movement, be they from the arts, intelligentsia or NGOs, was an important feature of the magazine at this time. It made these people well-known in the Australian households of II readers and gave Indonesia an alternative face to that of Soeharto and the Indonesian military. From the outset, one of II’s main goals was to serve as a megaphone for Indonesians speaking out against the New Order authoritarian regime. With very limited outlets for open dissent in the pre-internet age, and living in a tightly controlled media system, dissidents and opposition groups found in Inside Indonesia a strong advocate for their causes. Following a further tightening of press freedom in June 1994 when magazines Tempo, DeTIK and Editor were shut down (Inside Indonesia 1994: 2–6), Tempo magazine’s director, Goenawan Mohamad, already a friend of II, became a regular contributor, as did fellow journalist Stanley Adi Prasetyo. The magazine republished a report critical of the Minister responsible for the bans and in its editorial reminded its readers in Australia and elsewhere that ‘Indonesia’s NGO people, in the women’s movement, Muslim, writing and other circles, need support. It is timely to remind our readers that one of II’s roles is to serve as their vehicle outside Indonesia’ (Inside Indonesia 1995).

Transitions Analysts of Australia’s foreign policy on Indonesia saw the potential for significant improvements in the bilateral relationship after the fall of the New Order, which ‘lessened the tension in Australian policy between the pursuit of close relations and

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the promotion of human rights’ (Dutton 2003). Rather than optimism, however, a sense of foreboding took hold at the magazine as the Asian economic crisis hit Indonesia in late 1997 and 1998. In the April–June 1998 edition, Goenawan Mohamad and Ben Anderson looked at ‘what if?’ scenarios, imagining the still seemingly impossible prospect of life after Soeharto (Goenawan Mohamad 1998: 5; Anderson 1998: 16–17). And when the day of Soeharto’s resignation did come there was little time for euphoria or celebration. Publication time-lags meant that the first comprehensive coverage of Soeharto’s fall was not until the October–December 1998 issue, in which the tone remains cautious: ‘we celebrate the transition … but we are also holding our breath for the dark days to come’. The emphasis was on Indonesia’s uncertain future and, mindful of its mostly Australian readership, the editorial calls for generosity: ‘Now is the time for people … to respond compassionately. I like to think we are part of a movement within Australian civil society prepared to look beyond its own problems’ (Klinken 1998). The edition includes political analysis of the last days of Soeharto, the student movement that brought him down, and eyewitness accounts from Jakarta, including shocking reports on the mass rapes in the May riots. The next edition picks up where the previous one left off, expressing concern about the impact of the economic and political crisis on ordinary Indonesians, and joining those who held ‘no illusions that a transition to democracy under crisis conditions will be easy’ (Klinken 1999a). Reflecting the push to seek a renewal of Australia’s foreign policy on Indonesia now that tensions caused by the New Order were no longer in play, an article by Philip Eldridge on Australia’s aid contribution to Indonesia calls for an emphasis on governance and human rights programs and on non-government initiatives as alternatives to state aid. The overall editorial tone in the first issues after the New Order is restrained, measured and concerned. Inside Indonesia’s expert Indonesia-watchers observed a nation that had been tightly held in the New Order’s grip begin to unravel, violently in some cases. As van Klinken writes in the April–June 1999 editorial, ‘Frankly, as we began preparing this edition ahead of Indonesia’s first democratic elections in 44 years, I expected there to be more joy and optimism … yet there is more anxiety than euphoria … it was naïve to think that all would be rosy’ (Klinken 1999b). With the New Order gone, even though the regime and its legacy were still to be analysed and understood, there is a sense that the II team were grappling with the new situation and where to focus their attention. The lens shifted globally in search of answers to the appropriate role for international aid, and Western accountability for the economic crisis, but the magazine paid equal attention to understanding the communal and ethnic violence in places like Maluku (Winn 1999; Klinken 2000). In early 1999, for a brief moment, II allowed itself a rare glimmer of hope with the upcoming legislative elections in June and the independence referendum in East Timor in August. The subsequent horrific violence perpetrated by Indonesianbacked militias meant, however, that celebration of East Timor’s independence vote was muted in editorials, and there is no mention of Australia’s role in

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INTERFET and later UNTAET, and very little commentary about the AustraliaIndonesia relationship. The lead article in the first edition for 2000 is, however, less restrained. Written by outspoken critic of Australia’s policy on East Timor, Richard Tanter, it is a stinging rebuke of Australia as a racist, parochial and hypocritical nation and calls for Australia to realign its relationship with Indonesia on the basis of shared transnational interests (Tanter 2000). Signalling yet another shift in the magazine’s organisation, the next edition is dedicated entirely to Aceh, launching the introduction of themed editions, which continue until the present day. The magazine reached another milestone in this period—its fifteenth anniversary—and it became available online for the first time, and thus able to reach a new Indonesian readership.

Post-New Order, Independent East Timor and a Changing of the Guard An interview with leading human rights lawyer and Kontras founder, Munir, who was assassinated by government agents on 7 September 2004, is the lead article in the July–September 2000 issue. He describes how the New Order remains a force in Indonesia two years after it was toppled. He explains how pro-democracy forces have become ‘part of the system’, which means that those who promote democratisation now are from new emerging groups with ‘a much better perspective on democracy than those who just focused on Soeharto’ (Munir 2000). As if proscribing a post-New Order mandate for II as well as for Indonesia’s democracy movement, Munir’s piece is a searing reminder of the job still ahead for Indonesian human rights and democracy at the turn of the century. In the same edition, articles about local political struggles confirm Munir’s analysis that New Order structures in the bureaucracy, if not in politics, remain deeply entrenched. In the post-reformasi era, II continued to give priority to Indonesian voices in the magazine. Now free to speak out on previously taboo subjects, these voices and the range of topics multiplied. II included articles featuring Indonesian writers and activists working on issues such as 1965, political prisoners, West Papua and Aceh. From 2000 onwards the magazine’s themes—arts and activists, gender politics, the environment and West Papua—signalled the direction in which II’s concerns and contributions to discussion and debate inside and outside Indonesia were turning. The July–September 2001 edition (No 67, with a total of 17 articles) was dedicated to West Papua, and the editor hoped it might be a ‘first guide to action’ on Papua. It was perhaps the most ambitious edition so far, in terms of its size and single-issue focus. Gerry van Klinken’s last edition as the magazine’s editor was No 71 (July–September 2002), although he continued as Coordinating Editor for several more years. Now that East Timor was officially an independent nation,

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the edition focused on understanding the new nation outside Indonesia, as a post-colonial story. Long-time East Timor activist, Rob Wesley-Smith emphatically rebutted the notion that Australia should play the role of hero in the story of East Timor’s final liberation after the violence following the 1999 independence vote: ‘Howard now pretends Australia has always been East Timor’s best mate’ (Wesley-Smith 2002). Prompted by a need to understand why he and his contemporaries in Australia knew so very little about the 1965– 66 mass killings in Indonesia, Richard Tanter provides a significant piece on Australian news coverage of them, echoing similar investigations by Indonesians to uncover the truth about 1965 (Tanter 2002). In the magazine’s twentieth year II reported a significant event in Indonesia’s history with direct and profound impact on its relationship with Australia. The April-June 2003 edition was dedicated to the Bali bombing of October 2002, with analysis of domestic political responses, Islamic responses and the recovery in Bali. It also carried articles from an Australian perspective, including one by international security expert, David Wright Neville on the failings of the Australia–Indonesia intelligence cooperation, and an opinion piece from Justice Marcus Einfeld, Chair of Australian Legal Resources International, calling for Indonesia and all regional leaders to defend against militancy and terrorism by promoting local traditions of tolerance (Neville 2003; Einfeld 2003). Einfeld declares the vilification of Muslims in Australia following the bombings ‘a disgrace’ and reminds that other religions are similarly invoked in the name of violence. The choice of image for the front cover, a Muslim woman (bearing a striking resemblance to then President Megawati) offering her condolences at the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, is a deliberate, though subtle, nod to the magazine’s Australian readers. The twentieth anniversary edition of October–December 2003 was edited by founding editor, Max Lane. He took the opportunity to ask questions about the nature of Australia’s relationship with Indonesia that had not been addressed so directly in II for many years, and about the purpose of the magazine he helped to establish 20 years earlier. In his article Lane renews his earlier call for solidarity with the Indonesian people in their struggle: Initially, in the 1980s, Inside Indonesia campaigned, with an exclamation mark, to spread the views and activities of those fighting Suharto. That was its particular form of engagement. Today, I think we need a new form of campaigning … to find … an answer to the crisis of survival faced by Indonesian society. (Lane 2003)

Lane’s vision for II was as a hub or repository for the ideas and work of civil society organisations and ‘struggle groups’ in Indonesia, linking them with an Australian and international activist network, that went beyond ‘observing and commenting, even from the perspective of sympathy with issues of social justice’, which he thought would not be enough in the years ahead. As inspiring as Lane’s message of solidarity and action was, it is quite clear in the very next article in the edition that such a task was simply impossible for II in its present state. Reflecting on the history of the magazine, van Klinken revealed that, a year earlier, the board had been very close to shutting the magazine down: ‘One view within the board was that

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Soeharto was gone and East Timor was free, maybe the mag had served its purpose’ (Klinken 2003). Australian interest in Indonesia had declined, as reflected in fewer enrolments in language classes and in stagnant subscriptions to II. Nevertheless, views about the continuing need for voices on Indonesia like II’s prevailed and the necessary funding to continue was found. Gerry van Klinken’s departure as full-time editor coincided with the exit of several long-standing members of the board, including Pat Walsh, Krishna Sen and David Bourchier. New members joined and there was a change in the board’s membership to one largely comprising Australian academics. The editor’s chair was vacant and previous sources of funding to pay an editor were no longer available, so a new structure was sought. Initially it was planned that the editorship would rotate among four people each year, but a system of guest editors evolved. This meant that the final 18 print editions of II, from the last of 2002 to the second in 2007, were each the responsibility of different editors—a system that is more or less still in place today. The injection of new voices bringing different specialisations and emphases to each edition had significant and lasting consequences. II’s editorial voice was no longer uniform or particularly strong, and the magazine would not be as responsive to current events as it had been in the past.

The New Online Order Further financial pressures in 2007 meant that II was no longer sustainable as a print magazine, so the board made the decision to publish online only. Over the years, subscribers, of whom there were an average of about 2,000 through the 1990s and early 2000s, had only ever contributed some of what was needed to stay afloat; external funding and donations were always necessary. By sheer tenacity, frugality and generosity the magazine survived for 89 print editions, far exceeding the expectations of those involved in the beginning. The eighty-ninth edition of April–June 2007 was the last print edition to be published and distributed.16 With the magazine already online, albeit it in a fairly basic form, and with the writing on the wall for many small publications like II, it was inevitable that the printed version would be abandoned. It was a difficult period for those closely linked to the magazine, who worked intensively to create a new platform that II’s loyal readers would recognise and enjoy. There was also some anticipation of the potential of a web format for the exchange of views and discussion and the inclusion of more immediate or up-to-date articles, although the structure of the content initially remained largely unchanged, apart from the weekly publication of an ‘off theme’ article.

16  In early 2007, IRIP surveyed subscribers to determine their preference for a print or online version of II. 74% of respondents said they preferred print and offered to pay increased subscription fees and/or make donations, but the numbers of engaged readers and potential donors was very small.

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II faced new challenges online. The magazine was no longer the only Englishlanguage publication on Indonesia, and found itself sharing an increasingly crowded platform with news agencies and blogs working on a 24-hour news cycle that demanded more and more content. In the final print edition of II, van Klinken reflected on the origins of the magazine and its next steps: ‘Information is everywhere, increasingly in English. But the mainstream media remains far too narrow’ (Klinken 2007). This narrowness, he explained, was reflected in the Australian media’s focus on terrorism, which was shared by the Australian government, but he argued that the II community still had a role as a counterpoint to this parochialism. At the beginning of its new life online, the magazine’s editorial gaze, rather than shifting away from the Australia-Indonesia relationship as a topic of interest, lifted to look beyond the bi-national context and to imagine Indonesia and II readers more broadly. Interestingly, at no stage in the magazine’s transitions in format, editorial structure or personnel was there any discussion of rewriting IRIP’s founding vision and mission, with its commitment to improving understanding of Indonesia and Indonesians among Australians and its explicit aim to actively promote mutual cooperation between the peoples of Australia and Indonesia. In the decade since 2007, the online version of the magazine has been through a number of iterations and the organisation’s structure has changed again. The guest editor model remains, with sustained input and oversight from a core team of editors—all still volunteers. The two most significant changes, however, have been external. In early 2010 new platforms were introduced for the publication of academic commentary in particular, including the Melbourne-based The Conversation, New Matilda, and Eureka Street and specifically on Southeast Asia, the ANU’s New Mandala. Their entry onto the scene forced the II board to consider its next steps. The online platform offered potential for more blog-style content, with moderated discussions and other options. When such possibilities were first discussed in late 2011, II had set them aside because of a lack of resources to support inviting realtime commentary on its site. The weekly articles alone had imposed a significant burden on the editors responsible for this section, Ed Aspinall and Michele Ford. To maintain a reputable, high quality blog or discussion site would require almost fulltime attention, to which the small editorial team of volunteers could not commit. It was agreed that II’s strength lay in its editorial rigour, measured and informed commentary and research-based content—all elements that needed time. Meanwhile, Australian academics, who had become mainstays of II’s regular writer cohort over many years, were now contributing to other online publications and not to II, and there was some concern about what losing these writers might mean for the magazine. Furthermore, another significant development was also coming to light. The website’s analytical tools revealed a significant change in the magazine’s readership. In its print form, the subscriber base of about 2,000 was almost all Australian, with a small number in other countries around the world and in Indonesia. With the shift online only, however, the readership changed considerably. Between June 2016 and July 2017, II’s website recorded 260,000 users,

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of whom 33% are in Indonesia, around 15% in the US, 12% are in Australia and the remaining third spread around the world. Moreover, just as there have been increased opportunities for Australians to publish their Indonesia-related work elsewhere, II has published the work of more non-Australian authors, including a steadily rising number of Indonesians.17

Conclusion While Inside Indonesia took a highly critical stance on hot topics … the people who worked at the magazine, and others I met through my involvement, all had their own unique love affair with Australia’s beguiling northern neighbour. Indonesia and Indonesians were never the enemy. The enemy was repression and ignorance, including the ignorance of our own Australian community about the conditions in Indonesian society. (Sword 2003: 29)

Since it was established in the early 1980s, II has consistently maintained its key thematic focus on stories about Indonesia’s people, politics, human rights, environment, arts and culture, and solidarity with their struggles for a better life. In the past decade or more, the magazine has moved, as indeed it should have, from being a publication about Indonesia for, and largely by, Australians, to a magazine with a worldwide audience and writer profile. What is under consideration more than 33 years later, is the extent to which II should hold onto its founding profile and mission to ‘bring Indonesia alive for Australians’ and to contribute to improving mutual cooperation between Australians and Indonesians.18 This potentially opens a conversation that will continue for some time, but the question of II’s relationship with its still important and foundational Australian readership is more immediate. In recent years, polling of Australian attitudes to Indonesia by the Lowy Institute and others make clear that in the three decades since the IRIP founders declared their frustrations at Australia’s ignorance and negativity about Indonesia, we have not come very far at all. A 2013 poll commissioned by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Australian Government 2013) found that 30% of survey respondents were not aware that Bali was a part of Indonesia, and in Lowy’s 2017 poll, only 27% knew that Indonesia is a democracy.19 At the same time, the number of Australians visiting Indonesia (at least Bali) each year is growing, reaching one million in 2016–2017. Despite anxiety and some fear about the idea of Indonesia, most overwhelmingly agree that it is a good idea to understand Indonesia better.

17  In 2015, 60% of writers for II editions, and one third of writers for its weekly articles, were Indonesian. 18 For a comprehensive examination of people-to-people connections between Australia and ­Indonesia, see Missbach and Purdey (2015). 19  This was down seven points since the question was last asked in the 2015 poll. (Lowy Institute 2017).

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Research carried out by EY Sweeney for the Australia Indonesia Centre in 2015–2016 echoes the long-term trends determined in polls on Australia’s feelings about Indonesia and points to the fact that overall general ignorance is the single greatest obstacle to more positive attitudes (Sweeney, AIC 2016). The results of this research testify to the continuing importance for the Australia– Indonesia relationship of the work of II over three decades (two generations). Despite the diplomatic reality that crises from time to time in the bilateral relationship damage or set the relationship back, decades of attitudinal polling indicate that they have little impact on how the Australian public feels overall about Indonesia (Sobocinska 2015). Perceptions, based on ignorance, remain constant; although negative and anxious, these perceptions also indicate an awareness of the need to know more. In Indonesia, the longevity of II and its commitment to the Indonesian people, rather than to the priorities of either state, have given it a special status among many English-reading Indonesians, including, increasingly, younger Indonesians born during or after the New Order who crave alternative versions of their history. In the II archive they find the voices of dissent that were silenced in Indonesia during the New Order. In a news-hungry and hyper-political democratic Indonesia, they find in current issues of II stories about the poor, the workers, human rights claims, and history that emphasise social justice above politics. If II chooses to take it on, there remains the task, perhaps, for II to work harder to fulfil its mandate to shift Australian views on Indonesia. As it strengthened as a community of regular readers, contributors, and experts, was the more casual and comparatively uninformed reader neglected? The editorial in the December 1985 issue about how Australians see Indonesia, rings eerily true today: They see Indonesia as militarily aggressive, and feel threatened. Or they see Indonesia as a tightly-run, top-down, state monolith surrounded by keep out signs. Either way, Indonesia appears prickly, hostile, inaccessible and unattractive … Inside Indonesia exists to challenge this partial and alienating perception of Indonesia. (Inside Indonesia 1985)

The magazine is at an exciting moment in its history, when it can look back with some pride and satisfaction at its body of work. What will emerge as its mission for the next ten years remains to be written.

References Age, The (1983) ‘Indons Wooing Fretilin: MP’, 2 August, 8. Age, The (1986) ‘Jakarta Ban on RAAF Widens Row’, 5 September, 1. ALP (Australian Labor Party) (1982) ‘Platform, Constitution & Rules as Approved by the 35th National Conference’ (Canberra, ALP). Anderson, Ben (1998) ‘A Javanese King talks of his End’, Inside Indonesia, No 54, April–June, 16–17. Aspinall, Edward (2005) Opposing Soeharto: Compromise, Resistance, and Regime Change in Indonesia (Stanford Calif, Stanford University Press).

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Aspinall, Edward (2012) ‘The Politics of Studying Indonesian Politics’ in Jemma Purdey (ed), Knowing Indonesia (Clayton, Vic: Monash University Publishing, 2012), 53–74. Australia. Cabinet (1983) ‘Cabinet Submission 12—Australian Policy on ­Indonesia—East Timor—Decisions 93/DER and 116’, 23–29 March, National Archives of Australia (NAA): A13977, 12. Australian Government (2013) ‘Australian Attitudes towards Indonesia: A DFATcommissioned Newspoll Report’ (Canberra, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade), . Canberra Times (1983) ‘Journalists Allowed into Timor’, 26 July, 1. Crouch, Harold (1978) The Army and Politics in Indonesia (Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press). Dutton, David (2003) ‘Human Rights Diplomacy’ in Peter Edwards and David Goldsworthy (eds), Facing North: A Century of Australian Engagement with Asia, vol 2 (Carlton South Vic, Melbourne University Press and Department of ­Foreign Affairs and Trade). Einfeld, Marcus (2003) ‘A Moderate Majority’, Inside Indonesia, No 74, April–June, 24. Fawzi, Fadli and Bahrawi, Nazry (nd) ‘An Interview with Max Lane’, Asymptote, . Feith, Herb (1974) ‘Statement from Herb Feith’ 1(3) Indonesia Bulletin 2, October. Forbes, Cameron (1983) ‘Timor: Hard Light on the Truth’, The Age, 19 August, 11. Foulcher, Keith (1983) ‘Another side of Bali’, Inside Indonesia, No 1, November, 32. Goenawan Mohamad, ‘How to Love a Country in a Time of Crisis’, Inside ­Indonesia, No 54, April–June, 5. Goodfellow, Rob (1993) ‘Ignorant and Hostile: Australian Perceptions of ­Indonesia’, Inside Indonesia, No 36, September, 4–6. Hadiwinata Bob S (2012) ‘Contending Perspectives in the Australian Academy: A view from Indonesia’ in Jemma Purdey (ed), Knowing Indonesia (Clayton, Vic: Monash University Publishing), 77–96. Henry, Iain (2014) ‘Unintended Consequences: An Examination of Australia’s ‘Historic Policy Shift’ on East Timor’ 68(1) Australian Journal of International Affairs 52. Hill, David T (1994) The Press in New Order Indonesia (Nedlands WA, University of Western Australia Press). Inside Indonesia (1995) ‘The Mantiri Debacle’, No 44, September, 3–5. Inside Indonesia (1985) ‘Inside This Issue’, No 6 (December 1985), 1. Inside Indonesia (1986) ‘Inside This Issue’, No 7, May, 1 Inside Indonesia (1991) ‘In This Issue’, No 29, December, 1. Inside Indonesia (1994) ‘Muzzling the Indonesian Press’, No 40, September, 2–6. Inside Indonesia (1995) ‘In This Issue’, No 42, March, 1 Inside Indonesia (1996) ‘In This Issue: Australia’s Push into Asia’, No 46, March, 1. Kalidjernih, Freddy (2008) ‘Australian Indonesia-specialists and Debates on West Papua’, 62 Australian Journal of International Affairs 72. King, Arthur (1996) ‘Antithesis of Justice’, Inside Indonesia, No 46, March, 9.

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Klinken, Gerry van (1998) ‘Some Solidarity Please’, Inside Indonesia, No 56, ­October–December, 2. Klinken, Gerry van (1999a) ‘Globalisation Roadkill’, Inside Indonesia, No 57, ­January–March, 2. Klinken, Gerry van (1999b) ‘Never Again’, Inside Indonesia, No 58, April–June, 2. Klinken, Gerry van (2000) ‘What Caused the Ambon Violence?’, Inside Indonesia, No 60, October–December, 15. Klinken, Gerry van (2003) ‘Twenty Candles for Inside Indonesia’, Inside Indonesia, No 76, October–December, 17. Klinken, Gerry van (2007) ‘Looking Back …’, Inside Indonesia, No 89, April–June, 3. Lane, Max (1983) ‘Bringing Indonesia Alive: Editorial’, Inside Indonesia, No 1, 1. Lane, Max (2003) ‘Political Engagement’, Inside Indonesia, No 76, October–December, 14. Legge, John (1979) Summary of Proceedings, Seminar on Aspects of the AustraliaIndonesia Relationship, 18-20 October, Canberra. Lowy Institute (2017) ‘Poll 2017’, June, www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/ 2017-lowy-institute-poll. Mackay, Leigh (1983) ‘Indonesians Confident over MP’s Timor Findings’, The Age, 5 August, 7. Maresh, Denise (1995) ‘Who killed Ben Maresh?’ Inside Indonesia, No 43, June, 8–9. Missbach, Antje and Purdey, Jemma (eds) (2015) Linking People: Connections and Encounters between Australians and Indonesians (Berlin, Regiospectra). Mohamad, Goenawan (1979) ‘Perceptions of the Bilateral Relationship’, ­Proceedings of the Seminar on Aspects of the Australia-Indonesia Relationship, 18–20 October, Canberra. Munir (2000) ‘The Slow Birth of Democracy’, Inside Indonesia, No 63, July–­September, 4–5. Neville, David Wright (2003) ‘Taken by Surprise’, Inside Indonesia, No 74, April–June, 15–16. Purdey, Jemma (2011) From Vienna to Yogyakarta: The Life of Herb Feith (Sydney, UNSW Press). Purdey, Jemma (2012) ‘Morally Engaged: Herb Feith and the Study of Indonesia’ in Jemma Purdey (ed), Knowing Indonesia (Clayton Vic, Monash University Publishing). Salla, Michael E (1995) ‘Australian Foreign Policy and East Timor’ 49 Australian Journal of International Affairs, 207. Sobocinska, Agnieszka (2015) ‘Australia-Indonesia Attitudes Impact Study­Historical’, Australia Indonesia Centre, unpublished. Sweeney, EY and AIC (2016) ‘Australia Indonesia Perceptions Report’, August, www.aicperceptionsreport.com/. Sword Gusmão, Kirsty (2003) A woman of Independence: A Story of Love and the Birth of a New Nation (Sydney, Pan Macmillan Australia). Tanter, Richard (2000) ‘After Fear, before Justice’, Inside Indonesia, No 61, January–March, 4.

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Tanter, Richard (2002) ‘Witness denied’, Inside Indonesia, No 71, July–September, 28. Tapsell, Ross (2015) By-lines, Balibo, Bali Bombings: Australian Journalists in ­Indonesia (North Melbourne Vic, Australian Scholarly Publishing). Tapsell, Ross and Eidenfalk, J (2013) ‘Australian Reporting from East Timor 1975–1999: Journalists as Agents of Change’ 59 Australian Journal of Politics and ­History, 576. Tiffen, Rodney (2000) ‘New Order Regime Style and the Australian Media’ in Damien Kingsbury, Eric Loo and Patricia Payne (eds), Foreign Devils and Other Journalists (Clayton Vic, Monash Asia Institute), Waddingham, John (1984) (East Timor: How Indonesia mis-led the Australian ­Parliamentary delegation. Timor Archives (CHART), . Waddingham, John (2013) ‘Inside Indonesia: Conception and Birth’, Inside Indonesia, No 112, April-June, . Walsh, Pat (1984) ‘ALP Conference: A Requiem for Timor?’, Inside Indonesia No 3, October, 18. Walsh, Pat (2007) ‘An Audacious Project’, Inside Indonesia, No 90, October-­December, . Wesley-Smith, Rob (2002) ‘Australian Treachery, Again’, Inside Indonesia, No 71, July–September, 11. Winn, Philip (1999) ‘Banda Burns’, Inside Indonesia, No 60, October–December, 17.

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19 Friendship, Partnership, Action: Women and the Bilateral Relationship1 VIRGINIA HOOKER

The focus of this chapter is very specific: the relationship between Indonesia and Australia, expressed through the activities of women from each nation between 1942 and the early twenty-first century, performed in the spirit of ­strengthening understanding between them. Many Indonesian and Australian women have made outstanding contributions to fields such as research, the arts, business, ­diplomacy, politics, human rights, good governance, interfaith dialogue, education, and gender equality in their own nations. Their contributions may not, however, have been consciously directed to improving bilateral relations, or transferring knowledge between the two nations.2 Regretfully, unless their work is framed specifically in terms of the bilateral relationship, it has not been possible to include it in the chapter. The relationship started in 1942, when more than 5,000 Indonesians arrived in Australia. Their arrival was unexpected and unplanned and their presence provided the first significant twentieth century contact between white Australians and the indigenous peoples of the Netherlands East Indies.3 Dispersed in capital cities and rural towns, men, women and children formed personal relationships for which there was no precedent. When the Pacific War ended in 1945, nearly all

1  This chapter is dedicated to the many unknown Indonesian and Australian women who have reached out to each other through the years. Sometimes just a smile of friendship, or a kind enquiry, has made a difference to individuals and influenced the way they perceive each other and each other’s nations. It is through actions such as these that prejudice is broken down and understanding begins. 2  There are also female academics, diplomats, and others whose professional lives involve deep and extensive contact with Indonesians and Australians. Their work often provides the basis for decisions that affect each nation and provides a vital contribution to analysis and evidence-based policy making, including policies affecting women. 3  Before 1945, the nation now known as Indonesia was the Netherlands East Indies (NEI) and under Dutch colonial rule. Reactions against colonial rule became stronger through the first half of the 20th century, culminating in transfer of sovereignty to the Republic of Indonesia in 1949. The indigenous peoples of the NEI were referring to themselves as ‘Indonesians’ from the late 1920s, so that is the term used here. Regular contact between various peoples from the Indonesian archipelago and indigenous peoples in northern Australia has been ongoing since at least the 18th century.

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these Indonesians were repatriated. However, during the five years they lived in Australia, in a society then framed within the ‘White Australia’ policy, the relationships they formed with Australians influenced official policy and changed the course of individual lives (see Lingard 2010: 277). This was a crucial period for both Indonesians and Australians, a time when the friendships, partnerships and actions described in this chapter began. The contributions of Indonesian and Australian women to the quality and style of the relations between their nations can be best appreciated when placed in their historical and social contexts. The time, place, and events occurring in each nation influenced, but did not determine, the opportunities for contact and the forms that contact could take. Most of the women who encountered difficult periods in the bilateral relationship seem to have felt motivated, rather than constrained, by the challenges. The contexts also indicate the changing position of women in their own societies over the past 70 years. While both men and women have been active in the bilateral relationship they have contributed in different ways. An analysis of how women work in the bilateral context suggests the majority choose one of three mechanisms: informal, personto-person networks; designated ‘associations,’ ‘foundations’ and NGOs; or institutionalised linkages, especially in the fields of education, aid, media and the arts. None of these mechanisms flows directly into national policy-making in either nation. As a result, there is a strong risk that, with generational change, change of government, or unforeseen circumstances, there is, at best, a loss of momentum or, at worst, the breaking of links that women have forged. The results of many of the bilateral contacts made by women may also be so localised, or specific, that they go unrecognised.4 When key individuals are no longer involved, contact might cease, unless there are successors in place. As the material in this chapter shows, even though some of the links initiated by women disappear, they may leave traces in memory or more tangibly, and the work of pioneers can provide the basis for follow-up projects. This chapter is divided into sections or phases, based on six broad historical periods: Phase One

WWII–1950

Initial contacts

Phase Two

1950–1966

Building nationhood

Phase Three

1970–late1980s

Developing Indonesia, developing knowledge

Phase Four

1990–1998

Making commitments, funding, and frameworks

Phase Five

1998–2015

Partnerships

Phase Six

2016–

From now on

4  Wives of partners who hold very senior positions, for example, ambassadors, work extremely hard on behalf of their countries and have considerable influence through press coverage. However, their important, and, it must be said, unpaid, contributions to the bilateral relationship are rarely publicly acknowledged.

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The major social and political changes that happened during these periods provide the context for bilateral contacts and influenced the types of contact that were developed and sustained.

Phase One, WWII–1950: Initial Contacts The Japanese invasion of the Netherlands East Indies in 1942 caused great social and economic upheaval for ordinary Indonesians and the deaths of thousands through forced labour and appalling conditions. Australia entered the war as a nation depleted by WWI and the Great Depression, followed quickly by the shock of the loss of Singapore to the Japanese. Fortunately for the 5,000 Indonesians who were sent to, or sought refuge in, Australia from 1942 to 1946, the Labor government then in power5 was sympathetic to Indonesia’s struggle to resist the return of the Dutch as a colonial power. Australian scholar, Jan Lingard, emphasises that Australia’s support for Indonesia’s independence, signals ‘the genesis of Australia’s engagement with Asia.’ It was also the first time in its history that ‘the ­Australian government had formulated and followed its own [foreign] policy without seeking the approval of the UK government’ (Lingard 2010: 280). Looking back from the first quarter of the twenty-first century, it is difficult to appreciate fully the impact of the support given by some Australian women and men to the Indonesians who spent the years of the Pacific War (1942–1945) in Australia. One of them in particular, Molly Warner (later Molly Bondan), was so committed to assisting Indonesia gain and implement independence that she moved to Indonesia and worked there from 1950 until her death in 1990. In the words of Senator Gareth Evans, ‘[S]he will forever remain a symbol of practical friendship between Australia and Indonesia’ (Hardjono and Warner 1995: iii). Molly’s dedication to providing Indonesians and Australians with information so that they had a basis for better mutual understanding involved her in many activities. She had a keen eye for what was needed at a practical level, a breadth of vision for improving the human condition, and passionate dedication to social justice. Molly became both inspiration and adviser to many Australians who worked in Indonesia. Her background and motivation provide clues about why she was so dedicated to improving bilateral understanding. Born in New Zealand in 1912, her parents moved to Sydney in 1919. There they became interested in the Theosophical Society and the Douglas Social Credit Association. She later wrote that both these philosophies, ‘[C]ontributed to my life in a way I would never have suspected’. They prepared her to appreciate Indonesian attitudes to religion and community responsibilities. When she finished her schooling, she joined her father in his work as a commercial artist. This included producing advertising pamphlets, leaflets, and brochures, skills she was to use all her life (Hardjono and Warner 1995: 7–17). 5 

First under Prime Minister Curtin, who died in 1945, and then under Prime Minister Chifley.

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Molly’s first meeting with Indonesians was after she and a number of likeminded Australians agreed in November 1944 to form an Australia-Indonesia Association in Sydney.6 The ideas behind its establishment were ‘[T]o promote cultural relations with Asia, to arouse in Australia an interest in Asia, to educate Australia about Asia and Asia about Australia, to improve the woeful isolationism of so many Australians.’ To learn more about Indonesia, Molly visited a social club for Indonesians in Sydney. The English-speaking, cosmopolitan Manadonese she met at the club made a deep impression on her: These Indonesians were not only talking about the kind of society I had always idealised, they would soon be in the midst of a revolution to try and get it. I would have been stupid not to have joined in. So I did, and my marriage later on [to Mohammad Bondan] ensured that I would continue to join in (Hardjono and Warner 1995: 18, 23).

Her association with the Indonesian ‘revolutionaries’ in Australia brought Molly and several other Australians to the notice of the Commonwealth Investigation Branch (CIB). Their records reveal that the CIB kept a watch on Molly and members of the Australia-Indonesia Association. She was described in their files as ‘a strong communist and constantly in the company of Indonesians, said to be engaged in assisting the Indonesian Republican Movement, learning Indonesian and training Indonesians in the Communist movement’ (Lingard 2010: 114–5). These assessments are noted here because, as discussed below, similar assertions were later made against other women who also had strong connections across the bilateral divide. In late 1945, when the Japanese surrender ended the Pacific War, the Australian government under Chifley began repatriating the Indonesians in Australia to those parts of the new nation of Indonesia not under Dutch control. The centre of pro-Republican activities in Australia was Brisbane and Molly moved there to assist in any way she could. She worked closely with the leaders of the Central Komite Indonesia Merdeka (Central Committee for Indonesian Independence, CENKIM), writing brochures, letters and weekly newsletters based on information received by radio from Voice of Free Indonesia in Yogyakarta. In October 1946, Molly married Mohamad Bondan, President of CENKIM and, just over a year later, with their new-born son, they were among the last Indonesians to leave Australia for repatriation to Indonesia. Other Australian wives of Indonesians were denied permission by Australian immigration officials to accompany their husbands to Indonesia. Without their husbands, and criticised by some Australians for marrying ‘Asians’, these women— some with children—lived in very difficult conditions. Finally, in April 1948, they were granted permission to join their husbands and were told that they and their

6  Although the first meeting was not until 3 July 1945. The current members of the AIA in Sydney celebrated its 70th anniversary in 2015. A similar association was formed in Melbourne and held its first meeting in August 1945.

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children would be regarded as having Indonesian nationality.7 When they reached Indonesia, several of the wives could not adapt to the conditions they found in their husbands’ villages and returned to Australia. However, the majority stayed and lived for many years with their husbands and children in Indonesia (Lingard 2010: 239–41). The remarkable Melbourne-born Jean Walters, the only woman in the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Dentistry in the early 1940s, has written her own story of her marriage, in 1946, to Ambonese war hero, Julius Tahija (see Tahija 1998). Julius served as Minister for Social Affairs and Information in the government of eastern Indonesia in 1947 and later became highly respected in Indonesian and international business circles. Their family holding company is called Aust-Indo and their sons and grandchildren live and work in Indonesia, while all retain contact with Australia. Throughout her book, Jean emphasises that she and her husband worked always as partners and raised their children to be at home in the cultures of each of their parents. Jan Lingard pays tribute to the Australian women who ‘pioneered’ cross-cultural marriages with Indonesians. She describes them as: The courageous women who crossed racial, cultural and religious barriers to marry Indonesians. In the White Australia of the 1940s, a country with perhaps the most discriminatory racial policy in the world, many of these women faced prejudice from society at large and from their own friends as well as societal and economic hardship as a result of their choice of husband (Lingard 2010: 237).

Before concluding this section about early Australia-Indonesia contacts it is important to recognise that Molly was just one of a larger group of women who worked to help Indonesians in Australia during the war-time years. One of the first to assist Indonesians was Mrs Laura Gapp, a member of the Civil Rights League. She alerted the Australian government to the fact that Indonesians who were Dutch political prisoners (especially from Boven Digul) were being interned in Cowra. This contributed to the investigation that led to their release (Lingard 2010: 90). Other women worked to provide hospitality for the Indonesians. Jan Lingard describes a Ladies Committee formed in Adelaide to entertain Air Force cadets from the NEI whom they were surprised, but not dismayed, to find were Indonesians. She recounts similar stories about other Australians in Melbourne and Brisbane. The Freeman family, for example, said their extended contact with Indonesians in Melbourne enriched their lives in a way they had previously not thought possible in Australia during the late 1940s (Lingard 2010: 31–33). These people-to-people contacts, usually in informal settings, broke through preconceived impressions and made it possible for people to realistically assess each other as individuals. 7  The women had to register themselves as ‘Aliens by Marriage’ and surrender their British nationality, see Lingard 2010: 237.

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Phase Two, 1950–1966: Building Nationhood The 1950s were for both nations, in very different ways, times of post-war reconstruction. Indonesia’s first president, Soekarno, forged a nationalism that had to weld together a vast archipelago and establish Indonesia’s place in its region, including ties with Australia. In late 1949 Australians elected the conservative Liberal Party leader Robert Menzies as Prime Minister and, like Soekarno, he remained in power until 1966. They led young nations whose emerging intellectuals and artists were strongly inspired by the post-war ideologies of egalitarianism and post-colonialism.

Volunteering In late 1948, Molly Bondan began work with the fledgling Indonesian Ministry of Information in both its broadcasting and foreign affairs sections in Yogyakarta. A year later, when the Dutch finally handed sovereignty to Soekarno, Molly, ­Bondan and their son moved to Jakarta. Molly then began 18 years as a member of the Indonesian civil service translating and writing speeches for the President and senior officials. In Australia, students, particularly at the University of Melbourne, were learning about the situations of newly post-colonial Asian nations. Several, including Herb Feith, attended an International Student Service Conference in Bombay in 1950. There they met students from Indonesia who described the gaps left in professional and technical areas in Indonesia after the departure of Dutch experts. Herb had already been in correspondence with Molly Bondan about precisely the same issues (see Purdey 2011: 74–5). Herb and other like-minded students, including Betty Evans (who married Herb in December 1953), realised that filling this gap was something practical that could contribute to assisting the new nation. They began to plan how it could be done. In Betty’s words: This concept of equality and sharing, that of sharing work skills and work experience on the same rates of pay as local Indonesian government servants, became the basis of the [Volunteer Graduate] Scheme. Right from this first beginning, this concept was seen quite deliberately and self-consciously as a ‘New Direction’ for a relationship between Australians and people of Non-Western societies who had recently won independence (Purdey 2011: 75).

Herb, with Molly Bondan as his ‘supervisor,’ had Indonesian approval to work in the Ministry for Information for two years starting in June 1951. The formal intergovernmental agreement for the Volunteer Graduate Scheme (VGS) specified that graduates from Australian universities could work for up to two years as ­Indonesian civil servants on the same wage as Indonesians.8 Between 1951 and 8  Hugh O’Neill’s account of the early days of the Volunteer Graduate Scheme conveys the spirit of the enterprise, see O’Neill 1995: 15–18.

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their marriage in late 1953, Betty worked as a school teacher in Melbourne and in her spare time worked to promote the VGS. In 1954, Betty travelled to Indonesia with Herb and one of Betty’s friends, Ailsa Thomson, also a teacher. Both Betty and Ailsa took positions as members of the VGS to work in the Ministry of Education (Purdey 2011: 78, 87, 118, 121, 156). During the 1950s, other Australian women also worked in Indonesia under the VGS program. Their accommodation, work conditions, and pay were the same as those of their Indonesian workmates. For many of them, as for Betty Feith, Ailsa Zainu’ddin (as she became), Joan Hardjono (who, like Ailsa, married an Indonesian), and Elaine Wills (later McKay),9 the experience was the stimulus for life-long commitment to working with Indonesians, both in their own country and in Australia.10 Betty and Herb returned to Indonesia in 1996 and in 1998, after Herb’s retirement as a senior academic, to again work as volunteers teaching at several Indonesian universities (Purdey 2011: 478, 491). During the late 1960s and 1970s, Dr Ailsa Zainu’ddin and Elaine McKay pioneered courses on Indonesian history, society and education at Australian universities, each becoming a leader in her field. Elaine was the first Director of the Australia-Indonesia Institute, established in 1989 as the official second track diplomacy vehicle for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (see below). Dr Joan Hardjono first went to Indonesia in 1956 as a member of the VGS teaching English at Bandung’s Padjadjaran State University. After her marriage to an Indonesian engineer, she continued to teach and raise their family. She was also an active researcher and published on transmigration (Hardjono 1977), rural development (Hardjono 1987), and environmental change (before it was f­ashionable to do so). Her edited volume examining Indonesia’s resources, ecology and the environment at the height of the New Order regime, became a benchmark for studies that were to follow (Hardjono 1991). After Molly Bondan’s death in 1990, Joan together with Molly’s brother, Charles Warner, edited Molly’s autobiographical notes and published them as a tribute to the pioneering contribution she made to Indonesia, and to the Australia-Indonesia relationship. The difficult circumstances of the first decade of Indonesia’s independence were not conducive to Indonesian women visiting Australia, though as early as the 1950s, Indonesian men worked and studied in various Australian cities. By the early 1960s, President Soekarno’s domestic and foreign policies were causing widespread economic and social stress. Among Soekarno’s gestures of defiance towards the West was the establishment of an elite sports contest for athletes from

9  Between 1958–1960, Elaine worked in Medan, North Sumatra, training and upgrading local teachers. In 1973, she was appointed to the Tasmanian College of Education, where she promoted the teaching of Asian Studies in tertiary education and in schools. Elaine was a pioneer in the development of teaching materials for pre-tertiary students and in advising teachers on ways to include ‘Asia’— especially Indonesia—in their lesson plans. 10  Mary Johnson deserves special mention as one of the early VGS members. She stayed on and devoted her life to community development in Java.

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newly emerging nations. The GANEFO (Games of the New Emerging Forces) were held during November 1963 in the specially constructed Senayan stadium in Jakarta. One of the competitors representing Indonesia was Isti Sumardi, Indonesia’s pentathlon champion. She remembers hearing Soekarno and the Indonesian Communist Party leader, Aidit, giving speeches at the new stadium while she was training. She was also present with the national athletics team at an open-air presidential prayer ceremony in front of the Merdeka Palace when radical Muslims tried to assassinate Soekarno. Isti was attending the College of Sport (Sekolah Tinggi Olahraga) in her home city of Yogyakarta when the attempted coup of 30 September 1965 occurred in Jakarta and brought Soeharto to power in 1966. She became a member of the anti-communist student movement, known collectively as ‘the generation of (19)66’. When Isti learned that villagers living not far from Yogyakarta were trying to survive in conditions of extreme poverty, she raised funds and put together a team of animal husbandry experts from Gadjah Mada University to work with the villagers. David Reeve, an Australian junior diplomat sent to Yogyakarta to learn Indonesian, heard of Isti’s work and visited the area with her. He was impressed, and encouraged Australian ambassador Gordon Jockel and junior diplomat John Monfries to visit and see first-hand the results of the program Isti was coordinating. John continued to see Isti and they were married in 1971. Isti then began life as the wife of an Australian diplomat and for many years helped her husband represent Australia in a range of postings. She also deepened her knowledge of Indonesian cultures. Apart from her activity as an elite athlete and social worker, Isti had studied and performed the traditional dances of Indonesia and by the time she ‘retired’ in 2015, her repertoire included more than 50 of Indonesia’s ethnic dances. In 1994, Isti established a studio in Canberra where she taught her expanding repertoire of dances to Australians as well as Indonesians, on a voluntary basis. As a result, her dancers were regularly invited to perform as representatives of Indonesian culture at both Australian and Indonesian events, across the ACT and in NSW. Isti Sumardi Monfries still travels between Australia and Indonesia and continues to share her insights into the complexities of both cultures to enrich mutual understanding.

Phase Three, 1970–1980s: Developing Indonesia: Developing Knowledge Isti Monfries’s experiences with impoverished villagers in Indonesia during the late 1960s and early 1970s reveal the conditions in which many Indonesians were trying to survive. In Australia, events in Indonesia, particularly the horrific reports of widespread massacres following the attempted coup of 1965,

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stimulated demand for more information about exactly what was happening.11 During the mid-1960s and through the 1970s, the first wave of Australian u ­ niversity students began learning Indonesian and specialising in various forms of ­ ‘Indonesian studies.’ There was an urgent need for tertiary-level teaching materials but few ­academics were equipped to provide them. An exception was Yohanni Johns who had come to Australia in 1958, with her English-born husband, AH Johns. Yohanni is an example of an academic whose commitment to presenting Indonesian language and culture to Australians made a lasting impression on the many who came in contact with her, either in person or through her books. Born in West Sumatra, Yohanni experienced both Dutch and Japanese secondary school systems during the 1930s and 1940s. She completed her teaching training in 1952 and in 1954 was selected for a special course in languageteaching methodology and linguistics, sponsored by the Ford Foundation in West Sumatra. AH (Tony) Johns and Yohanni moved to Canberra when Tony was appointed as inaugural professor of Indonesian Languages and Literature at the Australian National University. Canberra’s population of civil servants, defence personnel, intelligence officers, diplomats, journalists, and their families was hungry for information about ‘Asia,’ in particular, Indonesia. Yohanni, a born ­communicator, presented talks about Indonesian culture and society to many groups and also worked as a tutor, then lecturer, in Indonesian language at the ANU. In 1971, Yohanni published Dishes from Indonesia, the first ‘serious’ book on Indonesian cuisine. Recipes were introduced with anecdotes about their significance and socio-cultural context in a style that became her hallmark. Introducing the book, Tony Johns wrote, ‘It is, I think, her special gift to be able to see two styles of life clearly and fully, and interpret one in terms of the other’ (Johns 1971: vii). This gift was apparent also in three graded Indonesian language textbooks, published in 1978, 1981 and 1996, based on Yohanni’s experience of teaching Indonesian to adult English speakers. The grammatical analysis she developed raised the teaching of Indonesian to new levels and the books are still used as texts. The majority of diplomats, civil servants, politicians, intelligence analysts, tertiary and secondary students who learnt Indonesian between the 1970s and the new millennium used Yohanni’s texts for at least part of their studies.12 Yohanni Johns pioneered linguistic analysis and interactive teaching ­methodologies for adult learners of Indonesian, some of whom went on to

11 Between 1968 and 1975, Molly and Bondan compiled summaries of articles from the Indonesian press, which they roneo-ed and made available to Indonesia watchers under the title, Indonesian Current Affairs Translation Service Bulletin, see Hardjono and Warner 1995: 148. 12  In the early 1960s, Bettina Gorton studied Indonesian in one of Yohanni’s classes. When John Gorton became Prime Minister in 1968, Yohanni accompanied him and Bettina on official visits to Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia, writing speeches for Bettina and coaching her in their delivery. Gorton joked that in Indonesia Bettina was front-page news, while he was relegated to the back pages (see also ch 20).

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become teachers of Indonesian themselves. There was a revolution occurring in foreign language teaching in the Australian school curriculum. Japanese, Chinese and Indonesian were slowly being offered in those schools with staff able to teach Asian languages to non-native speakers. Several schools in Victoria, in particular, developed strong programs in Indonesian language and culture. In each case, it was the dedication and knowledge of specialist teachers that underpinned and sustained the programs. Among several that were recognised for the quality of their students, was a nongovernment Melbourne girls’ school. The teacher responsible for the quality of the program and the competency achieved by students was the Indonesian-born Mrs Lien Lee. Lien’s family were of ethnic Chinese descent but had assimilated totally with the culture of their Javanese community in Semarang. Lien was one of the early female graduates from the University of Indonesia’s Law Faculty in about 1960 and in 1963 worked in President Soekarno’s State Secretariat. In 1966, after the attempted coup and its bloody aftermath, it became apparent that Lien’s life was in danger. With her husband, she was finally able to reach Melbourne in 1968, where Betty Feith helped them adapt to Australian life. Lien enrolled in a Diploma of Education at Monash University, guided by Ailsa Zainu’ddin and then started teaching Indonesian language at Presbyterian Ladies College, supported by its farsighted principal, Joan Montgomery. Lien developed an Indonesian program that drew on real materials (such as Indonesian newspapers) and included school visits to Indonesia every two years. Like Yohanni Johns, Lien encouraged her students to use only Indonesian in the classroom and trained them to deliver speeches in Indonesian and immerse themselves in Indonesian culture. Her students were rewarded with matriculation results that were among the highest in Victoria and enabled the best of her students to enter advanced levels of Indonesian at tertiary level. One of the results of quality Indonesian programs at secondary level was the flow-on effect at tertiary level so that students graduated from university with high levels of competency in spoken and written Indonesian. These graduates, a high proportion of them women, went on to fill positions in national and international organisations. The often-unacknowledged workers at the coal-face of Indonesian language teaching were, and are, Indonesian women who live in Australia, or who have moved here specifically to teach Indonesian language. Many of these Indonesian native speakers are highly skilled language teachers, others have learned ‘on the job.’ All of them do the hard slog of language teaching—helping students correct their pronunciation and grammar, listening to repetitions of important phrases, generating interesting materials, and marking assignments. No computer technology can replace this face-to-face learning from a native speaker. These dedicated women have made invaluable contributions not only to language ­learning but also to deeper understandings of the customs and attitudes of contemporary Indonesians.13 13 Two specific examples stand for the many unsung heroes among the Indonesian women language tutors. Cathy Mardisiswoyo worked at the Point Cook School of Languages in Victoria between

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In the late 1960s, Adelaide-born Margaret Hutchesson (later Kartomi) returned from her doctoral studies in Berlin with a DPhil degree in Indonesian music. She has since become internationally recognised for her publications and tertiary teaching about Indonesian music and dance. Throughout her long career, she has also dedicated herself to explaining and interpreting the musical traditions of Indonesia to audiences in Australia. In 1969, she organised perhaps the first public performance of Sundanese (West Javanese) music, in the Melbourne Town Hall. Margaret also worked with Victorian schools and organised regular concerts of Indonesian performing arts at Monash University, specifically designed so that school students could participate. She also brought leading Indonesian musicians and dancers to Monash University to teach school children and university students, culminating in a special ‘graduation’ concert. Through the experience of learning and performing Indonesian traditional music, Australian students began to appreciate the different tonal structures, instruments, and styles of playing that give contemporary expression to the traditional cultures of Indonesia. Margaret continues her research into Indonesian music and dance and now works with her daughter, Dr Karen Sri Kartomi Thomas, herself a scholar of Indonesian music. Karen’s daughter, Jesse, also researches with them, ensuring that their contribution to recording traditional Indonesian music and presenting it to Australian audiences will continue for several more decades. In 2016, Indonesia’s Minister of Education and Culture recognised Margaret’s research into Indonesian traditional music, her teaching and her establishment of an archive of Sumatran and Asian music at Monash University with a prestigious cultural award that is given to only a very few non-Indonesians. From the early 1970s, President Soeharto’s New Order Indonesia determined that national unity would be the keystone of domestic policy and cultural diversity and would be expressed in terms defined by his regime. Dissent was not tolerated and the media and political expression were rigorously controlled. In response, many leading Indonesian writers, artists and musicians expressed their criticism of the New Order through their art. Pop music was especially effective as a medium of dissent, as recorded by Piper and Jabo (1987). The ‘first wave’ of Australian graduates who had specialised in Indonesian language, society and culture translated, interpreted and analysed the works of these ‘dissident’ artists and writers and made them available not only to Australians but also to ­Europeans, British and American scholars and audiences. Essential to the research and writing of Australian academics and others working on Indonesia at this time was the collection of contemporary Indonesian material which the National Library of Australia assembled. The National Library’s investment in s­pecialist

1969 and 1993. She taught specific-purpose Indonesian to staff of the Departments of Defence and ­Foreign Affairs, military personnel and members of the intelligence services. Cathy was also a dedicated supporter, office bearer and Indonesian language tutor for many years in the Australia-Indonesia Association (Victoria Branch). In Canberra, Indonesian-born Prapti McLeod has for many years taught Indonesian to senior diplomats of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

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staff to identify and build the Indonesian collection has paid huge dividends. Its internationally respected materials, many of which are available online, are a vital resource for studying bilateral relations and Indonesian women.14 Professor Barbara Hatley, who studied Indonesian with Yohanni Johns and Professor Tony Johns in the late 1960s, is one of the Australian pioneers who introduced the formal study of contemporary Indonesian popular culture (street theatre, ludruk, kethoprak) to Australian students and wider audiences. These forms of cultural expression have strong followings in Indonesia because they express the essence of popular thought in vernacular forms that are rarely seen by non-Indonesians. Through her writings Barbara has shown the close links between expressions of popular culture and Indonesian socio-political issues. Her work on theatre, particularly the writings of Rendra, focussed attention on the ways writers were daring to criticise the repressive regime of President Soeharto.15 Suzan Piper was also in this ‘first wave’ of graduates of Indonesian language, literatures and culture. In 1976, she graduated with Honours from the University of Sydney and then gained qualifications in the teaching of foreign languages. As a student, she made frequent visits to Indonesia, joining Rendra’s Bengkel Theatre in Yogyakarta, where she later met her husband Sawung Jabo (Indonesian musician, composer, and film/stage performer). In 1983, they returned to live in Indonesia where Suzan employed her knowledge of Indonesian language and society to work on projects for the World Bank and market Australian tertiary education at IDP Education. In 1992, they returned to Australia with their two children. Having taught Indonesian language and studies on various Sydney tertiary institutions, Suzan now teaches Indonesian translating and interpreting at the University of New South Wales. Her work as an Indonesian-English interpreter and translator was recognised in 2009 when AUSIT (Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators, Australia’s peak body for professionals) awarded her the prestigious Excellence in Translating Award.

14  In 1971, the National Library of Australia (NLA) sent George Miller to Jakarta to establish an acquisitions office that had a network of agents across Indonesia. Mrs Ilse Soegito, headed the Jakarta office between 1972 and 1979, and strengthened the networks so that the NLA’s contemporary Indonesia collection is now exceptional. Amelia McKenzie, who headed the Regional Office between 1993 and 1996, and is now Assistant Director-General, Collections Management, remembers a number of prominent Indonesian women librarians who made important contributions to the Australia-Indonesia relationship through their support and work for the NLA. Since 2009, Ibu Tieke Atikah has been managing the Regional Office from the NLA in Canberra, liaising with Indonesian staff in Jakarta and readers in Australia. 15  Barbara also writes on contemporary Indonesian literature and the contributions of Indonesian women writers to the representation of Indonesian women, see for example, Hatley 1997 and 2002. Pamela Allen’s important work in this area is also influential and widely acknowledged, see Allen 1995.

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Phase Four, 1990–1998: Making Commitments Through Funding and Linkages In 1990, Molly Bondan died in Jakarta. Philip Flood, the Australian ambassador at the time, had been in contact with Molly since his appointment and wrote, ‘[S]he introduced me to many of the subtleties of Indonesian culture’ (Flood 2011: 211). When news of her death came, Ambassador Flood was one of the many who visited her house to pay his respects. Also at Molly’s home paying their respects were Foreign Minister Alatas, Minister for People’s Welfare Rustam, the widow of Indonesia’s first Vice-President, Mohammad Hatta, and three former ­Ministers of Information (Flood 2011: 212). Molly had not only worked in practical ways to support Indonesia’s path to independence but had also dedicated herself to ensuring the new nation was heard in the wider world. Her contribution to Australia-Indonesia relations is summed up by Emeritus Professor John Legge, who described her ability to interpret ‘Indonesia to generations of Australian visitors’ and give ‘[A] large number of senior Indonesians a subtle understanding of Western, and especially Australian, society and culture’ (Legge in Hardjono and Warner 1995:ix). The year before Molly’s death, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade established the Australia-Indonesia Institute (AII), ‘To develop relations between Australia and Indonesia by promoting greater mutual understanding and by contributing to the enlargement over the longer term of the areas of contact and exchange between the people of Australia and Indonesia.’16 The AII is the official Australian flagship organisation for bilateral relations with Indonesia. Its first Director, Elaine McKay, was responsible for explaining its purpose to interested groups and individuals in Australia, which she did with great skill. Elaine developed the AII’s strategic plan and the principles of parity, participation, and partnership that underpin the AII’s programs and grants. She worked closely with Dr Jennifer (Jenny) Lindsay, the Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy in Jakarta (1989–1992) to develop a vibrant and imaginative arts program.17 The brief of the AII ranges widely so it can encompass linkages between almost any sphere of society, including the media, business, sports, science and technology, and institutions such as universities, schools and museums. Jenny’s experience in Indonesia and her arts contacts from her earlier work at the Australia Council enabled her to identify and encourage leading Indonesian figures to visit

16 For full details about the AII and its programs see . 17  Francesca Beddie, a career DFAT officer with fluent Indonesian, had worked at the Australian embassy in Jakarta from 1984 to 1987 and returned to Jakarta in early 1989. Among her many contributions to the bilateral relationship were her development of links with arts and cultural organisations in Indonesia, laying foundations on which the AII was able to build.

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Australia and vice versa. She particularly encouraged Australian arts administrators to visit Indonesia and see for themselves the talent and creativity of performers and artists. As a result, Australian festival directors invited Indonesian groups to perform at their festivals. In 1994, the Adelaide Festival, curated by Christopher Hunt, included many Indonesian performances. Among them was an allnight Javanese shadow-puppet performance, with simultaneous translation into English—a highlight of the Festival. During Jenny’s term as Cultural Counsellor, the linkages she initiated developed momentum and continued beyond her term at the Embassy. One of the Indonesian arts administrators she worked with, Amna Kusumo, later became Director of Yayasan Kelola (Kelola Foundation) in Jakarta, which assists Australians who have arts residencies in Indonesia, as described in Sedgwick (2006: 32).

Arts: Ahead of the Curve During the 1970s, young Australian women, like Barbara Hatley and Jenny Lindsay, began travelling regularly to Indonesia. Some made their own very personal links through marriage, as had Molly but always through total immersion in the Indonesian communities in which they lived. Suzan Piper did this in the 1970s and 1980s and Margaret Bradley from the early 1980s. Margaret had an Australian degree in music and in Indonesia learned to play traditional musical instruments and gamelan, as well as singing and playing with Indonesian bands. During their extended periods in Indonesia, they established their own networks and were able to draw on them in the 1990s for projects that deepened crosscultural understanding. In Melbourne in 1992, IKAWIRIA (the Indonesian Community Association of Victoria), a non-profit community organisation of volunteers, organised a four-day major exhibition of Indonesian culture at the Victoria Arts Centre. Supported by the AII, the Victorian State government and, in Indonesia, the Lontar Foundation and the Femina (magazine) Group, this was the first major I­ ndonesian arts event to bring leading Indonesian intellectuals, journalists, traditional and contemporary dancers and musicians as well contemporary photography to Australian audiences. Lanita Idrus, then president of IKAWIRIA, sums up the achievement of the exhibition: ‘[T]his exhibition speaks volumes about the localised, personal, organisational and successful partnerships of all involved in an attempt to further develop Australians’ understanding of Indonesia through the arts’ (Idrus, email: 11 December 2015). Australian female visual artists, too, discovered that working in Indonesia, was inspiring and could be beneficial for their careers. Judy Shelley, a young artist, ‘discovered’ the arts community in Ubud (Bali) when she first visited there in the early 1980s. She married Sumadi, a local artist in 1982, and became part of the artistic community there. She describes how she was able to share with local artists her knowledge of artists’ rights and their relationship with commercial ­galleries, to

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improve their control over the way their works were sold. Judy became aware that female artists in Bali faced particular challenges because their families often did not support their wishes to make a career in art. With Mary Northmore Aziz, she set up Seniwati Bali (Women’s Art Group in Bali) and presented the first ­exhibition of works in 1990 (Shelley 2008: 96–98). Seniwati Bali remains a focus for women’s art and a centre for art lessons for girls and young women. Judy ­Shelley returned permanently to Australia in 1992, maintaining her links with Indonesian artists and continuing to find ways to fund regular visits to Australia by Indonesian artists. Around the same time, Alison Carroll, in Melbourne, was concerned about the lack of contact between Australian and Asian artists, particularly Indonesian artists. Alison pioneered an exhibition of links between Asian and Australian art held in the Art Gallery of South Australia in the early 1980s. In 1991, she established and directed a far-sighted arts exchange program under the umbrella of Asialink, at the University of Melbourne.18 Central to the program was the concept of crosscultural partnerships manifested in a system of residencies that offered visiting Australian professional artists a local mentor and studio space in or near a local arts community. The residencies, which started with visual artists, expanded to include performing arts, literature and arts managers. Indonesian women who have become long-term supporters of the residencies include Amna Kusumo of the Kelola Foundation in Jakarta and Dutch-born Mella Jaarsma, co-founder of Cemeti Gallery in Yogyakarta. The Asialink residencies introduced many Australian artists to their counterparts in Indonesia and brought some Indonesian artists to Australia. But introducing the works of leading contemporary Indonesian artists to the wider Australian public needed a different approach. In the early 1990s, Dr Caroline Turner, a respected curator, art-historian and Deputy Director of the Queensland Art Gallery, co-founded the Asia-Pacific Triennial (APT) exhibitions at the Queensland Art Gallery. Caroline was Project Director for the first three of the exhibitions, held in 1993, 1996 and 1999. These not only brought the works of leading contemporary Indonesian artists to Australia, they also brought them to international attention. Opportunities for the artists to explain their works to Australian ­audiences were well-attended and laid the foundations for networks with Australian art specialists, journalists, and galleries. As Caroline writes: The most distinctive features of the early APTs in the 1990s were that artists and scholars in the region helped select, curate and write about the art … and that the art chosen for exhibition was not “officially” selected (Turner 2014: 20).

Caroline worked with those already active in Indonesian-Australian linkages, such as Jenny Lindsay and Alison Carroll, who was one of the curators of the first three

18 For further details see www.asialink.unimelb.edu.au. For the Asialink Arts Residencies, in ­ articular, see Carroll 2014: 202–205. For Alison’s own story of her engagement with Indonesia, p see Carroll 2008.

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APTs. Both Caroline and Alison served (at different times) as Board members of the AII, and were thus in a position to strengthen some of the existing bilateral cultural networks as well as identify and mentor emerging artists. Christine Clark’s experiences show how the APTs and the art management aspects of the Asialink Arts programs can reinforce each other. Christine worked with Caroline Turner as Project Officer for the first three APT exhibitions and is currently exhibitions manager at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, Australia. Her undergraduate degree in art history had not included any reference to Asian art and she decided to redress this by enrolling in an MBA and choosing Asia-Australia relations as her thesis elective. She visited Indonesia in 1993 following her intense involvement with Indonesian colleagues in the first APT, when she liaised with Indonesian curators and Indonesian artists. This involved bringing them and their works to Brisbane for the APT and then organising their visits to other centres in Australia, including giving talks at regional centres. After continuing to work with Indonesian artists and curators for the APT projects throughout the 1990s, Christine, supported by an Asialink Residency in Arts Management, made contact in 1998 and 1999 with staff in the art faculty of Bandung’s prestigious Institute of Technology (ITB), and with Marintan Sirait, an artist and co-founder of the Lawang Art Foundation in Bandung. Christine and Marintan jointly led a workshop on arts management for over 80 Indonesian participants from across Java. For many years after, the workshop and its handbook were used as a valued resource for Indonesian art professionals. Christine has returned to Indonesia regularly for other projects, including being invited on a number of occasions for initiatives funded by the Department of Culture. The National Portrait Gallery in Canberra now has an official partnership with Indonesia’s National Gallery. These formal institutional links at the highest level facilitate ongoing contact between Australian and Indonesian artists, curators, art historians, and arts managers. Looking back, the 1990s were a peak time for Indonesia-Australia linkages through the arts and much of the energy and leadership driving the connections was initiated by women.19 Indonesian and Australian women saw the potential for joint projects and residencies and then worked to set them in place so that artists, performers, writers and arts managers could work together on new projects that were then introduced to Australian and Indonesian audiences. In Australia, it is structures such as the Arts programs of Asialink and the APT that provide the over-arching frameworks for interaction. Funding was, and remains, an issue. During the 1990s the largest funds came from the Australian government through the Australia Council and, to a lesser extent, DFAT, often

19  Robyn Maxwell’s contributions to raising the profile of Southeast Asia art, especially Indonesian textiles, through her work at the National Gallery of Australia and the teaching of Asian art history at the Australian National University deserve special recognition. See Maxwell 1990.

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via AII. The Arts Departments of each Australian state or territory also support Asialink Residencies. In Jakarta, as a result of Jenny Lindsay’s work while Program Officer for Culture at the Ford Foundation (1995–1999), Australia was included in Ford’s international programming for Indonesia, especially for arts and arts management residencies, both hosting and sending. Other funds came through Indonesia’s Department of Culture and the Kelola Foundation. Local partner groups of arts professionals in each country are essential to ensuring that this kind of funding is used with utmost efficiency. In the new millennium, Australia ­Council funding for Indonesia linkages has fallen away, leaving the AII as a vital source of funding for Indonesia-inspired arts projects.20

Culture Exchange Networks In 1995, Suzan Piper and Sawung Jabo established a cross cultural consultancy, ‘Wot Cross-Culture,’ (www.wotcrossculture.com.au, ‘wot’ meaning ‘bridge’ or ‘crossing’ in Javanese), building on their ten-year support of the Indonesia-­ Australia arts connection in Indonesia. Wot has created and produced various stage performances and tours of Australia and Indonesia. It has introduced examples of the traditional and contemporary music of both countries to each other, and explored the relationship between the two nations through drama.21 In 1991, Margaret Bradley and her husband, Arif Hidayat, returned to Australia and established an arts consultancy in Sydney called ‘Arimba Culture Exchange’. They saw Arimba as ‘an ongoing project to assist cultural exchange between Australia and Indonesia, bringing Australians and Indonesians closer together through the arts’ (Bradley, email: 13 August 2015). Arimba’s emphasis was on cultural exchange between artists as well as with their audiences, introducing contemporary Indonesian culture to the broadest Australian audiences, and ­developing contacts between indigenous Australians and Indonesian communities. It specialises in music tours and exchanges and has developed specialised programs of Indonesian music for schools. As well as establishing Arimba with her husband, Margaret completed a Masters degree in the traditional music of West Java. She also has specialist music teaching qualifications and works in arts education in the NSW Department of Education. She developed a solo schools performance, Exploring Indonesian Music, which toured schools in New South Wales, the ACT and Victoria. ABC TV’s highly-rated preschool series, Playschool, employed her as composer, consultant and musician for a special episode on Indonesia. Judy Shelley also returned to Australia in the 1990s and maintained contact with the Indonesian artists she had worked with in the 1980s. She was determined 20  For more on the arts in the Australia-Indonesia relationship, and the role of government funding, see ch 17. 21  Some of Suzan’s reflections on the term ‘cross-cultural’ appear in Piper (2008: 80, 83).

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to create a program that would bring ten Indonesian artists annually to Australia. All Australian states and all Indonesian provinces were to be involved. In 1998, she founded the Australia Indonesia Arts Alliance (AIAA), which is still active and still inviting not only Indonesian artists to Australia but also poets, musicians, and dancers. With minimal funding from Australian organisations, and by using ‘Work for the Dole’ funds to support the administration of projects, AIAA has run Indonesian film nights, school performances, children’s art exchanges and created a website and the first Australia-Indonesia arts email network. She writes: ‘My experience has been that what drives Australia Indonesia cultural exchange is the love and commitment of key individuals across Australia who have kept going against all odds to keep this process moving forward’ (Shelley 2008: 99, 100).

Doing Business The five-year development plans (Repelita) of Soeharto’s New Order administration resulted in rapid and sustained economic growth in Indonesia on a scale that attracted the attention of international corporate and business enterprises (Hill 1994: 54–114). During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Australian firms (miners, construction companies, banks, manufacturers) began establishing partnerships with Indonesian counterparts. It was this climate that prompted Deacons law firm (now Norton Rose ­Fulbright), which was already active in Asia, to open an office in Jakarta working with the local law firm Hanafiah Soeharto Ponggawa. In 1992, Deacons sent Elizabeth Hallett, a partner in their Melbourne office, to Jakarta to build a base of Australian clients there for the firm. Elizabeth describes the challenging conditions under which she, and other (male) Australian lawyers, worked to build their practices at this time. Communication with Australia was mostly by fax and there was no Indonesian Companies Law, so that regulations, departmental and ministerial decrees formed the basis of ‘the law’ (Hallett, email: 8 August 2015). Elizabeth was almost immediately struck by the impressive numbers of Indonesian women working at senior levels in the corporate world. By contrast, in Australia it was very rare for her to meet women in senior corporate positions, including in law firms, until the late 1990s. She notes that the Indonesian business community and Indonesian lawyers were welcoming and supportive, helping her adjust to a difficult working environment. Elizabeth’s work increased the practice so that, in 1995, her firm was able to post junior lawyer Kerry Ryan to assist her in Jakarta. Elizabeth returned to Deacons Australian office in 1996 and Kerry continued her work, staying a further three years as a senior associate. Elizabeth believes the role of women in the bilateral business relationship is an unrecognised field. She also identifies the importance of the presence of Australian professionals working in Jakarta. In her words, the Australians: [H]ave an impact on the younger generation of Indonesian professionals working in their Jakarta offices. The young Indonesians get to know the (mostly) good and

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(less ­frequently) bad aspects of Australians, they get to know them as people, not just caricatures in the media … (Hallett, email: 8 August 2015).

More than Making News Dewi Anggraeni and Ratih Hardjono are women with a foot each side of the bilateral divide, equally at home in Indonesia or Australia, equally at home speaking English or Indonesian. Each is well known in both countries for their books and their journalism. Although they have done so in different ways, both have used their writings to improve understanding between Indonesians and Australians. Jakarta-born Dewi Anggraeni came to Australia in the early 1970s and worked teaching Indonesian and French at a secondary school in Victoria. She would later lecture in comparative education, comparative literature and comparative media at three Victorian universities. She married an Australian, raised a family, and wrote articles for The Age, The Australian, The Australian Financial Review, The Canberra Times, Griffith Review, The Sydney Papers, and Borderland, as well as works of fiction. In 1986, after she had been in Australia for 15 years, she was appointed by the highly respected Indonesian weekly Tempo as its correspondent in Australia. She is also correspondent for the English language daily, The Jakarta Post. Dewi has extensive first-hand knowledge of Australians and believes it is their unfamiliarity with Indonesia and its peoples that causes high levels of mistrust and offence being too easily taken. Her writings gently work towards bridging the gap of misunderstanding by both sides. The spread of her articles across many types of print media ensures they reach a range of Australian readers. She believes it is vital to face up to reality however ugly it might be. She says, ‘[W]hen I do write, I do my best to express how I think the situation is, however bad it is, because when it is bad, I believe we have to face it’ (Anggraeni, email: 14 July 2015). In 1992, the organisers of a special voyage from Darwin to East Timor to commemorate the 1991 massacre of young Timorese in the Santa Cruz cemetery, invited Dewi as Tempo representative to sail with them. Among the Portuguese, Australian and other international representatives, Dewi was the only representative of the Indonesian press. Some Australian passengers started a rumour that Dewi was a spy for Indonesia, although this was not believed by most of the other passengers. More serious was the Indonesian response. Some Indonesian officials labelled her a traitor (to Indonesia) because she was participating in a ‘protest’ voyage to East Timor. She was later prohibited from entering Indonesia but was eventually cleared by Indonesian intelligence. Ratih Hardjono is Joan Hardjono’s daughter, born in Bandung in 1960. Her father had fought in the war of independence against the Dutch when he was only 15. Later, he worked as an engineer for the oil company Caltex. Ratih completed her schooling in Indonesia then took a degree at the University of Sydney.

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After t­eaching Indonesian language and literature in Sydney, she accepted an appointment as full time international correspondent for the respected Indonesian-language daily, Kompas. Ratih worked exclusively for Kompas between 1986 and 1999, publishing up to 2,500 articles. She says, ‘I wrote about everything Australian, from politics, to environment, economic and social issues such as Indonesian fishermen and Aboriginal affairs’ (Hardjono, email: 11 August 2015). Having studied at an Australian university, mixed with Australian academics, writers and journalists, and observed the number of books about Indonesia being written by Australians during the 1980s, Ratih decided some balance was needed. In 1992, her own book, Suku Putihnya Asia: Perjalanan Australia Mencari Jati Dirinya (White Tribe of Asia: Australia’s Journey in Search of its Identity) was published in Indonesia. She says she wrote the book ‘[I]n response to laments that there are hardly any books by Indonesians about Australia, whereas there are many by Australians about Indonesia’ (Hardjono 1993: opening note). Ratih’s explanation of Australia’s history, culture, society, politics and defence preoccupations, written in Indonesian, was the first serious attempt to ‘package’ Australia for Indonesian consumption. Its publication by Gramedia in Indonesia ensured it was available in all major bookshops across the republic.22 The book is dedicated to Molly Bondan, the first Australian to officially help Indonesians understand Australia. Ratih moved back to Indonesia in 1999, invited by Abdurrahman Wahid to work with him on his election campaign. After he became Indonesia’s president, Ratih worked for a time as Secretary to the President. It was in that capacity, notes Philip Flood, that she helped build and promote freedom of Indonesia’s press (Flood 2011: 213). Both Dewi Anggraeni and Ratih Hardjono, senior women journalists working across cultures, have had to face unfounded allegations of spying. Like Dewi, Ratih was also accused of spying by both sides at different times. The accusations by Indonesians, who later apologised to Ratih, were not as vicious as those she experienced from two former members of the Australian Defence Forces. Concocted in 2000, to smear both Ratih and Kim Beazley, then leader of the Australian Labor Party in opposition and facing a national election, the allegations were investigated by the Director-General of ASIO and completely quashed (Sheridan 2004; Kerin 2004). Even their reputations as senior and respected journalists did not protect Ratih and Dewi from the paranoia of a few individuals, both in Indonesia and ­Australia, who attempted to question their motives and loyalty. It seems that there is still resistance to the fact that individuals, particularly women, who have influence and strong connections in both Indonesia and Australia can be equally loyal to both.

22  In 1993, an English translation was published entitled, White Tribe of Asia: An Indonesian View of Australia.

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Phase Five, 1998–2015: Partnership The impact of the Asian economic crisis of 1997 was most severely felt in Indonesia in early 1998, leading in May to the ‘fall’ of Soeharto. He was replaced by President BJ Habibie, followed by Presidents Wahid and Megawati Soekarnoputri. Indonesians saw this as the beginning of a transition to a more open form of democracy. Non-government organisations (NGOs) recognised the opportunity to play a more active role in society. They were ready to work with foreign donors in partnerships where Indonesians were active contributors to the design, implementation and evaluation of aid programs. Health was one of the areas that Indonesians identified as in urgent need of greater assistance from foreign donors, including Australia.

Medical Partnerships Visits between Australian and Indonesian health professionals started with the VGS in the 1950s. By the early 1970s, Australian surgeons and specialists were working in Indonesia on a pro bono basis, operating on Indonesian patients and training local medical staff.23 By the late 1980s, more permanent linkages were being established. One of the earliest (and still ongoing) bilateral medical partnerships was set up to support the work in Indonesia of the Australian Craniofacial Unit based in Adelaide. Under Dr David David, the Australian head of the Unit, and his specialised medical team, reconstructive surgery has been provided for severely disfigured Indonesians since 1983. Dr David and the Adelaide unit also provide training workshops for Indonesian doctors (such as plastic surgeon Dr Bisono) and ­specialist staff in Indonesia and in Adelaide so that, where possible, surgery can be performed in Indonesia. In 1987, Dr David approached Mrs Jane Arthur before she left Adelaide with her husband, who had been appointed as Medical Officer for the Australian Embassy, asking them to support the work of the Unit. The Arthurs agreed to find funding for Indonesians to travel to Adelaide where the Craniofacial Unit performed the operations pro bono and the Adelaide Children’s Hospital did not charge fees. Jane Arthur approached airlines to sponsor the travel of patients but no system was in place to provide ongoing financial support.24 Hearing of Dr David’s work, 23 Retired surgeon Dick Varley says that from the early 1970s, for example, members of the ­ rovincial Surgeons Association of Australia sent teams of surgeons and theatre nurses to West ­Sumatra P to perform operations and train Indonesian doctors and nurses in specialist procedures. The John Fawcett Foundation (Yayasan Kemanusiaan Indonesia) is another long-term Australian-initiated program, started in 1989 in Bali to perform cleft palate operations. The Foundation later began a longterm program of free cataract operations for Balinese. It collaborated with the University of Indonesia’s Faculty of Medicine to train ophthalmologists for work throughout Indonesia. 24  See colour plate in Flood 2011: 132ff.

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a group of Indonesian women, together with the Rotary Club of Kuningan in Jakarta, raised A$12,000 to support craniofacial surgery for Indonesian children. They offered the money to Mrs Martha Morrison, wife of the then Australian ­Ambassador, on condition that a Foundation (Yayasan) be set up in accordance with Indonesian law. This was done in 1989, with Jane Arthur as its first chair, and a formal agreement was concluded with Indonesia’s Ministry of Health. The four founding patrons were Minister for People’s Welfare Soepardjo Roestam, Minister of Health Dr Adhyatma, Minister for Social Affairs, Professor Dr Haryati ­Soebadio, and Australia’s next ambassador, Philip Flood. The money was invested so that the interest could pay for children to travel to Adelaide for surgery. Once established, the Foundation received ongoing donations from fundraising ventures organised by Indonesian and Australian women, including Ibu Hartini Moerdani (who in 1993 succeeded Jane Arthur as Chair of the Foundation), Mrs Siti Bambang Utoyo, Ibu Puck Schmutzer, Ibu Ida Tumengkol, Ibu Lina Sumantri, Ibu Astari Rasjid, Mrs Carole Flood and others.25 Over time, YCB opened branches in several places in Java and Sumatra as well as in E ­ astern ­Indonesia. About A$250,000 was raised to buy specialist equipment so more operations could be performed in Indonesia. Indonesian and Australian women worked together in a large house in Jakarta to provide pre- and post-surgical care, meals, transport and help with paperwork for patients. The work of YCB continues and since 2005 it has received additional support from the Priscilla Hall Memorial Foundation for Underprivileged Children in Indonesia. The Foundation was established in 2004, to commemorate the life of Glenn Innes-born Priscilla Hall (1968–2004), who was killed in a plane crash near Jakarta where she had worked for the previous two years. Her concern for disadvantaged children in Indonesia guides the many projects supported by the Foundation.26

Women’s Health and Knowledge Sharing Through the 1990s, Indonesian and Australian women continued to collaborate on projects that enhanced their medical skills and knowledge. The AustraliaIndonesia Institute contributed to the funding for some of these. Lanita Idrus, for example, while Head of the Nursing Practice Department at the Australian Catholic University (ACU) in 1994, received an AII grant to work with University of Indonesia’s Faculty of Medicine and the Indonesian Midwives Association to design a health preceptorship for the ACU’s Graduate Diploma in Midwifery. Over 20 Australian midwives trained alongside Indonesian midwives during a four-week program in Indonesia. Both Indonesian and Australian participants 25  I thank Jane Arthur and Philip Flood for providing the information on which this summary of YCB is based. 26  For further details see .

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reported that they had benefitted greatly from the experience, taking their learning into their future practice.27 In 2002–2003, Lanita was again involved in a bilateral program, this time as part of the World Bank’s ‘Sister School Project’. The project was funded by the World Bank to raise the quality of training for nursing staff and midwives at eight institutions in Central Java, through professional development sessions. With other health care professionals from the University of Melbourne’s Australian Institute of Health, Lanita worked closely with counterparts in Indonesia to upgrade the standards of professionalism in health-care delivery to pregnant women.28 Lanita Idrus was born in Indonesia but moved to Australia with her parents when she was still in primary school. Inez Nimpuno was also born in Indonesia but came to Australia as an adult, leaving her own career as a General Practitioner in Jakarta in 1998 to accompany her husband when he was appointed to the Australian National University (ANU). Deciding to further her postgraduate studies, Inez completed a Masters degree in Population Studies at the ANU in 2001 followed by a Master of Arts in Demography in 2002.29 Moving into health policy work for ACT Health, the Health Department of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) government, Inez now has extensive experience in overseeing Federal government health initiatives implemented in the ACT, and health policy development work in a range of areas such as maternity care, blood and blood products, age care, health economics, and intergovernmental issues. In 2006 and 2007, Inez had direct experience of the Australia health system from the perspective of a patient, when she was diagnosed with, and treated for, breast cancer. She found that the support services and information provided by Breast Cancer Network Australia (BCNA), the largest Australian breast cancer support organisation, were in sharp contrast to current practice in Indonesia. Indonesian women receive little, if any, follow-up support after their hospital procedures. Soon after finishing her own cancer treatment, Inez started voluntary work to promote the importance of early detection of breast cancer to the Indonesian community in Canberra. One of Inez’s friends in Jakarta, Dana Chatib Basri, a former television journalist, public figure in Indonesia and breast-cancer survivor, became a member of ‘Lovepink,’ a support network set up in 2013 for Indonesian women with breast cancer. In the same year, Inez, through Dana, also joined ‘Lovepink’ and was invited to become adviser and mentor to the movement. Drawing on her professional knowledge and personal experience, Inez introduced the approaches and programs used by BCNA to ‘Lovepink’. By mid-2015, ‘Lovepink’ had more than 400 members spread over a number of cities in Java, Sumatra and Kalimantan. 27  Ms B Murphy and Ms K Crockett were also awarded grants by the AII in the early 1990s to develop programs for Australian nurses to include practical studies in Indonesia in their training. 28  Lanita Idrus, email correspondence, 10 July 2015. In response to medical needs of survivors of the 2004 Aceh tsunami, Lanita joined a small team assembled by Melbourne’s Marsh Foundation that travelled to Aceh to provide health checks and vaccinations for over 2,000 Acehnese. 29  The title of her thesis was ‘Institutional Barriers to Adequate, Safe Blood Supplies in Indonesia’ and it was written in the context of Indonesia’s high rate of maternal mortality.

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Inez has developed the education side of the ‘Lovepink’ program and she provides information to hundreds of members through social media channels. She also established a daily blog to provide comprehensive and reliable information about breast cancer in Indonesian for Indonesian women. Before Inez established her blog, there were no internet sites in Indonesian providing this kind of ­information.30 Her goal is to transfer knowledge and train women who in turn pass their knowledge to others. She is also extending breast cancer awareness and support into poor, urban communities that are too often overlooked. Inez continues to spread health information for Indonesian women from her home in Australia through her blog and daily ‘chat’ via social media as well as occasional articles in the Indonesian daily, Kompas.

Capacity Building and Australian International Aid The Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID)31 was a proactive partner of Indonesian aid programs, particularly those that matched the government of Indonesia’s Millennium Development Goals for women and children and the Women’s Empowerment Board goals. Allison Sudradjat’s contribution to the Australia-Indonesia foreign aid relationship is representative of the work of other dedicated women specialising in this challenging area. Allison Keevil was born in 1966 in Western Australia and gained a national scholarship to study Indonesia at the ANU. After completing her degree, she was awarded a special Indonesian government scholarship to study for a further year at an Indonesian university. In 1989, she joined AusAID and managed important aid programs in Papua New Guinea before taking up postings in Indonesia. On 26 December 2004, Allison heard there had been a massive tsunami in Aceh, and went straight to her office to begin to evaluate the extent of the ­disaster. She coordinated the Australian government’s emergency relief response and in 2005, as Minister Counsellor, directed all Australia’s aid programs for Indonesia. While travelling to Yogyakarta on 7 March 2007 on an official assignment, she was killed in a plane crash together with three other Australians also working in the bilateral sphere. Soon after her death, Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade established the Allison Sudradjat Prize—six Australian Leadership Awards Scholarships awarded annually for outstanding scholars and current or emerging leaders.32 Allison believed education is one of the pillars of development and she not only supported scholarships for Indonesians to study in Australia but personally supervised the first intake of Indonesian Leadership Awards recipients during their time in Australia. Allison’s contributions to the design and delivery of aid through

30  See Lovepink’s website for further details and Inez’s blog at . 31  For an overview of AusAID’s work and history, see Flood 2011: 223–40. See also ch 22. 32  For details of the awards see DFAT website Australia Awards.

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t­ argeted and consultative programs stand as an ongoing tribute to her professionalism and her dedication to the bilateral relationship. By coincidence, during Allison’s first posting to Indonesia in 1992–95, Dr Louise Simpson, another Australian aid professional, was administering an AusAID community health program to supply clean water to villages in Nusa Tenggara Barat. Louise has 22 years of experience as an international aid worker in Indonesia. She has designed and implemented community health projects throughout Southeast Asia but has particular experience in Indonesia, which she first visited in 1974. Between 2009 and 2015, Louise worked as partnership director for the Australia Indonesia Partnership for Maternal and Neonatal Health (AIPMNH) program in Eastern Nusa Tenggara. As the Partnership proceeded, the focus of its work was refined to improving outcomes in Maternal and Neonatal Health services with coverage of about 78% of the Province of Nusa Tenggara Timur (encompassing Timor, Sumba, and Flores islands). The partnership has been described as being ‘almost unique’ among the aid programs then funded by DFAT because the program operates within government of Indonesia systems for planning, budgeting and implementation. According to Louise, ‘[T]his has resulted in very high levels of ownership by the local and provincial government agencies that we partner with. I believe this approach has considerably strengthened relationships between Indonesia and Australia.’33 Between 2009 and 2014, there was a 40% reduction in maternal deaths in the area covered by the program. This is a major advance in the care of pregnant women, especially in this part of Indonesia with its extremely high poverty levels and many remote communities. An important part of the program was the establishment of a text message mobile phone system staffed by Indonesian midwives. Known as ‘2H2’ it serves as a ‘help desk’ and monitoring resource for health staff caring for pregnant women two days (hari) before and two days after their babies are delivered. An Indonesian ­midwife, Joria Parmin, designed 2H2 and, with ­Australian funding, other midwives are brought on study tours to her centre to see it in action and replicate it in their own regions.34 The investment in scholarships to support Indonesian women to study in Australia pays dividends for the individuals and for their nations. Indonesian women who study in Australia make professional connections that are maintained over decades. It is no coincidence that Indonesian women in key positions in the AIPMNH (maternal and neonatal program) in Nusa Tenggara Timur gained their higher degrees at Australian universities on scholarships provided by the ­Australian and the Indonesian governments.

33 Dr Louise Simpson, Partnership Director, Australia Indonesia Partnership for Maternal and ­Neonatal Health (AIPMNH), email communication, 13 July 2015. 34  See the following film of Ibu Joria and 2H2 at . The final report for AIPMNH is entitled ‘Australia-Indonesia partnership for Maternal and Neonatal Health AIPMNH: Activity Completion Report January 2009–June 2015,’ DFAT.

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Indonesia-Australia: Telling It as It Is Professor Dr Dewi Fortuna Anwar is a highly respected and influential Indonesian scholar, foreign policy analyst, and senior government official. When BJ Habibie followed Soeharto as president in 1998–99, Dewi was appointed Assistant Minister/ State Secretary for Foreign Affairs. Between 2001 and 2010, she was Deputy Chair for Social Sciences and Humanities at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences until being appointed Deputy Secretary for Political Affairs in the Secretariat of the Vice-President of the Republic of Indonesia, in the last term of President Yudhoyono. In May 2015, under President Joko Widodo, she was reappointed to the Secretariat of the Vice-President in the expanded role of Deputy for Government Policy Support. Dewi sits on the boards of international bodies for peace and disarmament, and has accepted invitations to be a visiting professor in Japan and the US. As one of Indonesia’s leading foreign affairs analysts, why is Dewi, in her own words, ‘[A] long-term practitioner in promoting Indonesia-Australia relations through various means’? The answer might lie in the fact that she spent several years in Australia studying for her doctorate, and has been invited back many times to give official briefings and public lectures. ‘I have many friends from different walks of life in Australia’, she explains, ‘[A]nd I continue to be actively involved in various initiatives at Monash University designed to enhance bilateral relations, such as the establishment of the Australia-Indonesia Centre’ (Anwar, email: 25 August 2015). She is frequently consulted ‘off the record’ by Australians, officials and media representatives for her views on Indonesia’s domestic policies, foreign policy, and bilateral relations in general. When Dewi gives official media interviews and is invited to speak at public forums in Australia, invitations she generously accepts despite her very full schedule in Indonesia, she is respected for her forthright appraisals of the state of bilateral relations. In her appraisals, Indonesia is always represented as an equal partner in the relationship, a fact not always acknowledged by some Australian commentators. When Dewi contributes to these debates she brings not only the interests of Indonesia to the table but also a sense of honesty and realism. Dewi’s credentials as a respected analyst and experienced researcher place her in an unusual position as a senior policy adviser. Although not a politician, she has contributed to policy making at the highest levels, both within Indonesia and at government-to-government meetings between Indonesia and Australia. This input began in the late 1990s and has continued up to the present. She is rare among Australian and Indonesian women for being in a position to influence policy-making, including policies that affect the ongoing bilateral relationship. Julia Suryakusuma, like Dewi Fortuna Anwar, is well known in both Indonesia and Australia. She is a writer with an international audience, made possible because her work is available in English. Julia undertook her postgraduate study not in Australia, but at the Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands. She completed her Masters in Development in 1988 and her thesis was the first

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analysis of the New Order’s ideology for co-opting women, and through them their families, as servants of the state. Entitled ‘State Ibuism: The Social Construction of Womanhood in New Order Indonesia,’ Julia’s thesis was not published until 2011 but had been available in photocopied form from the late 1980s. She was also among the first to expose publicly the encroachment of the New Order state into the private lives of its citizens, particularly women. As a result, Australian (and other) aid agencies drew on this information when they designed aid partnership in areas such as health, education, and economic development. In ways such as this, Julia’s exposé of State-Ibuism has made an important contribution to the bilateral relationship. Julia’s weekly columns in the Indonesian English-language daily, The Jakarta Post and her articles in the English edition of Tempo news magazine make a different kind of contribution. Since 2006, she has published witty, sometimes satirical, and always pointed, short pieces focussing on individuals or issues that illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of life in contemporary Indonesia. Although published in English, her columns have a devoted readership in Indonesia among ­Indonesians as well as English-speaking expatriates. Through online versions, they are also read outside Indonesia. Julia says that when she started writing these pieces in English she became ‘[V]ery conscious of my role in explaining Indonesia to the outside world’, adding a parenthesis in typical Julia style, ‘not that we I­ ndonesians necessarily understand what’s going on in our own, often-bewildering, country!’ (Suryakusuma 2013: xxiv). Julia has friends and colleagues in Australia, refers to Australia and ­Australians in her columns, and is interested in the nature of the bilateral relationship. In 2007, for example, one of her columns focussed on the twenty-fifth anniversary ­celebration in Jakarta of the Australia-Indonesia Youth Exchange Program— AIYEP. Describing a traditional dance from Aceh performed by young Indonesians and Australians, she wrote: I felt very moved by what I saw and by the energy and innocence emanating from these young people. It was like witnessing children dancing in the garden of Eden, joyful, without a care in the world, oblivious to the cultural, religious and political differences between their two countries that are so often played up by laymen and politicians alike. This is the true reality of Australia-Indonesia relations, I thought, not the crises beloved of the media, like East Timor; the 42 Papuan boat-people seeking asylum in Australia;35 Australian outrage at Abu Bakar Ba’asyir beating Bali bombing conspiracy charges; and the Schapelle Corby and Bali Nine cases etc., etc. (Suryakusuma 2013: 74).

Julia gives her readers, Indonesians and non-Indonesians, the opportunity to see the possibilities for unprejudiced interaction between young people, when they are able to meet as individuals with common interests, rather than representatives of their nation’s policies. 35  42 Papuans initially received temporary protection visas, before the 43rd member of the group also received a visa several months later.

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In Australia, Dewi Anggraeni was asked to contribute an essay on AustraliaIndonesia relations to a special Asia edition of the Griffith Review. It was 2005 and Dewi began her article stating that she was an Australian citizen and had lived more than half her life in Australia. She explained that emotionally: I feel both Indonesian and Australian. Each step Australia or Indonesia takes to move closer toward each other fills me with warmth and pride, the two sides of me coming together. Each time something happens that pulls the two countries apart, I feel the pain. And I feel embarrassed when Australia or Indonesia takes a step in the wrong direction’ (Anggraeni 2005: 109).

Dewi used her article to consider the complexities of the relationship and the misunderstandings that had occurred in 2004 and 2005, listing, as did Julia Suryakusuma, events such as Abu Bakar Ba’asyir’s ‘light’ sentence for his involvement in the Bali bombings and the conviction of Schapelle Corby for drug offences. She ended it with the hope that the young people in each nation could come to know each other better because ‘[W]hen we are young, there is more chance of our learning about each other with the least prejudice’ (Anggraeni 2005: 117).

Translating and Interpreting: A Partnership in Communication Bilateral relationships stand or fall on their capacity for mutual understanding. Essential to the accuracy of this understanding is language. Many Indonesians have excellent English but the number of Australians with native-speaker levels of Indonesian is disappointingly low. The first wave of Indonesian language graduates from Australian universities in the late 1960s and through the 1970s was responsible for introducing an international audience of English speakers to a diverse range of Indonesian writing. Max Lane and Harry Aveling brought the works of Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Rendra respectively to international attention. Suzan Piper translated more of Rendra’s works and Arimba Culture Exchange and Wot Cross-Culture brought Rendra to Australia to perform them.36 Jennifer Lindsay has translated the quirky, direct, and highly readable insights of Indonesia’s premier journalist, Goenawan Mohamad, in four books of selections from the Indonesian weekly magazine Tempo. The first in the series appeared in 1994, the year that Tempo was banned in Indonesia, and the fourth volume in 2015. Lindsay’s translations have ensured that the sophistication, astuteness and honesty of Goenawan Mohamad can be appreciated by Australians, as well as his influence in Indonesia.37 In 1997 Jan Lingard’s translation of Seno Gumira Ajidarma’s collection of short stories entitled Eyewitness, won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award-SBS Dinny 36  A special edition of Inside Indonesia edited by Suzan Piper provides an important series of evaluations of Rendra’s works, see Piper 2010. 37  Dr Lindsay’s award-winning essay about Goenawan is an excellent analysis of contemporary Indonesia, its strengths and weaknesses, for Australian readers. See Lindsay 2012.

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O’Hearn Prize for Literary Translation. This translation may not have assisted Indonesian-Australian bilateral relations at the time but the availability of an ­English version of ‘fictional’ stories about the abuse of human rights in East Timor under Indonesian occupation in the 1990s, helped focus international attention on the issue. Suzan Piper has reflected on the nature of the partnership between a speaker and their interpreter. She describes the process of articulating the thoughts of the speaker: ‘[I]t’s about inhabiting another person’s skin, their speech patterns— often even their pauses—and certainly their cultural and personal references, to realise them in another language and different cultural context in a way that conveys the message as faithfully as possible.’ Suzan has interpreted in various legal contexts, including for visiting Indonesian judges and also at various trials of Indonesian boat crew members charged with people smuggling. She has interpreted for meetings between then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and the Speaker of the Indonesian national legislature, and also for the former Governor General, Dame Quentin Bryce, as well as former New South Wales Governor, Marie Bashir and the Sultan of Yogyakarta. She has translated into Indonesian a number of important Australian films that touch on the bilateral relationship. They include Lucky Miles (2007), The Burning Season (2009) and Ruth Balint’s Troubled Waters (2001, about Indonesian fishermen apprehended in Australian territorial waters.) Since 2009 Suzan also translates fiction for the annual Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. Suzan describes the differences she sees between interpreting and translating particularly with reference to translation of literature: Translating has its own more sustained challenges of delivering a permanent record of a cross-cultural rendering of meaning … Once one becomes accustomed to being an accomplice, not the face or producer of the original work, it is a fascinating and intriguing profession, driving immense curiosity about knowledge across many domains. Not conceiving the original work does not in any way diminish the sweat and inspiration it takes to create a new piece that still fits in the target language out of the old (Piper, email: 9 September 2015).

It is through literature that many non-Indonesians gain their impressions of the people, culture and landscapes of Indonesia. Janet de Neefe, an Australian married to a Balinese and resident in Ubud since the late 1980s, describes her ‘continuing love affair with Bali’ in her book, Fragrant Rice.38 In 2004, in response to the deaths, destruction and economic damage to Bali caused by the bombings of 2002, Janet and Dr Ketut Suardana founded the non-profit organisation Yayasan Mudra Swari Saraswati. Through ‘a range of community-building arts and cultural p ­ rograms’ the Yayasan (Institute) aims to enrich ‘the lives and livelihoods of I­ndonesians.’

38 

See De Neefe 2003, quote from the cover.

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The Ubud Writers and Readers Festival is the best known of the Yayasan’s projects and brings an international audience to Ubud each year to interact with Indonesian and international authors.39 Australians play a large part in the F ­ estival as speakers, authors, commentators, translators, media representatives and ­audiences, and in these ways many Australians now appreciate and better understand contemporary Indonesia. Janet’s role in establishing, organising, sustaining, and publicising the Festival is indispensable to its success. Profits from the festival support education programs for young Indonesians.

Green Turtle Dreaming: Community Arts Linked by the Sea In 2002, an extraordinary bilateral community arts project was conceived by artist Susan Barlow-Clifton, composer/musician Melanie Humphrey, and translator Richard Barlow.40 The focus and inspiration for the project are the green turtles, ancient and long-lived creatures that inhabit the seas linking Indonesia and Australia. At risk are not only the turtles, now an endangered species, but also the stories, arts, music, and beliefs that the peoples of Eastern Indonesia and northern Australia have created around them. The project to collect and record these turtle-linked arts and stories ‘addresses a range of concerns including biodiversity, indigenous rights, traditional relationships with endangered species and the relationship between Australia and Indonesia’ (Dawkins 2004). The project was designed to involve communities not usually included in formal cultural exchanges, to give priority to communities in which resources are limited, and to work with communities only if those communities invited the organisers to do so. The result of the months of interactions is a travelling exhibition that brings together the recorded songs, stories, and drawings of artists and performers from all the communities involved in the project. Green Turtle Dreaming Exhibition toured city and regional museums in Australia and Indonesia between 2005 and 2006 and was awarded several prizes. This community arts and development project was conceived and led by women but it brought together men and women from remote areas of both nations in partnerships to preserve oral and visual arts and to protect an ancient marine species that is not constrained by national boundaries.

39 

See . Dawkins 2004 and ‘Green Turtle Dreaming’ at www.ccd.net/projects/browse.html?project ID=1123633100. This was a pilot project for the Australia-Indonesia Arts and Community Program, supported by the Australia Council and Asialink, and also by the AII, the Myer Foundation, the Mullum Trust, the Wettenhall Foundation, the NSW Ministry for the Arts, Arts Victoria, and Visions Australia. 40  See

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Phase 6, 2016—From Now On Most of the material and stories in this chapter has come directly from Indonesian and Australian women.41 The connections were initially made through my own networks but expanded rapidly as each woman introduced me to others. The support and generosity of the women who shared their stories and sent me material— sadly more than I can include in this chapter—has been extremely moving. The way the chapter expanded is an excellent example of the way women crisscross physical and cultural divides.42 Personal relationships lead to more connections. Today, blogs and social media make the connections more quickly and with more people. But the experiences of the women described here suggest that relationships take root and grow most strongly when individuals are able to live for extended periods within the ‘other’ culture. Nothing replaces experiential knowledge and the give and take that social contact necessitates. During the early phases of the bilateral relationship, women seemed to feel they were living and working between cultures, particularly if they were working in professional areas. When contacts through the arts gathered momentum in the 1990s, there were changes in the ways artists and performers viewed their own cultures. As well, when the opportunities for collaborative partnerships increased, the creativity that flowed when artists and performers worked on projects together produced something new for all of them. Dr Angie Bexley, an anthropologist who has collaborated with art and media workers in Indonesia and East Timor, suggests that perhaps the time has come to think not of ‘multiculturalism’ but ‘interculturalism.’ Angie explains the implications and potential of ‘interculturalism’: Interculturality means putting at stake the prejudice of belonging to a certain cultural identity or group and stepping into the unknown, without having a definite frame of reference for the work at hand. It means we are forced to go outside of our comfort zone and go without the things we are used to …

To do this, says Angie, implies the possibility of transformation. ‘At the heart of interculturality is a view of culture that is dynamic and the product of the processes of interaction, not isolation’ (Bexley in Crosby et al 2008: 112, 114, 115). The examples provided in this chapter show it is often artists and performers who are quick to recognise and appreciate the interactive nature of the relationship when colleagues from different cultures work together. The Green Turtle Dreaming community arts project identified the turtle as a creature central to the traditions 41  The exceptions are Philip Flood, who connected me with Jane Arthur, and Nicholas Metherall, who introduced me to Ibu Joria and Louise Simpson. 42  The riotous cover of the book Gang re:Publik illustrates the interconnectedness of these relationships. The cover (drawn by Karl Khue) is an intricate map of all kinds of dwellings untidily linked by a complex web of fine lines, criss-crossing, doubling back and connecting even the outer dwellings with the others, see Crosby et al 2008.

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of coastal communities around the Arafura Sea. Although all those communities recognised the significance of the turtle, expressions of that significance varied greatly. The artists recognised the commonalities and differences and collaborated to express their understandings through their art forms. Some of their works were re-creations of traditional arts, so they could be recorded in their new millennium versions. Other, combined creations, were conceived in an entirely new conceptual space, which Angie describes as ‘intercultural.’ The women who have been working in a bilateral context over the past decade, and who took the time to discuss their work with me, have all spent long periods in Indonesia. As well, some are married to Indonesians or have a parent or parents who are Indonesian. Like the green turtles, they move easily between cultures and, like the green turtles, they also inhabit a space beyond separate cultures, a zone that is recognised as shared territory. Because these women of the new millennium are comfortable in both cultures, they have the confidence to, in Angie’s words, step into the unknown. And in doing so, they are creating new, shared areas that are forming the basis for the future of the bilateral relationship. The chapter ends with examples of women who have the experience, networks, and skills to create and effectively use the new ‘intercultural’ areas where bilateral cooperation is a dynamic process. They have shown that this is not only possible but unexpectedly productive.43 Both Dr Angie Bexley and Dr Elly Kent have first-hand experience of community arts projects in Indonesia. Each has extensive in-country knowledge of Indonesia, with Indonesian language training, as well as anthropology and art respectively. Each has lived in Indonesia, with their partners and children, for extended periods and have established extensive professional networks. They have drawn on their contacts to prepare important exhibitions in both Australia and Indonesia, have facilitated art exchanges and conferences, and translate and interpret Indonesian and English materials for publication and circulation to wider audiences. Angie and her husband, artist and culinary expert Jon Priadi, have extensive experience working on intercultural art projects. One of these is a collaboration between local Indonesian artists and several from Australia in an innovative movement called ‘Culture Kitchen FoodLAB’. As Angie explains, it ‘[A]ims to document and recreate Indonesian food using modern techniques.’44 This is a project of interdisciplinary food and art practice that brings together anthropologists, chefs, and artists, as well as Australian students studying in Yogyakarta under the ACICIS scheme.45 Through events such as the Ubud Food Festival in Bali, they explain the history of shared Indonesia-Australia culinary connections.

43  Alexandra Crosby and Rebecca Conroy are other pioneers of creating and using the intercultural zone, most notably in the Gang Festivals they organised in 2005 and 2008, see Crosby et al 2008. 44  Email correspondence 19 September 2015. See the website . 45  The Australian Consortium for Indonesian In-Country Studies, which has greatly influenced the aims and style of the New Colombo Plan, explained in more detail in ch 20.

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Angie says their future plans all include ‘building people-to-people relations through the frame of art and food.’ Elly Kent has extensive practical experience of Indonesia’s art structures. In 2001, she worked as an intern (with Cemeti Art House, 2003) and held an Asialink Arts residency with the Indonesian Visual Arts Archive (2010) in ­Yogyakarta. During this period, she contributed to several local children’s art organisations. Working with one of those children’s groups she established ‘Teman Gambar’ (Drawing Pals), through which over one thousand children at selected Australian and Indonesian primary schools participated in programs of drawing exchange. The drawings became the basis for sharing ideas and images of their experiences. In 2015, Elly established Studio Auntara, an informal network of people ‘interested in sharing language and cultural opportunities and collaborating on projects across Australia and Indonesia.’ The long-term goal is to facilitate residencies for Indonesian and Australian artists in non-metropolitan areas, which would, for the first time, take artists beyond the big cities and into the more remote areas of each nation. In early 2017, she also organised a new ACICIS internship program, Creative Art and Design Professional Practicum, placing Australian tertiary art students in studios and galleries to work with established Indonesian artists and curators (Kent, emails: May 2015 and interview 15 December 2016). The most innovative intercultural works require several years lead-time and funding throughout that period to sustain the enterprise. A consortium of funding bodies, like that assembled for the Green Turtle Dreaming project, seems to be essential to bring highly creative work to fruition. One such project was the acclaimed collaboration between Australian dancer and choreographer Ade Suharto and Indonesian vocalist and composer, Peni Candra Rini, that began in 2012. Inspired by the strong female character Ontosoroh in Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s historical novel This Earth of Mankind (first published in 1980), Ade and Peni took two years to create and develop ‘Ontosoroh,’ a unique musical dancedrama that was produced by Lee-Anne Donnolley. Asialink, Arts SA, Australia Council and the AII each gave financial support and further grants were needed to take the production overseas. After performing in Australia, it went to Canada and several Indonesian cities and was enthusiastically received at each venue. In 2014, the Australian Embassy supported its presentation at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. Australian Ambassador Greg Moriarty described it as ‘a v­ isionary piece of work reflecting a meaningful and sustained collaboration between talented Australian and Indonesian artists.’46 Also developing and exploring the intercultural zone are Alfira O’Sullivan and Kristi Monfries, daughter of Isti and John Monfries. Kristi facilitates collaborations between Indonesian and Australian visual artists and musicians with the

46 ‘Ontosoroh: Australia-Indonesia Dance Theatre Collaboration’, Australian Embassy Indonesia Media Release, 5 October 2014.

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aim of creating a completely new musical tradition.47 Alfira O’Sullivan, of Acehnese and Irish parentage, formed the Sydney-based Suara Indonesia Dance Group in 2001 and is its artistic director. Since then Alfira has worked to preserve traditional Indonesian dance in Australia but also to create new dance forms that incorporate Australian and Indonesian elements. In late 2015, Suara Indonesia Dance performed and held workshops with the Yirrkala Community in East Arnhem Land.48 In the area of business and education three young women are building on and extending the work done by their predecessors over the past two decades. Lydia Santoso, a solicitor in Sydney, assists Australians wanting to enter the Indonesian market or set up businesses there. Lydia’s Indonesian father met her mother in Cessnock, New South Wales, while he was training to be a Garuda pilot. Lydia was raised in both nations, attending schools in each, and has a law degree from the University of New South Wales. Now working with her husband in their own legal practice, Lydia travels frequently between both countries. She is pioneering a new zone of interaction between Australians and Indonesians through the creation of small and medium business enterprises in Indonesia and in Australia that serve bilateral and international markets. Lydia’s contribution to the bilateral relationship extends beyond her work as a solicitor. She was a member of NSW Government’s Multicultural Business Advisory Council (2013–2015) and chair of NSW branch of the Australia ­ ­Indonesia Business Council, for the maximum period of two terms. She is a strong advocate for the AIBC to provide a business-to-business alternative to government-to-government relations. This would ensure that it can be business as usual during periods of tension in bilateral relations. Lydia has a keen interest in projects to support young leaders in both nations and she has recently been appointed to the selection panel for New Colombo Plan and the Board of the AII, where her experiences in the intercultural zone will be invaluable. Dr Kirrilee Hughes and Jemma Parsons both studied Indonesian at their ­Australian high schools in the 1990s. Kirrilee won a scholarship to spend one year on an AFS (American Field Service Intercultural Programs) high school exchange, during which she lived with a host family in Yogyakarta. She studied Indonesian (and Chinese) at the ANU and, as part of her undergraduate degree, spent one year in Indonesia on the ACICIS program. Kirrilee had a part-time job while she was still studying at the ANU assisting the Education and Culture Attaché at the Indonesian Embassy in Canberra. Jemma also enrolled in Indonesian at the ANU, also worked in the Culture Attaché’s office in Canberra, and studied in Indonesia on the ACICIS program a few years after Kirrilee. 47  Interview with Kristi Monfries, Canberra, 26 August 2015. See her website . 48  Thanks to Suzan Piper for alerting me to Alfira’s work and website .

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Both Kirrilee and Jemma have extensive in-country experience and near native Indonesian language proficiency. Kirrilee believes, however, that more than that is needed to reach the senior levels in the professional world, as she, Jemma and Lydia have done (Hughes, email: 14 September 2015). Lydia has a law degree, Jemma has a Masters and besides her doctoral degree, Kirrilee has a Masters in Marketing. Previously working as Deputy Director Indonesian Affairs at the University of New South Wales’s International Centre, Kirrilee was responsible for all aspects of the university’s engagement with Indonesia. She is currently Partner Director and CEO of AFS, where her leadership in intercultural programs extends beyond Indonesia, although she still maintains her special links with colleagues there. Like Lydia, Kirrilee is associated closely with organisations that foster bilateral relations. She has succeeded Lydia as chair of the NSW branch of the AIBC, having for three years served as national Executive Officer for the AIBC. Jemma has a Masters in Asian Law and has lived in Indonesia for extended periods working in the fields of Islamic education, curriculum reform in Islamic universities, and in business development for a large Australian-based business consultancy. She was Senior Consultant at Cardno Emerging Markets before moving to The Strategy Group, Sydney, a consulting firm specialising in innovation, where she is a Director. When I asked Jemma how her work with Cardno contributed to the bilateral relationship she replied: [B]y having Indonesia specialists in business-development roles the company is contributing to the bilateral relationship by doing good business and building strong business relationships between Australian and Indonesian companies, and between Australian companies and the Indonesian government (Parsons, email: 15 September 2015).

In fact, Australian companies and businesses are yet to explore the potential of the intercultural zone. As Angie Bexley explained, working interculturally requires moving outside normal comfort zones in order to transform rather than maintain the status quo. Jemma Parsons believes that most Australian firms, particularly large listed companies, find it very difficult to operate in the ‘regulatory and operational ambiguities’ that characterise the Indonesian business sector. She says: [I]t’s actually a fairly commonly acknowledged phenomenon that to do well in business in Indonesia you need to have a reasonable level of comfort operating in the grey area that is the Indonesian business and regulatory environment.

She adds: Most Australian firms, particularly large listed companies, are not good at this. They need clarity to be sure for themselves and their shareholders that they are 100% compliant with Indonesian law (Parsons, email: 22 September 2015).

Knowing what compliance means in the Indonesian context and explaining to Indonesian businesses the nature and importance of compliance in Australia is an area ripe for intercultural negotiation.

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Margaret Bradley has been exploring the intercultural zone since the 1990s through her musical compositions and performances,49 as well as through her contributions to intercultural education. In her work for the New South Wales Department of Education and Communities, she devises and implements creative arts programs for school teachers and pupils in which she incorporates examples of music, art and dance from Indonesia.50 Margaret’s workshops are designed to encourage exploration by taking individuals beyond their comfort zones. In 2015, she worked with three Indonesian artist/performers who live in Australia, three primary arts teachers, and three Indonesian language teachers to develop online learning modules for the project CLASP (Culture, Language and Arts in Schools Project).51 The Indonesian artist/ performers and the teachers step together into an intercultural space where they explore new areas of artistic experience. As the teachers develop their sense of creativity they are also developing themselves, developing new areas in art and language practice, and finding new ways to help their pupils do the same. Schools—places of learning, socialisation, and community interaction—are at the heart of the bilateral relationship. In Australia, opportunities now exist for teachers and parents to suggest projects that will enhance children’s experiences and deepen their learning. Some schools see a relationship with a sister school, outside Australia, as an opportunity to extend the experience of their pupils. Dr Sally White, whose research includes extensive contact with Indonesian Muslim women’s organisations, has special connections with Farha Ciciek, a leading Indonesian activist for human rights, particularly gender equality. In 2009, Farha Ciciek and her husband established a non-profit community activity and support group for disadvantaged children in Ledokombo, a sub-­ district in East Java.52 The achievements of the children have become famous across Indonesia, and Australians visit and raise funds for the group. When the school that Sally’s children attend in Australia was considering a sister school linkage in Asia, Sally made the case for a school in Indonesia. The suggestion was accepted and the principal asked Sally to recommend one. Sally consulted Ciciek who suggested the local primary school in Ledokombo. Discussions are underway about what forms the interaction will take and how it can be developed. Both schools will be moving outside their comfort zones, and ways of communication will have to be found—perhaps through art, like the ‘Drawing Pals’ program Elly Kent initiated. The schools will be moving into unchartered waters in their experience but along lines already established by others. They will find their own path and they 49  Margaret’s Sydney-based group ‘Songket’ play her compositions, which reflect the Australian Indonesian cultural mix. 50 Between 2013 and 2015, Margaret was Creative Arts Adviser, Early Learning and Primary Education, Learning and Leadership for NSW state schools, Kindergarten to Year 6. 51  Margaret Bradley email correspondence, 28 August 2015. 52  The group is called Tanoker, see and . See also, McMillan 2011 for information about Farha Ciciek.

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will discover the shared zone of intercultural space where children, teachers, and parents will create something that is new for both schools. When Ciciek learned of the sister-school plans she emailed Sally to say: ‘I am moved and more than “happy” because our sisterly relationship which is like extended family, is moving beyond that to become a friendship between our countries.’53 This is just one of the ways Indonesian and Australian women continue to connect—friendship and informal links become the basis for action and interaction. Over time there is the trust and confidence to create an intercultural zone where ‘bilateral’ is no longer the characteristic that defines the relationship.

Acknowledgements Dewi Anggraeni, Dewi Fortuna Anwar, Jane Arthur, Tieke Atikah, Angie Bexley, Margaret Bradley, Alison Carroll, Zuly Chudori, Farha Ciciek, Christine Clark, Alexandra Crosby, Philip Flood, Elizabeth Hallett, Ratih Hardjono, Barbara Hatley, M.B. Hooker, Kirrilee Hughes, Lanita Idrus, Ibu Joria Jepe, Adrienne Jones, Yohanni Johns, Margaret Kartomi, Elly Kent, Jenny Lindsay, Jan Lingard, Elaine McKay, Amelia McKenzie, Cathy Mardisiswoyo, Nicholas Metherall, John and Isti Monfries, Kristi Monfries, Inez Nimpuno, Jemma Parsons, Suzan Piper, Lydia Santoso, Louise Simpson, Ade Suharto, Caroline Turner, G.R. (Dick) Varley, Sally White, and Amrih Widodo. It has been a privilege to learn more about the ways women in both nations have worked together for the greater good and it has been difficult and challenging to select material for the chapter from the wealth of information I now know exists. There are many stories still to be told.

References Allen, Pamela (1995) Women’s Voices: An Anthology of Short Stories by Indonesian Women Writers (Melbourne, Longman Australia Pty Ltd). Anggraeni, Dewi (2005) ‘The Pain of Disrespect’, Spring, Griffith REVIEW 109. Australia in the Asian Century (2012). Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, White Paper. Bexley, Angie (2008) ‘Towards an Intercultural Art Practice’ in Alexandra Crosby, Rebecca Conroy, Suzan Piper and Jan Cornall (eds), Gang re:Publik: IndonesiaAustralia Creative Adventures (Newtown, Gang Festival, printed by Ligare), 112. Carroll, Alison (2014) ‘People and Partnership: An Australian Model for International Arts Exchanges—The Asialink Arts Program, 1990–2010’, 199.

53 

Email correspondence, Farha Ciciek to Sally White, 28 July 2015.

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Carroll, Alison (2008) ‘Indonesian Journey’ in A Crosby et al (eds), Gang re:Publik: Indonesia-Australia Creative Adventures (Newtown, Gang Festival, printed by Ligare), 63. Crosby, Alexandra, Conroy, Rebecca, Piper, Suzan, Cornall, Jan (eds) (2008) Gang re:Publik: Indonesia-Australia Creative Adventures (Newtown, Gang Festival, printed by Ligare). Dawkins, Zoe (2004) Swimming with the Tide: Australia-Indonesia Arts + Community Program (Melbourne, Victoria GT Graphics, The Asialink Centre, The University of Melbourne). De Neefe, Janet (2003) Fragrant Rice (Sydney, HarperCollins). Flood, Philip (2011) Dancing with Warriors: A Diplomatic Memoir (North Melbourne, Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd). Hardjono, Joan (1977) Transmigration in Indonesia (Singapore, Oxford University Press). Hardjono, Joan (1987) Land, Labour and Livelihood in a West Java Village (Yogyakarta, Gadjah Mada University Press). Hardjono, Joan (ed) (1991) Indonesia: Resources, Ecology, and Environment (Singapore, Oxford University Press). Hardjono, Joan and Warner, Charles (ed) (1995) In Love with a Nation: Molly Bondan and Indonesia, Her Own Story in her Own Words (Sydney, Southwood Press Pty Ltd). Hardjono, Ratih (1992) Suku Putihnya Asia: Perjalanan Australia Mencari Jati Dirinya (Jakarta, Gramedia). Hardjono, Ratih (1993, second revised edition) White Tribe of Asia: An Indonesian View of Australia (Clayton, Monash Asia Institute; South Yarra, Hyland House). Hatley, Barbara (2002) ‘Literature, Mythology and Regime Change: Some Observations on Recent Indonesian Women’s Writing’ in Kathryn Robinson and Sharon Bessell (eds), Women in Indonesia: Gender, Equity and Development (Singapore, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies), 130. Hatley, Barbara (1997) ‘Nation, “Tradition” and Constructions of the Feminine in Modern Indonesian Literature’ in J Schiller and B Martin-Schiller (eds), Imagining Indonesia: Cultural Politics and the Politics of Culture (Athens Ohio, Center for International Studies University of Ohio), 90. Hill, Hal (1994) ‘The Economy’ in Hal Hill (ed), Indonesia’s New Order: The Dynamics of Socio-economic Transformation (St Leonards, Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd). Idrus, Lanita (1995) ‘Growth, Change and New Directions in Education’ in H Da Costa et al (ed) Indonesians in Victoria from the 1950s (Melbourne, Monash University, Monash Asia Institute). Johns, Yohanni (1971) Dishes from Indonesia (Melbourne / Sydney, Thomas Nelson Australia) Ltd.

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Johns, Yohanni, in collaboration with Robyn Stokes (first edition 1977) Bahasa Indonesia Langkah Baru: A New Approach (Canberra, Faculty of Asian Studies, in association with Australian National University Press). Johns, Yohanni (1981, 2nd ed 1990) Bahasa Indonesia Langkah Baru: A New Approach. Book Two, 2nd edn (Canberra, Australian National University Press). Johns, Yohanni (1996) Bahasa Indonesia: Langkah Baru: A New Approach, Book Three: Bertutur & Bertukar Pikiran (Jannali NSW, AS Wilson, Inc). Kerin, John (2004) ‘Ex-Army Analyst Smeared Beazley’, The Australian 1 July: 2 Lindsay, Jennifer (1994) Cultural Organisation in Southeast Asia: A Guide for Artists, Performers, and Cultural Workers (Strawberry Hills NSW: The Australia Council). Lindsay, Jennifer (2012) ‘Man on the Margins’, Australian Book Review, October, 345. Lingard, Jan with Bibi Lanker and Suzan Piper (1995) Eyewitness/Seno Gumira Adjidarma (Potts Point NSW, EET Imprint). Lingard, Jan (2008, reprinted 2010) Refugees and Rebels: Indonesian Exiles in Wartime Australia (North Melbourne, Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd). McMillan, Joanne (2011) ‘Interpreting Islam for Women’, Inside Indonesia, No 103: Jan-Mar 2011, . Maxwell, Robyn (1990) Textiles of Southeast Asia: Tradition, Trade and Transformation (Canberra/Melbourne, Australian National Gallery/Oxford University Press). O’Neill, Hugh (1995) ‘Volunteer Graduates’ in H Da Costa et al (ed), Indonesians in Victoria from the 1950s (Clayton, Monash University, Monash Asia Institute). Piper, S and Sawung Jabo (1987) ‘Musik Indonesia dari 1950-an hingga 1980-an’ (Indonesian Music from the 1950s to the 1980s), 5 Prisma 8. Piper, S (2008) ‘in between’ in Alexandra Crosby, Rebecca Conroy, Suzan Piper, Jan Cornall (eds), Gang re:Publik: Indonesia-Australia Creative Adventures (Newtown, Gang Festival, printed by Ligare), 80. Piper, Suzan (ed) (2010) ‘Remembering Rendra’, Inside Indonesia, No 101, JulySeptember, www.insideindonesia.org/feature/remembering-rendra-02071330. Purdey, Jemma (2011) From Vienna to Yogyakarta: The Life of Herb Feith (University of New South Wales, UNSW Press. Sedgwick, Georgia (2006) Jalan-Jalan: The Indonesia-Australia Arts Management Program 1999-2006. University of Melbourne: Asialink. Shelley, Judy, (2008) ‘Australia-Indonesia—A Love Affair to Remember’ in Alexandra Crosby, Rebecca Conroy, Suzan Piper, Jan Cornall (eds), Gang re:Publik: Indonesia-Australia Creative Adventures (Newtown, Gang Festival, printed by Ligare), 96. Sheridan, Greg (2004) ‘Artificial Intelligence’, The Australian, 1 July: 16.

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Suryakusuma, Julia (2011) State Ibuism: The Social Construction of Womanhood in New Order Indonesia (Depok, West Java: Komunitas Bambu). Suryakusuma, Julia (2013) Julia’s Jihad (Depok, West Java: Komunitas Bambu). Tahija, Jean (1998) An Unconventional Woman (Hawthorn, Penguin Books Australia). Turner, Caroline (2014) ‘Introduction Part 1—Critical Themes, Geopolitical Change and Global Contexts in Contemporary Asian Art’ in Michelle Antoinette and Caroline Turner (eds) Contemporary Asian Art and Exhibitions: Connectivities and World-making (Canberra ACT: ANU Press), 1.

20 Language, Learning, and Living Together: Education as a Bilateral Barometer DAVID T HILL

Politicians often note the stark contrasts between Australia and Indonesia before they proceed to assure their publics of the importance of bilateral collaboration. What is less commonly acknowledged by governments is that, given such differences, our capacity to collaborate for mutual benefit requires investment in developing the ability to communicate with, and to gain direct knowledge of, the other community. This chapter therefore explores the bilateral relationship through the lens of education in general, and more specifically through ­Australians’ study of the national language of Indonesia. To provide background, I begin with a discussion of the shared history that stimulated the teaching of Indonesian in ­Australian schools and universities—which has experienced both boom and bust. As a measure of the effectiveness of our respective education systems in providing a grounded knowledge of the other society, I then contrast the prominence amongst Indonesian political leaders of alumni from Australian universities with the paucity in the Australian community of Australian politicians with experience of Indonesia. The evidence presented in the chapter demonstrates that the process of learning Indonesian, and particularly of studying in Indonesia, provides an invaluable asset for the Australian community as these two nations seek to balance their contrasts with an inevitably shared future.

A Turbulent History On a warm early September morning in 2015, the Australian Ambassador to ­Indonesia, Paul Grigson, and the then Indonesian Ambassador to Australia, ­Nadjib Riphat Kesoema, exchanged pleasantries as they sat together under a large white awning in Yogyakarta’s Vredeburg Fort Museum. For the first time in our diplomatic history, each nation’s ambassador had recently been temporarily withdrawn by their government to express displeasure with the behaviour of the other.

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Ambassador Nadjib had been recalled over allegations of Australian tapping of the phones of the Indonesian president’s inner circle, while Ambassador Grigson had been recalled after the execution of two Australian drug smugglers. It was a measure of the bilateral tensions over recent years. The fort in which they met is a colonial legacy of Dutch control of Indonesia but the ambassadors were there to focus on another history. They were launching an exhibition called ‘Black Armada’ celebrating the black-banning by Australian wharfies of Dutch ships to prevent colonial re-occupation after the declaration of Indonesian independence in August 1945. After several years when most attention had been placed on the tensions in the current bilateral relationship, focussing on the Black Armada might be regarded as an attempt to shine the spotlight on something more positive: the two countries’ long history of collaboration—and, in particular, Australia’s support for, rather than antagonism towards, Indonesian government policy. When casting around for an indication of the length and depth of Australia’s relationship with Indonesia, many with long memories retell the story of the ‘Black Armada’. That campaign—captured so graphically by the documentary film-maker Joris Ivens in his classic short film Indonesia Calling (screened on a loop as part of the Vredeburg Fort Museum exhibit)—may be regarded as the symbolic beginning of what is often referred to broadly as the ‘­people-to-people’ relationship.1 At a time when the fledgling Indonesian republic was struggling to repel Dutch re-occupation of their archipelago from bases in Australia, the solidarity of left-wing labourers on Australian wharfs provided both strategic and moral support, long-remembered in some quarters in Indonesia, if virtually unknown to ordinary Australians. Coupled with the diplomatic support given to Indonesia by the Curtin and ­Chifley Labor governments (1942–49), and championed by individual diplomats like Tom Critchley, through such mechanisms as the United Nations’ Good Offices Committee, there was a broad embrace of Indonesia at both the governmental and ‘people to people’ level.2 This curious connection between the activist Indonesian unionists and diplomats and their Australian counterparts remains a high-point in the bilateral relationship—one to which we are yet to return. It was not long before this same wave of support for, and interest in, ­Indonesia spread to Australia’s post-war universities. As ably recounted by Jemma ­Purdey, the young activist scholar Herbert Feith both undertook painstakingly detailed research to understand and analyse Indonesian politics, and initiated the ­Volunteer Graduates Scheme, which grew into Australian Volunteers ­International, and inspired the government’s Australian Volunteers for International Development (AVID).3 In this, Feith was but a primus inter pares, with his generation including world-renowned Indonesianist scholars like Jamie 1  See Ivens (1946). The most comprehensive study of Indonesians’ activities in Australia during the struggle for Independence is Lingard (2008). See also Lockwood (1982). 2  The most detailed study of this period is George (1980). See also Lingard (2008). 3  See Purdey (2011). On AVID, see .

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Mackie and John Legge. The philosophical basis of Feith’s engagement was that ­Australians should be prepared to live amongst ordinary Indonesians, on local salaries, and contribute as equals to the development of the nation. It was implicit that such volunteers—and the graduate students supervised by such Indonesianist scholars—would learn the national language of Indonesian.

Introducing Indonesian Language Along with an interest in the politics of southeast Asia in Australian universities, the 1950s saw the emergence of the first courses in Indonesian language, with Feith’s University of Melbourne, the University of Sydney, and Canberra ­University College (later to become the Australian National University), awarded Commonwealth grants for Indonesian and Malayan studies in September 1955 (­Purdey 2011: 186). It was a linguistic landscape dominated by classical and modern ­European languages. Latin, Greek, French and German provided the basics of a broad liberal arts degree, with little support for the languages of Asia. While ­Japanese language competence had proved a valuable war-time skill and no doubt numerous ­Australian servicemen and women had picked up some Asian languages during their tours of duty in the region, it was still largely the European classical and modern languages that dominated universities. The value of teaching Indonesian in universities (and schools) was recognised in Australian government policy. The Australian Curriculum Authority (ACARA), for example, has noted explicitly that since Indonesian was introduced into ­Australian schools ‘a number of government policy initiatives have supported the teaching of Indonesian, largely for economic and national security reasons. The introduction of Indonesian language studies in 1955 was in response to the ­Australian ­Government’s concerns about regional stability in Asia’ (Australian Curriculum nd). It was upon Indonesia—sometimes dubbed the ‘arc of ­ instability’—that many of those concerns were focussed, as the young nation rapidly claimed an increasingly substantial role in the emerging non-aligned movement, born at the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung. During the final decade of Soekarno’s presidency (1945–66) Australia’s ­diplomatic relationship with Indonesia became increasingly tense, as I­ndonesia adopted a fiercely independent foreign policy, inclining to the left in the global polarisation of the Cold War. The Australian government was alarmed by ­Indonesia’s campaign to incorporate West Papua (deferred during the initial independence negotiations with the Dutch colonial power in the 1940s) and ­Soekarno’s ‘Confrontation’ of Malaysia, which led to Australian and Indonesian troops s­quaring off against each other in the jungles of Borneo/Kalimantan in another rarely known side-story in the bilateral relationship.4 4  See Mackie (1974). Australia’s involvement was kept secret at the time, but 23 Australians were killed during Confrontation. See Australian War Memorial, nd.

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Ironically, perhaps, the fall of Soekarno and the rise of Major-General S­ oeharto’s New Order stimulated an expansion in interest in the learning of Indonesian in Australian schools and universities. Indonesian language was introduced into a growing number of high schools in New South Wales (NSW), for example, in the mid-1960s, and enrolments in university courses of the language increased significantly.5 Language competence emerged in the most unexpected places and individuals. The potential of linguistic expertise to influence the temperature of the ­bilateral relationship is perhaps best illustrated by the impression left on President ­Soeharto by the skills of one particularly well-placed individual. As a long-time Australian resident in Asia, Geoffrey Gold noted recently:6 On 13 June 1968, the second Australian Prime Minister to visit Indonesia, Mr John ­Gorton, accompanied by Mrs Bettina Gorton, was welcomed to Djakarta by President Suharto and [his wife] Ibu Siti Hartinah. […] Mrs Gorton replied on behalf of her ­husband … in Bahasa Indonesia. She was fluent in both Indonesian and Javanese ­languages, had lived in Indonesia during 1966 and had spoken to Indonesian audiences on Radio Australia.

Gold noted of the Gortons’ visit that the ‘purpose of the Australian mission was to consult with the New Order government on its economic stabilisation and development priorities—Gorton had doubled non-military aid—and to support the recently formed Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN)’. Security and economic concerns certainly loomed large, but the president’s curiosity was piqued by Mrs Gorton’s Indonesian language skills. President Soeharto reportedly noted at dinner that night: It is indeed an honour, it is even very moving for the Indonesian people that this time outside the Malay race we have a State guest who is well versed in our language and who has a thorough knowledge of the Indonesian culture. I feel that Mrs. Gorton’s ­fluency and her knowledge of the Indonesian language are a manifestation of the friendly f­eelings and the understanding of the Australian people about the Indonesian people.

At no subsequent time has an Indonesian president been able to make such observations of an Australian Prime Minister or their spouse—or, for that matter, a foreign minister or any other member of an Australian government. The case of Bettina Gorton (nee Brown), illustrates the often haphazard process through which many had come to learn Indonesian. In 1934, Bettina Brown had been a young American language student studying at the Sorbonne in Paris when she met John Gorton in Spain. After her first trip to Southeast Asia in 1960, when she accompanied her husband—then minister assisting Paul Hasluck as Minister for External Affairs—on an official visit to Sarawak, she developed a lifelong 5  I recall the late Jamie Mackie arguing that the surge in enrolments in Indonesian at Melbourne University in the early New Order years had as much to do with interest from student critics of the New Order as it did with any Australian government policy of rapprochement with Indonesia. 6  See, , dated 27 July 2015.

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interest in the region and its languages. In 1967, she graduated from the ANU with an Honours degree in Asian studies, when her husband was Minister for Education and Science, and began working as a part-time research assistant on the ANU’s English-Malay dictionary project (Australian Government, National Archives of Australia (NAA) nd). This personal relationship between a student of ­Indonesian language and the Minister for Education suggests that an awareness of both ­Indonesia and the value of Indonesian language competence would have been uppermost in the mind of the man who was both overseeing educational policy and was to assume the prime ministership. In 1968, after Gorton’s election to that office, the couple made their official visit to Malaysia and Indonesia. In Malaysia, her work on the dictionary project was already well known and, as a result, her official speeches during the visit were widely reported. In Indonesia, her speeches and ready conversations with people in their own language had an impact few prime ministerial wives have managed. (Australian Government, NAA nd)

Decades later, in 1997, former Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam recalled ­Bettina Gorton having used her Indonesian language skills to make a lasting and valuable contribution to ‘Australia’s relations with our great neighbour’ (­Australian Government, NAA nd). Rising interest in Indonesian language in the early 1970s coincided with the decision of the Whitlam Labor Government (1972–75) to engage more independently with Asia, while also substantially increasing access to a university education. ­University tuition fees were abolished and student living allowances were institutionalised. In post-war Australia, new universities had been springing up around the country every couple of years, with 11 established in the 21 years between between 1954 and 1975.7 The majority of these—notably New ­England, Monash, La Trobe, Flinders, James Cook, Griffith, Murdoch, and Deakin— included a major in Indonesian language.

Indonesian’s Boom and Bust The 1970s and 1980s were a buoyant time for Indonesian language—and I­ ndonesian studies more generally—in Australian universities. Internationally r­ecognised ­centres of research on Indonesia were being built at the ANU (the ­Indonesia Project) (Brown 2015) and Monash (the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies).

7 These were: 1954, University of New England; 1958, Monash University; 1964, Macquarie ­ niversity; 1965, La Trobe University; 1965, University of Newcastle; 1966, Flinders University; U 1970, James Cook University; 1971, Griffith University; 1973, Murdoch University; 1974, Deakin University; and 1975, University of Wollongong, .

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By the mid-1970s the first-year Indonesian course at ANU, for ­example, had routine enrolments in excess of 100. The subsequent establishment of a­ cademic concentrations on Asian Studies in universities in most other states complemented these. In the late 1980s, newer universities like Murdoch in Perth were also attracting more than 100 students to their first-year Indonesian language courses. This growth in Indonesian language enrolments in Australian education attracted little, if any, attention in analyses of the bilateral relationship, which focussed almost exclusively upon trade, security, and ­government-to-government relations. When summarising the achievements in Australia’s relations with ­Indonesia in 1991, for example, Foreign Minister Gareth Evans noted his May 1989 initiative in establishing the Australia-Indonesia Institute, yet made no ­mention of Australia’s Indonesian language competence as a measure of bilateral cordiality (Evans 1991: 1–14). Nor do the major compilations analysing the bilateral relationship during the 1990s refer to Indonesian language skills or levels of interest in learning ­Indonesian in the Australian community (for example, Ball and Wilson 1991; and Brown 1996). The educational linkages were focussed almost exclusively on the flow of fee-paying (or scholarship-receiving) Indonesian students into Australian universities, with rarely even a passing mention of ‘student exchange’ to imply the possibility of a reverse flow of Australians going to Indonesia to study.8 The learning of Indonesian language by growing numbers of Australians was regarded as peripheral to the realpolitik of the bilateral (economic and political) relationship. During Paul Keating’s prime ministership (1991–96), with its emphasis on a broad ‘engagement’ with Asia,9 and ‘with growing national interest in trade with Asia, the Australian government introduced the National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools (NALSAS) Strategy, which enabled a major expansion of Indonesian in schools, particularly in the primary sector. Indonesian rapidly became the third most-studied foreign language in Australian schools.’10 In fact, the early 1990s were a high-water mark in the study of Indonesian in Australian universities, with NALSAS boosting studies of Indonesian in schools. Up to 25 universities were offering Indonesian language (at some level), but academics began to note a slow decrease in interest in Indonesian. By the late 1990s, there were forebodings that the tide was receding, with the closure of Indonesian at James Cook University in 1997 starting a trend, as enrolments slipped nationally.11 Lecturers spoke with concern of the negative effect on enrolments of media images of Indonesian soldiers behaving brutally in East Timor (occupied by ­Indonesia from December 1975 until October 1999). The issue proved more than a ‘pebble in the shoe’ (to quote then Indonesian Foreign Minister, Ali Alatas,

8  9 

See, eg, Moegiadi (1996: 135–40), Peacock (1996: 141–47) and Rogers-Winarto (2006: 87–105). For Keating’s views on his prime ministership, see Keating (2000).

10 , accessed 13 September 2017. 11  Hill (2012: 63) provides a list of universities teaching Indonesian.

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in 1992) for the two governments. It was a constant source of negative media coverage, with Alatas later admitting ‘in its final years the East Timor problem was no longer a mere pebble in the shoe, but had become a big boulder dragging down Indonesia’s international reputation to one of its lowest points’.12 By the time President Soeharto was forced to step down in the face of sustained public opposition in May 1998, it was as if the interest in the language that had been triggered from the late 1960s had waned. Research documenting enrolments in Indonesian language programs in Australian universities since 2000 reveals the rapid descent of Indonesian (Hill 2012). In the period between 2001 and 2009, national enrolments in Indonesian language in Australian universities plummeted by around 37%, despite the total university enrolment surging by about the same percentage overall during this same period. In some states, the fall was even more dramatic, as Indonesian programs started closing in universities around the country. In a stroke of poor timing, just as university enrolments in Indonesian were starting to fall, in 2002 the Howard coalition government prematurely terminated NALSAS, which had been stimulating enrolments in secondary schools. That same year, the Asian Studies Association of Australia published a key report indicating that, while university enrolments in Indonesian had increased four-fold from 1988 until 2001, ‘from the late 1990s, Indonesian programs were in decline or in ­jeopardy at a number of universities’ (ASAA 2002: 40). The cessation of NALSAS in turn exacerbated the decline in interest at the tertiary level. When the Foreign Affairs Sub Committee of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade of the Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia published its 2004 report Near Neighbours—Good ­Neighbours: An Inquiry into Australia’s Relationship with Indonesia, it was in no doubt about the threats to Australia’s knowledge base concerning Indonesia (­Australia. Foreign Affairs Sub Committee 2004). It received submissions indicating that ‘Indonesian studies is undergoing a grave decline around the country, with staff and student numbers contracting or stagnant in many institutions’ (p 146). The Committee responded by recommending ‘that Indonesian Studies be designated a strategic national priority and that the Australia Research Council and the Department of Education, Science and Training be requested to recognise this in prioritising funding for both research and teaching’ (Recommendation 18, p 147). Convinced of the benefits of a school-based incentive program for Asian languages, the Committee also recommended ‘that NALSAS … be restored, or a program with similar aims and an equivalent level of funding be established’ (Recommendation 19, p 161). It was another four years of renewed economic and strategic focus on Asia after the 2004 Near Neighbours—Good Neighbours report before a similar incentive scheme to NALSAS was implemented, albeit briefly. The National Asian

12 

Quoted in Thompson (2006).

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­ anguages and Studies in Schools Program (NALSSP) was introduced in 2008 to L revive the study of Indonesian (along with three other targeted Asian languages) in ­Australian schools but, like the ill-fated NALSAS, it survived only until 2012 before it too was shut down prematurely. One can only speculate on the causes but within a year or two of the commencement of NALSSP, the dramatic decline of Indonesian enrolments at ­university level in Australia slowed. As Figures 1 and 2 illustrate, from 2009 onwards, the downward trend of the previous decade flattened, with enrolments fluctuating slightly from year to year but generally relatively level nationally at about 300 EFTSL (equivalent to about 1,200 students in total).13 While nationally enrolments were relatively flat in the five years after 2009, the growth in some states masked an alarming fall in other jurisdictions (notably ­Tasmania and South Australia), as is evident from the break-down in Figure 2. Decelerating the decline of the century’s first decade is but a poor achievement, however. Indonesian language enrolments in Australian universities remain in the doldrums. Advocates of Indonesia-literacy in Australian universities looking for good news may take some solace from halting the decline, but since 2009, enrolments have been merely flat-lining, not rebounding. It needs a substantial sustained investment over a decade to re-build the subject. It is a matter of speculation as to what factors might have halted the national decline in Indonesian enrolments. The public attention generated by the national consultation that proceeded the formulation of Australia in the Asian Century White Paper (2012) and the Coalition’s energetic promotion of the New Colombo Plan—making study in Asia part of Australia’s foreign affairs strategy—may have 500 400 300 200 100

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

0

Figure 1:  Indonesian language student load (EFTSL) in Australian universities (2001–14)14 13 Australian universities use a standardised unit called an Equivalent Full Time Student Load (EFTSL) to measure student enrolment. One EFTSL represents the amount of load a student would have when studying full time for one year. For example, if a student had to take four subjects each year to make up a full time load (= 1 EFTSL), then one of those subjects would generate 25% of an EFTSL. 14  This and the following graphic are drawn from Hill (in press for 2017).

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

NSW

83.1

74.5

63.6

50.6

54.7

46.6

46.0

43.7

45.0

40.0

42.1

50.3

50.9

38.9

730

−53

SA

30.9

27.9

40.0

43.3

20.5

24.5

24.8

24.3

21.9

19.7

19.6

20

14.4

14

346

−55

172.3 172.6 151.5 149.1

142.3

131.4

129.9

120.7

146.8

126.0

133.0

2120

−27

VIC

181.5 186.1 176.8

Total % change 2001–14

QLD

38.7

40.6

38.5

34.1

31.0

27.5

24.8

18.6

20.5

20.9

21.4

24.8

21.9

24.6

388

−36

WA

55.1

54.0

58.8

59.4

59.8

53.9

45.2

45.4

30.3

34.0

32.7

39.9

34.0

33.0

636

−40

NT

15.3

18.0

14.0

12.9

17.0

13.3

16.5

13.5

14.6

14.5

24.0

23.5

23.8

18.8

240

23

ACT

45.0

45.0

36.0

47.0

42.0

38.8

34.0

31.4

22.9

28.5

26.9

21.3

31.8

32.5

483

−28

TAS

32.3

24.0

27.4

24.5

20.6

16.8

16.5

18.8

15.8

16.5

21.1

10.4

6.8

8.5

251

−74

444.0 418.3 372.8 356.8 339.1

302.2

304.9

301.2

337.9

308.5 302.5

5195

−37

National 481.9 470.0 455.1 Total

Language, Learning, and Living Together

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Figure 2:  Indonesian language enrolments in Australian universities by state/territory, 2001–14 (measured in EFTSLs, rounded to one decimal point)

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highlighted the personal and national benefits of Asian language competence. As will be evident when I return to look more closely at the New Colombo Plan (below), the government’s focus has shifted from the teaching of Indonesian in Australian classrooms to encouraging students to go to Asia to study. The rise and fall of Indonesian in Australian universities since the 1950s need to be interpreted in the context of the very positive overall educational relationship between Australia and Indonesia during this period.

Education’s Place in Bilateral Relations Education has featured very prominently in Australia’s relationship with ­Indonesia, virtually since the founding of the Republic. Australia provided thousands of scholarships for Indonesians to study in universities here under the original Colombo Plan, with Purdey noting that the Indonesian alumni of Australia’s various government scholarship programs now number about 18,000 (Purdey 2015: 111). The Australian government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade website proudly notes the: Australia Awards program for Indonesia is the largest and longest running scholarship program of its kind offered by the Australian Government to any of its development partner countries. […] It focuses on areas of importance to the development of I­ ndonesia’s human resource gaps, including those aimed at strengthening economic governance and the delivery of services in health and education. […] A total of 2982 long term awards and 1395 short term awards have been provided to Indonesia from 2007–14 (Australia DFAT nd).

In addition, in recent years the Indonesian government has also provided around 250 Masters and Doctoral scholarships annually to support university staff taking postgraduate study in Australia. Despite such government programs, the vast majority of the almost 18,000 Indonesians studying in Australia in November 2014 were private, fee-paying students (Resosudarmo, Verico and Pasaribu 2015: 62–64). International education is Australia’s fourth-largest earner of export income. As a 2013 report prepared by the International Education Advisory Council chaired by prominent Australian businessman Dr Michael Chaney noted, ‘­Australia’s international education activities generate over A$15 billion of export income annually and this revenue supports more than 100,000 jobs. Australian staff, researchers and students gain many benefits from the contributions made by international students’ (Chaney 2013: i). More than 21% of students in ­Australian universities were international students, which (according to the Chaney Report) ‘has internationalised the design and delivery of its education systems, benefiting both domestic and international students’ (Chaney 2013: 8). In 2013, Indonesia was the seventh largest source of international students in Australia (with 13,300 students).

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By contrast, historically education has been a one-way street with very few ­ ustralians travelling to Indonesia to study in its schools or universities. An A ­Australian family living in Indonesia may occasionally place their children into a local school, but most would attend expatriate international schools. A handful of young Australians do undertake various student exchanges (such as the American Field Service, (AFS)), spending a year in a local Indonesian school. One notable who was profoundly influenced was Bill Johnston MLA, Member for ­Cannington and Minister for Asian Engagement in the present Western ­Australian Labor ­Government who, in his inaugural 2008 address to the WA parliament, acknowledged: Keluarga Sumawiganda, the family with whom I lived in Bandung, Indonesia, during my AFS exchange in 1981-82 and the friends I made both at SMA2 and among the exchange students. It was a powerful experience for a young bloke and it still lives with me today (Western Australia. Parliament (2008)).

In the decade following the 2002 Bali bombing, when the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) travel advisory effectively prevented schools undertaking visits to Indonesia, hundreds of Australian and Indonesian schools have been linked in cyberspace by the BRIDGE (Building Relationships through ­Intercultural Dialogue and Growing Engagement) program, initiated by DFAT’s Australia-Indonesia Institute. So successful was the BRIDGE school program that in 2014 it was extended to the tertiary level, as the UniBRIDGE program, which partners Charles Darwin University, Murdoch University, and the University of the Sunshine Coast with Indonesian universities, most notably Universitas Cendana in Kupang, in Indonesian Timor. Since the 1970s, there have been a variety of other short summer programs run by different Australian entities. The largest is currently run by a university consortium known as RUILI (Regional Universities Indonesian Language Initiative) in Lombok. Another, run by Deakin University, alternates between Malang and Padang, while another is arranged by ANU in Salatiga. In total, I estimate these short summer language courses would attract around 200 Australians each iteration. However, until the 1990s, virtually no ­Australian undergraduates spent even a semester enrolled in an Indonesian university. That was to change with the formation of a dedicated organisation to be a ‘reverse Colombo Plan’.15 In 1990, Murdoch University introduced an innovative four-year Bachelor of Asian Studies (Specialist) degree that required students to spend one of those years studying at a university in Asia, in order to develop advanced language skills. As Murdoch’s numbers going to Indonesia for that in-country year were relatively modest—around half a dozen annually—and as interest grew from students in other universities in the in-country year, Murdoch staff developed a new strategy. In 1994, staff proposed a cross-university Australian Consortium for In-Country Indonesian Studies (ACICIS), open to all universities, to facilitate the 15  I recall Dr Paul Stange, the inaugural ACICIS Resident Director, using this term to describe the broad intention of the consortium when we were promoting the concept in the early years.

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placement of Australian undergraduates into Indonesian universities. Supported by government seed funding in 1994–95, ACICIS pioneered the regular placement of Australian undergraduates into Indonesian universities. Since its first cohort of 29 students to Indonesia in August 1995, this consortium (now with 27 universities as members) has facilitated more than 2,000 such enrolments with partner universities including Gadjah Mada, Muhammadiyah Malang, the ­Indonesian Islamic University, Sanata Dharma, Atma Jaya Jakarta, Parahyangan, Bogor ­Agricultural University, the University of Indonesia, and Satya Wacana Christian University, Salatiga.16 In first semester of 2015, enrolments exceeded 70 students for the first time in ACICIS’ history, with another 74 undertaking one of the three six-week summer internships based in Jakarta. Until recently Indonesia was only the fifth most-popular destination in Asia for international study experiences by Australian university students, attracting not only significantly fewer than Anglophone countries like the UK, US, and Canada, but even less than other Asian countries like India and Malaysia (Australia DFAT nd). While reliable figures on foreign nationals studying in Indonesian universities are hard to obtain, in-bound numbers are relatively small and, compared to other Anglophone or European states, Australia seems to supply a large proportion—if not the largest number—of students.17 If Indonesians studying in Australia generated around A$500 million annually in the Australian economy (Australia DFAT nd), by contrast, the economic benefit for Indonesia of inbound Australians students would, in absolute terms, be negligible. I have not been able to find any official figures on the revenue Australian students might generate in Indonesia, but if I was to make a very rough calculation, I would suggest the semester-long students might bring in about A$1 million, with the short courses generating a similar amount. These are modest figures by comparison with the reverse flow but may be meaningful in the specific city or neighbourhood destinations in which such funds are spent. Despite a growing number of Australians undertaking some study in ­Indonesian universities, over the past half century, estimates of the number of Australian citizens of non-Indonesian descent who have completed a full tertiary degree in an Indonesian university would probably number only a handful.18 Many more

16  For an analysis of the impact of ACICIS upon Indonesian universities, see Hadiwinata (2015: 113–50). 17  DIKTI data lists Australia as the 7th largest student source country for Indonesia. However, other sources suggest it is either the 3rd or 5th largest supplier, similar to China and Korea, both of which appear to be increasing lately. 18  For example, George Quinn completed his Sarjana Sastra degree at UGM around 1978, and was for decades the only such graduate in Australia of non-Indonesian descent. Johan Weintre completed his Masters in Education at Universitas Negeri Semarang about 30 years later, while Michael York completed a Master’s Degree in Politics and International Relations at Universitas Muhammadiyah ­Yogyakarta in October 2015. While there have undoubtedly been others unknown to me, such as spouses of diplomats or expatriates working in Indonesia, the number of Australians completing complete degrees in Indonesia would remain very small.

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­ ostgraduates—I would estimate several hundred—would, however, have underp taken part of their research degrees doing fieldwork in Indonesia, under the notional sponsorship or supervision of an Indonesian university or academic. Such ‘Indonesianists’ have become academic staff in Australian university departments and specialists in Australian government departments for decades. Their impact upon the general community has, however, been limited.

The Politics of Studying Abroad If the early decades of this century saw the decline of Indonesian language in ­Australian universities, and slowly increasing enrolment by Australian undergraduates in Indonesian universities, it also revealed the extent to which Indonesian alumni of Australian universities figured in Indonesia’s political elite. During the presidency of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (2004–14), both the President and Vice President Boediono had direct or family experience of being educated in Australia. One of the president’s sons, Edhie Baskoro, studied at ­Curtin University; Boediono studied at both the University of Western Australia and Monash. In addition, the then Foreign Minister, Dr Marty Natalegawa, the then Minister for Tourism and Creative Economy, Dr Mari Pangestu, and the then Minister of Finance (21 May 2013–20 October 2014), Dr Chatib Basri, were also graduates of an Australian university (ANU). Thus, four key figures in the cabinet of President Yudhoyono had Australian degrees, and at least one—possibly more—had sent their children to Australian universities. In addition, the Coordinating Minister for Political, Law and Security Affairs, Air Chief Marshal (ret) Djoko Suyanto, had advanced military training in Australia (and the US). It is instructive to compare the proportion of Australian graduates in ­Yudhoyono’s Indonesian Cabinet, with those from other countries. Of the 34 ­Cabinet members whose education I was able to determine (searching their online biographies), 19 were solely Indonesia-trained, while 7 of the remainder had studied in the US, 4 (or 12%) in Australia and 2 each in the UK and the Netherlands, with individuals in various other countries. Some, including both Natalegawa and P­angestu, have degrees from two foreign countries. Given the significant positions of these Australian graduates, this is an extraordinary concentration of knowledge about Australia and Australian society within the Indonesian Cabinet, a factor that would benefit Australia in a variety of ways. The original Colombo Plan and decades of promoting Australian universities to the middle class of our region have ensured that Australian education and the corollaries of residence and exposure to Australian values and culture are no longer foreign to many of the political and economic elites of Southeast Asia. A similar observation might be made of the Malaysian cabinet for example, and the elites in various South Pacific nations are commonly schooled in Australia. However, the

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level of direct, positive and personal exposure to Australian education and society at the presidential, vice-presidential and cabinet level during Yudhoyono’s tenure provided a unique texture to his government. In fact, President Yudhoyono headed an Indonesian government that was one of the most positively inclined towards Australia, ever. The contrast with the cabinet of President Joko Widodo is stark. In President Widodo’s initial cabinet only two (6%) of the 34 members—State Secretary Pratikno and Minister for ­Women’s Empowerment and Children’s Protection, Yohana Yembise—held ­ Australian degrees (incidentally from universities outside the Melbourne-Canberra-Sydney axis).19 While some observers of Australia-Indonesia relations (including senior diplomats in Jakarta) are of the view that the low proportion of Australian graduates in the Widodo Cabinet does not reduce Australian government access, it is nonetheless indicative of the Widodo government’s lesser familiarity with ­Australia and Australian perceptions compared to his predecessor. This participation of graduates of Australian universities in both the cabinets of Yudhoyono and—albeit to a lesser extent—Widodo contrasts strongly with the complete absence in the Australian Cabinet (or the Shadow Cabinet) of any member with any educational experience in Indonesia. No members of recent ­Australian Cabinets speak Indonesian and none have studied or lived in Indonesia. Only a tiny handful—less than half a dozen—Commonwealth parliamentarians speak (or have studied) Indonesian and only one has spent any time living there.20 Given Australian cabinet members are elected politicians, whereas members of the Indonesian cabinet are appointed by the President often from outside parliament, comparisons cannot be direct. Indeed, most Australian alumni in ­Yudhoyono’s cabinet were presidential appointees rather than elected party politicians. There is also a greater tradition of including scholars in government in Indonesia than in Australia. Nonetheless, that a personal knowledge of Australia was shared within the Yudhoyono cabinet in a way and at a depth not reciprocated is obvious. In the absence of such personal experience in an Australian cabinet, however, the government can draw upon civil servants, often very senior, with a deep 19  Dr Yohana Susana Yembise, the Minister for Women’s Empowerment and Children’s Protection, has a Masters in Education from Simon Fraser University, Canada and a PhD from the University of Newcastle (Australia). The State Secretary, Dr Pratikno, has a Bachelors degree from UGM, a Masters from Birmingham University, UK, and a PhD from Flinders University, Australia. A Wikipedia search of the biographies of the 34 Ministers in the Working Cabinet (after 12 August 2015 reshuffle) indicate: 14 with only Indonesian degrees; 12 with US degrees; 3 with Dutch qualifications; 2 with no degrees; 2 with Australian degrees; 2 with UK degrees; and 1 each from Malaysia, Canada and Japan. Most have multiple degrees. 20  Martin (2015) notes the following Indonesian speakers in the parliament: Chris Bowen, Stephen Jones and Andrew Leigh (all Labor). Sarah Henderson (Liberal) and Penny Wong (Labor) speak Malay. Labor Shadow Treasurer Chris Bowen is currently learning Indonesian (Bourke 2015). Andrew Leigh, Labor’s Shadow Assistant Treasurer and Federal Member for Fenner in the ACT, did attend primary school in Banda Aceh, where his academic parents were working (see Parliament of Australia 2010). He says, however, that he has only retained a limited number of Indonesian words. I am aware of several other Commonwealth politicians who have family members with business interests in Indonesia.

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knowledge of Indonesia. The fact that the embassy in Jakarta is now Australia’s biggest representation abroad, hosting around 500 staff from 14 agencies, means that public servants both from DFAT as well from other agencies and departments, do have the opportunity to include a term in Indonesia as part of their career progression (Croft-Cusworth 2016). Importantly, so long as Australian universities maintain their Indonesia-specialists, such knowledge will be available to Australian politicians and the civil service, should they wish to draw upon it. This depth of Indonesia knowledge in our education system is vital to the Australian government’s policy development into the future. In addition, both the Australian government, through its embassy, and ­Australian universities and colleges, through their various agents and international offices, have attempted to raise the profile of Australia as a destination for ­Indonesian students. Strategies include organising alumni networks and events for those who have returned. The embassy hosts annual Australian Alumni awards. Past recipients include some of the country’s highest profile political figures. In 2012, for example, the Distinguished Alumni Award went to Dr Mari Elka Pangestu, then ­Minister of Tourism and Creative Economy, and the Inspirational Alumni ­Awardee was the then Mayor of Banda Aceh, Mawardy Nurdin. There were separate awards for Excellence in Education Research and Innovation; Sustainable Economic and Social Development; Media, Culture and the Arts; National Defence; National Security; Public Administration (awarded to Prof. Ali Ghufron Mukti, then Vice Minister and Acting Minister, Indonesian Ministry of Health); Entrepreneurship; Business Leadership and Business Management; and an Outstanding Young Alumni Award (Australian Embassy Indonesia 2012). Australia benefits from having so many Indonesians—well-educated in Australia, hopefully with very positive attitudes to Australia—already in, or ­ ­moving into, influential positions in government, education, business, and the broader community. But is such a policy driven by a formal government agenda to maximise support for Australia within the Indonesian government? One would be naïve to think this was not a consideration. Nonetheless, a period living in ­Australia is no guarantee that one will develop a sympathetic stance towards Australian ­government policy. The late Dr George Aditjondro, for example, was employed in Australian universities for several years during the New Order, and maintained a highly critical stance against both Australian and Indonesian ­government policies during that period. One might argue that the hallmark of a good ­Australian education is precisely the development of a critical and analytical attitude to knowledge—and to government policies. Government policy is rarely singular in its objective and familiarity can breed both friendship and contempt! If (as has been noted above) Australia has been successful in producing substantial numbers of influential Indonesian graduates with a knowledge of Australia, neither Australia nor Indonesia have been particularly successful at producing comparable numbers of Australians with a deep knowledge of, and experience living in, Indonesia.

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Recent Australian Government Policy The 2012 Australia in the Asian Century White Paper set as a goal the development of stronger educational links between Australia and Asia. Its twelfth National Objective stated: ‘A larger number of Australian university students will be studying overseas and a greater proportion will be undertaking part of their degree in Asia’ (p 171). It encouraged universities ‘to substantially boost the number of Australian students studying in Asia through closer links with regional institutions, and improve financial support and information for students who study in Asia’ and ‘to increase the number of students who undertake Asian studies and Asian languages as part of their university education’ (Australian Government 2012: 16–17). Soon after the White Paper’s release, the Gillard Labor Government announced the AsiaBound scholarships (with a total value of A$37 million) to assist Australian students wishing to study in Asia. The instability of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd Labor governments and the immediate archiving of the White Paper by the incoming Abbott Government meant many of the document’s aspirations came to nought. Nonetheless, its goal ‘to substantially boost the number of Australian students studying in Asia’ found an effective champion in in-coming Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, who dubbed her policy the ‘New Colombo Plan’ (NCP). The NCP was rapidly implemented after the Abbott government came to power in 2013 as ‘a signature initiative of the Australian Government which aims to lift knowledge of the Indo Pacific in Australia by supporting Australian undergraduates to study and undertake internships in the region’. Providing elite merit-based annual scholarships, together with a broad mobility grants program for both short and longer-term study, involving internships, mentorships, practicums and research, the NCP was allocated A$100 million over five years. The aim of the Coalition government was ‘to see study in the Indo Pacific region become a rite of passage for Australian undergraduate students, and as an endeavour that is highly valued across the Australian community’ (Australia DFAT nd b). Stimulated by mobility grants of varying amounts from A$3,000 to A$7,000, depending on the nature and duration of their study program, increasing numbers of Australian undergraduates are choosing Indonesia as an academic destination. In 2016, in what appears to be the largest single NCP grant, ACICIS received funds to support studies in Indonesia by 303 students, or around a third of the 823 New Colombo Plan mobility places in Indonesia. By the end of 2016, NCP funding will have been provided to some 10,000 Australians to live, study and work in Asia and the Pacific, with approximately one-fifth of these students going to Indonesia.21 It is yet to be seen whether Australians’ response to such financial support to study in Indonesia will be sustainable. The impediments are considerable. 21  For a statistical overview of student mobility flows from Australia to Indonesia in recent years, see Section 3 of the ACICIS Annual Report 2016 (ACICIS 2016).

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The image of Indonesia in the eyes of many Australians remains less than positive. Other countries exert a much more powerful pull upon the imaginations of undergraduates. Practicalities, such as the absence of a specific Study Visa in Indonesia and slow processing of visa applications, remain disincentives.22 Most Australian students come to Indonesia with NCP support to undertake short term programs of less than one semester. The numbers who opt for longer semester programs, whether taught in English or Indonesian, remain modest compared to those who choose Europe or North America. Encouraging students from beyond the traditional disciplines of Indonesian language, Indonesian Studies and more broadly the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, remains a further challenge.

‘Linguistic Diplomacy’? Staff in the Indonesian Embassy in Canberra and consulates in other cities enthusiastically encourage Indonesian teachers in the promotion of Indonesian language to Australian students, but for its part the Indonesian government provides little, if any, financial support for Indonesian teaching in Australia. The Indonesian government’s flagship Dharma Siswa scholarships are poorly promoted, with the information often arriving only a couple of weeks before the application deadline, leaving students very little time to apply. Few Australian students are attracted. Indonesian government officials are aware of, and concerned about, declining enrolments in Indonesian in Australian schools and universities. That this decline is occurring at a time when interest and enrolments in competing Asian languages such as Chinese and Korean are strengthening as a consequence of specific government strategies and investments to support such studies highlights the contrast with the relative absence of interventions by the Indonesian government to support the teaching of that language. There is a body under the Ministry for Education and Culture charged with the promotion of, and support for, Indonesian, both at home and abroad, called the Badan Pengembangan dan Pembinaan Bahasa (Language Development and Promotion Board).23 One of the program goals of the Board is to ‘increase the function of Indonesian language as an international language’ (Peningkatan fungsi bahasa Indonesia sebagai bahasa internasional) but most attention in this regard appears focussed on asserting the aspiration rather than supporting efforts in other countries to teach Indonesian.24 Recent restructuring of the Board did, ­however, result in the creation of a new Centre for Strategic Development and Linguistic Diplomacy (Pusat Pengembangan Strategi dan Diplomasi Kebahasaan), which is now more actively seeking ways to support the teaching of Indonesian abroad. 22 

For an analysis of these impediments, see King (2012: 199–211).

23 . 24 .

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There are indications that the Language Board is at least considering, for e­ xample, funding the despatch of Indonesian language lecturers to assist in ­Australian universities.25 Such a realisation of the ‘soft power’ advantages of having Australians studying Indonesian language might align with the Indonesian government’s recent recognition also of the strategic value of the Indonesian diaspora. Following an initiative of the then Indonesian ambassador to the US, and later Deputy Foreign Minister, Dr Dino Patti Djalal, the first Congress of Indonesian Diaspora was held in Los Angeles, on 6–8 July 2012. The concept soon expanded with subsequent conferences in Jakarta attracting participants from around the world in what has since been formalised as the Indonesian Diasporic Network (IDN).26 That the most recent IDN congress in July 2017 was opened by former US president ­Barrack Obama suggests something of the profile achieved by the organisation.27 Yet, despite such initiatives, there is little tangible evidence yet of Indonesia leveraging the ‘soft power’ benefits of having foreigners either study Indonesian or studying in Indonesia. Having substantial numbers of Australians studying ­Indonesian, and therefore studying about Indonesia and how it sees the world, would represent a substantial investment in creating sympathy for Indonesia in the Australian community. Elsewhere, I have examined the correlation evident in a major study of ­Australian attitudes to Indonesia between the experience of learning Indonesian and the development of a positive attitude towards Indonesia. The discussion was based on a May 2013 Australian DFAT-funded Newspoll Survey into Australian attitudes towards Indonesia, which had been conducted in June 2012, using a sample of 1,202 Australian adults.28 On the basis of such responses, it was evident that the learning of Indonesian language was imbuing in students a greater sense of identification with, and recognition of the shared humanity of, Indonesians in the broadest sense. As I observed: When asked whether they felt the Indonesian people and government shared something in common with Australians and their government, those who had studied Indonesian registered the highest overall responses (8 per cent ‘a lot in common’; 27 per cent ‘quite a bit in common’), totalling 35 per cent. (Hill 2016: 374–75)

The response of those who had learned Indonesian exceeded other categories of respondents, with the next most positively inclined group being those closest to school-age, namely respondents aged 18–24, who totalled 31% (being 8% ‘a lot’; 23 per cent ‘quite a bit’) (Newspoll 2013).

25  The author was involved in preliminary conversations about this possibility in October 2015 with the head of the Language Board, Prof Mahsun, and the Director of the Centre for Strategic Development and Linguistic Diplomacy, Prof Emi Emilia. 26 . 27  President Obama’s opening address is at . 28  See Newspoll (2013). My analysis is included in Hill (2016: 374–75).

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We do not have meaningful comparative data over time but it would appear that the investment in the teaching and learning of Indonesian in Australian schools and universities bears as fruit a greater sense of identification with a shared future between Australians and Indonesians. This can only enhance all aspects of our relationship. In that context, the failure of governments on both sides of the Arafura Sea to support such teaching and learning adequately enough to ensure its continuing growth is doubly regrettable.

Conclusion During his address to the joint houses of the Australia Parliament in March 2010, then Indonesian president Yudhoyono noted that Indonesian was taught more widely in Australia than in any other Western country (Yudhoyono 2010). The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) has been even more enthusiastic, asserting that: Today Australia is the largest provider outside of Indonesia itself of Indonesian language education for school-aged children. In fact, Australia is recognised as a world leader in expertise on the Indonesian language and Indonesian language education (ACARA nd).

Indonesian language has been taught in our universities and schools for more than half a century. Our education system has produced some of the world’s leading scholars in Indonesian affairs. Yet the knowledge of Indonesia within government circles in Australia trails far behind the experience of Australia enjoyed by the political elite in Indonesia. Perhaps this is because Indonesians coming to study in Australia do so across the full spectrum of disciplines, gaining a wide array of skills that they bring back to all sectors of Indonesian society. By contrast, those Australians studying in Indonesia have—at least until the New Colombo Plan— been postgraduate researchers, focussing specifically on Indonesian topics, and graduating into a core of Indonesia-specialists in our universities and public service bureaucracies. Sometimes dubbed the ‘Indonesia lobby’, such scholars appear to have had only limited impact beyond academe, in the general and business communities. This contrasts with the permeation through Indonesian society of Indonesians who have studied in Australia. As a consequence, Indonesia has yet to achieve the kind of influence and penetration into the upper reaches of Australian government that Australian education has achieved in recent times in Indonesia. It may be only a partial barometer, but it is symbolic nonetheless that the Australian Cabinet can boast no similar depth of knowledge of Indonesia—or of Indonesian language—to that which recent Indonesian Cabinets have enjoyed of Australia— and Australia’s linguistic riches. Two months after Ambassadors Grigson and Nadjib launched the Black Armada exhibition, in November 2015 four Australian Cabinet Ministers were in Indonesia as a demonstration of closer government ties, on a visit ­originally

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planned for the previous March but deferred due to prevailing tensions. On 17 ­November, ­Australia’s dual-purposed Minister for Tourism and International Education, Richard Colbeck, met with the then Indonesian Minister for Culture and Education Anies Baswedan. In marked contrast to President Yudhoyono’s March 2010 praise for Australia’s prominence in Indonesian language education, B ­ aswedan reportedly used his closed-door meeting with Colbeck to push for greater promotion of Indonesian in Australia, with Indonesian media noting its decline in ­Australian universities since 2001. Colbeck responded that ‘part of our role is to drive demand for those services [that is, Indonesian language]’, adding that promoting Indonesian is ‘probably something that we need to work on together and develop over time’ (Sundaryani 2015). Baswedan’s comments suggest that the decline in Indonesian language in Australia was being viewed with concern in Jakarta, as one barometer of the bilateral relationship. While the NCP may be increasing the number of ­Australians studying in Indonesia—and many will master I­ ndonesian—enrolments in the language in our universities are stagnant or declining. Its fate will have a negative impact on the bilateral relationship, and—equally concerning—without substantial investment in the teaching of ­Indonesian in its schools and universities, Australia will remain incapable of realising its potential in the Asian Century.

References ACICIS (2016) ‘ACICIS Annual Report 2016’, www.acicis.edu.au/acicis-annualreport-2016/ Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) (2002) Maximizing Australia’s Asia Knowledge: Repositioning and Renewal of a National Asset (n.p., ASAA). Australia. Foreign Affairs Sub Committee, Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia (2004) Near Neighbours—Good Neighbours: An Inquiry into Australia’s Relationship with Indonesia, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra, May. ACARA (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority) nd) ­‘Context Statement: The Place of the Indonesian Language and Culture in ­Australia and in the World’, , accessed 13 September 2017. Australia DFAT (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) (nd a) ‘Indonesia ­Country Brief’, http://dfat.gov.au/geo/indonesia/pages/indonesia-country-brief.aspx. Australia DFAT (nd b) ‘New Colombo Plan’, . Australian Embassy Indonesia (2012) ‘Australian Alumni Award Winners Announced’, 3 June, . Australian Government (2012) Australia in the Asian Century, October. Australian Government/National Archives of Australia (nd) ‘Bettina Gorton’, .

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Australian War Memorial (n.d.) ‘Indonesian Confrontation, 1962–1966’, . Ball, Desmond and Wilson, Helen (eds) (1991) Strange Neighbours: The AustraliaIndonesia Relationship (North Sydney, Allen and Unwin). Bourke, Latika (2015) ‘Chris Bowen Learning Bahasa as Shadow Treasurer Talks Up Economic Ties with Indonesia’, Sydney Morning Herald, 22 October, . Brown, Colin (2015) Australia’s Indonesia Project: 50 Years of Engagement (­Canberra, Graham Publishing). Brown, Colin (ed) (1996) Indonesia: Dealing with a Neighbour (St Leonards, Allen and Unwin with Australian Institute of International Affairs). Chaney Michael (2013) (report) International Education Advisory Council,­ February, . Croft-Cusworth, Catriona (2016) ‘Australia’s Biggest Embassy’, The Interpreter, 24 March, . Evans, Gareth (1991) ‘Australia’s Relations with Indonesia’ in Desmond Ball and Helen Wilson (eds), Strange Neighbours: The Australia-Indonesia Relationship (North Sydney, Allen and Unwin). George, Margaret (1980) Australia and the Indonesian Revolution (Melbourne, Melbourne University Press and Australian Institute of International Affairs). Hadiwinata, Bob Sugeng (2015) ‘Reciprocity and Relationship Building through Education: The ACICIS Field Study Program in West Java’ in Antje Missbach and Jemma Purdey (eds) Linking People: Connections and Encounters between Australians and Indonesians (Berlin, Regiospectra). Hill, David T (2012) Indonesian Language in Australian Universities: Strategies for a Stronger Future (ALTC Report). Murdoch University, http://altcfellowship.­ murdoch.edu.au/finalreport.html. Hill, David T (2016), ‘Language as “Soft Power” in Bilateral Relations: The Case of Indonesian Language in Australia’ 36(3) Asia Pacific Journal of Education 364, September. Hill, David T (in press for 2017) ‘Facing the Twenty-First Century: Indonesian in Australian Universities’ in Paul Thomas (ed), Talking North: The Journey of ­Australia’s First Asian Language (Clayton, Monash University Publishing). Ivens, Joris (1946) Indonesia Calling, Dir. Joris Ivens, Produced by Waterside Workers Federation, Australia, 22 minutes; Keating, Paul (2000) Engagement: Australia faces the Asia-Pacific (Sydney, Macmillan). King, Phillip (2012) ‘Reversing the Flow: Australian Student Enrolments in I­ ndonesian Universities’ in RA Curaming and F Dhont (eds), Education in I­ndonesia: Perspectives, Politics, and Practices. (Yogyakarta: FIS Press).

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Lingard, Jan (2008) Refugees and Rebels: Indonesian Exiles in Wartime Australia, Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne. Lockwood, Rupert (1982) Black Armada: Australia and the struggle for Indonesian independence 1942-49, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1982. Mackie, JAC (1974) Konfrontasi: the Indonesia-Malaysia Dispute 1963–1966 (Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, for the Australian Institute of International Affairs). Martin, Lisa (2015) ‘Don’t Let Indonesian Language Die: Bowen’, The ­Australian, 21 November, . Moegiadi (1996) ‘Educational Links and the Dynamics of People-to-People ­Relations: An Indonesian Perspective’ in Colin Brown (ed) Indonesia: Dealing with a Neighbour (St Leonards, Allen and Unwin with Australian Institute of International Affairs). Newspoll (2013) ‘Australian Attitudes towards Indonesia: Report’ commissioned by the Public Diplomacy and Information Branch (PDB) of the Commonwealth Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Canberra), . Parliament of Australia (2010) ‘Andrew Leigh, Maiden Speech’, 18 October, . Peacock, Roger ‘Educational Links and the Dynamics of People-to-People ­Relations: An Australian Perspective’ in Colin Brown (ed), Indonesia: Dealing with a Neighbour (St Leonards, Allen and Unwin with Australian Institute of International Affairs). Purdey, Jemma (2011) From Vienna to Yogyakarta: the Life of Herb Feith (­Kensington NSW, University of New South Wales Press). Purdey, Jemma (2015) ‘Investing in Good Will: Australia’s Scholarships Programs for Indonesian Tertiary Students, 1950s-2010’ in Antje Missbach and Jemma Purdey (eds) Linking People: Connections and Encounters between Australians and Indonesians (Berlin, Regiospectra). Resosudarmo, Budy P; Verico, Kiki; and Pasaribu, Donny (2015) ‘Evaluating the Importance of Australia-Indonesia Economic Relations’ in Antje Missbach and Jemma Purdey (eds) Linking People: Connections and Encounters between ­Australians and Indonesians (Berlin, Regiospectra). Rogers-Winarto, Isla (2006) ‘The Indonesian Student Market to Australia: Trends and Challenges’ in John Monfries (ed) (2006) Different Societies, Shared Futures: Australia, Indonesia and the Region (Singapore, ISEAS). Sundaryani, Fedina S (2015) ‘Govt to promote RI language use in Oz’, The Jakarta Post, 18 November, . Thompson, Geoff (2006) ‘Former Indonesian Official Speaks Out on East Timor’, ABC radio, AM, 10 August, .

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Western Australia. Parliament (2008) ‘Hansard—Maiden speech, WJ Johnston (­Cannington)’, 11 November, . Yudhoyono, Susilo Bambang (2010) ‘Address by the President of the Republic of Indonesia’, to Joint Sitting of the Australian Parliament, Canberra, 10 March, in Parliamentary Debates: House of Representatives: Official Hansard: 2136–40.

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21 Enhancing the Bond: Narratives of Indonesian Academics from Two Continents MUHAMMAD NAJIB AZCA, ATIN PRABANDARI AND PRIYAMBUDI SULISTIYANTO

Despite political fluctuations in the Indonesia-Australia relationship, the two countries have usually been able to maintain stable and mutually beneficial ties in the education sector. Australia has been a key destination for Indonesian postgraduate students and, partly through its aid program, has worked to improve access to quality education in Indonesia. A much smaller cohort of Australian students also study at Indonesian universities. Similarly, Indonesia is one of the most popular destination countries for the Australian Coalition government’s ‘New Colombo Plan’ initiative, which supports Australian students to study and undertake internships in-country in order to enhance their knowledge, understanding and awareness of the Asia-Pacific region. Education has been long recognised as having the power to build communication and strengthen understanding between nations, as part of their soft power engagement. This is why public officials of both countries have often acknowledged the importance of education for Australia-Indonesia ties. In fact, speaking at Flinders University in 2014, then Education Minister Christopher Pyne even described education as a ‘bedrock’ upon which cooperation in other sectors could flourish (DET 2014). Consistent with this outlook, when President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono halted bilateral cooperation in various sectors in 2013 in a harsh response to reports of Australian espionage directed at his wife, he kept the education relationship intact (Ananta 2013). He seemed to understand that, as Australian academic Michele Ford has argued, ‘Universities provide strategic ballast to the Australia-Indonesia relationship in their own right’ through student mobility and research (Ford 2013, para 7). Beyond these clear positives, education ties between Indonesia and Australia remain constrained by various limitations. Some have characterised bilateral education ties as an unequal relationship because of the much larger numbers of

434  Muhammad Najib Azca, Atin Prabandari and Priyambudi Sulistiyanto Indonesian students in Australia than vice versa, and because Australian government assistance to Indonesian higher education highlights the ‘donor-recipient’ nature of the relationship. Australia acts as the ‘giver’ in this context, providing scholarships, technical and capacity building support as well as policy advice, with Indonesia sometimes cast as a passive recipient. The relationship is also characterised by an imbalance of interest. Many Australian universities maintain ­Indonesian studies programs, making Australia one of the leading centres of excellence for Indonesian studies worldwide. By contrast, Indonesian scholars have shown ­little interest in studying Australia. There are only few Australian studies centres in Indonesian universities and just a handful of university departments offer subjects about Australia. The imbalance is also evident in the co-publication of research papers. ­Australia was Indonesia’s fourth largest collaboration partner in 2010, behind Japan, ­Malaysia and the US (Brennan, 2013). Indonesia, by contrast, was not among ­Australia’s top 30 research partners (Office of the Chief Scientist, 2012, in B ­ rennan 2013). Australian academics face high pressure to publish in international j­ ournals, whereas many Indonesian researchers lack grounding in methodology and theory, discouraging collaboration (McCarthy and Ibrahim 2010: 1, in Brennan 2013). The dearth of funding for research from the Indonesian government and higher education institutions is a further disincentive to collaboration. How we can reconcile the positive aspects of Indonesia-Australia educational ties with the deep discrepancies in the relationship? In this chapter, we argue that some of the relationship’s imbalances are better thought of in terms of an ‘equal yet different’ relationship, in which present collaboration will be a stepping-stone to more positive outcomes and collaboration between the academics of the two nations in the future. Certainly, this has been the personal experience of the three authors of this chapter, all of whom are Indonesian academics who graduated from Australian universities. Australian academics have access to greater resources from their home institutions and government, which enable them to be more mobile and flexible in establishing collaborative initiatives. They also have better access to international publications. Indonesian academics, by contrast, have better access to data and usually more knowledge of localities for various research topics that require fieldwork in Indonesia. Their involvement in collaborative research thus strengthens the end product. Initial collaboration on these terms has often led to further knowledge and expertise exchange down the track, and facilitated student mobility programs. In the remainder of this chapter, we aim to provide a more nuanced picture of the Australia-Indonesia education relationship, illustrated through the personal stories both of the authors and some of their forerunners in establishing connections between universities in each nation. After studying in Australia, two of the authors returned to their home institution, Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM), the largest and oldest public university in Indonesia, and one of a very few with the resources and reputation to engage in international collaboration. The third author presently lives in Australia, working as a lecturer at Flinders University.

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This chapter will explore each author’s trajectory after undertaking study in ­Australia, and their ongoing contribution to Indonesia-Australia educational ties. Overall, this chapter aims to illustrate the extent to which Australia’s active engagement in educational fields could be a stepping-stone for more positive engagement and empowerment of academic counterparts in Indonesia—and how, over time, this can open new opportunities for Australian scholars as well. With this in mind, the chapter opens with one of the earliest examples of bridgebuilding between Indonesian and Australian academics, namely the career of the Australian scholar, Herbert Feith.

Narratives from Indonesia: Herb Feith and the UGM Story A young Herb arrived in Indonesia in the early period after Indonesian independence in June 1951, working as a volunteer in the English language division of ­Indonesia’s Department of Information. Following this period as a volunteer and an Indonesian government civil servant, he became an academic (graduating with a PhD from Cornell University and later working at Monash University) and would go on to become a leading expert-cum-activist on Indonesia. Herb was one of the pioneers of what has come to be known as Australian ­Volunteers International. He died tragically in a traffic accident in Melbourne in 2001 (Purdey 2011) but by then UGM and Yogyakarta had taken a special place in his life. Impressed by the city, its cultural past and its contemporary infrastructure, he had quickly formed a strong bond with Yogyakarta—the heartland of Javanese culture, renowned as Indonesia’s education capital—and lived there for several years in the mid-late 1990s.1 The seeds of Herb’s special relationship with UGM were sown when, as a ­lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne, he became the PhD supervisor of Ichlasul Amal, a lecturer in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences (FISIPOL) at UGM. Several years after graduating from Monash in 1984, Amal became dean of his home faculty (1988–1994) and in 1998 was elected Rector of UGM, a role roughly equivalent to an Australian Vice-Chancellor, which he held until 2002. The personal link between Herb and Amal took on an institutional dimension when Herb worked in FISIPOL during Amal’s period of leadership at UGM, delivering lectures and supervising the research of young FISIPOL staff. One of this chapter’s authors, Najib Azca, benefited directly from Herb’s mentoring, with Herb guiding him in revising his BA thesis on military hegemony for publication as a book.2

1  2 

The special relationship between Herb and Yogyakarta is set out in his biography (Purdey 2011). Azca (1998). The thesis was published with a foreword by Feith.

436  Muhammad Najib Azca, Atin Prabandari and Priyambudi Sulistiyanto Herb also engaged intensively with the young staff of UGM’s Centre for ­Security and Peace Studies (CSPS), reflecting his increasing focus over the course of his academic career on peace studies and peace activism (Purdey 2011). ­During this time, he played a critical role in the establishment of UGM’s Masters program on Peace and Conflict Resolution. The program offered a Herbert Feith Scholarship to select students each year, particularly those from post-conflict areas in Indonesia. The relationship that developed between Herb Feith and UGM cannot be described as unbalanced, with Herb positioned solely as the ‘giver’. Although the relationship began with Herb in a supervisory role (the same role he performed as an academic at Monash), the relationship developed into one of knowledge exchange and collaborative work from which Herb also benefited. Moreover, many of the young Indonesian researchers mentored by Herb at UGM have themselves gone on to become scholars who now maintain, enlarge and deepen networks with Australian academic counterparts. One striking example is Ariel Heryanto, who received his PhD from Monash University. Heryanto has become a leading scholar of Indonesian studies in various Australian institutions, most recently taking up the appointment in March 2017 as Herbert Feith Professor of Indonesian studies at Monash. Other Indonesian scholars who received their PhDs from Australian universities have similarly become leaders in their field while based at Australian universities. Murdoch University graduate Vedi Hadiz is another example, working first at Murdoch and now serving as Deputy Director of the Asia Institute and Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Melbourne.

Alumni Engagement: Multiplying and Rebalancing Educational Ties In recent years, Australian alumni have progressed to leadership positions at FISIPOL, UGM, further developing and deepening ties between it and Australian universities. Amal was among the first cohort of Australian alumni at FISIPOL but many other staff have followed in his footsteps, as Australia has displaced the US as the preferred destination for overseas graduate study for Indonesians. Two other Australian graduates have subsequently also become Deans of FISIPOL: Sunyoto Usman, a 1991 graduate of Flinders University (1997–2004); and Pratikno, a 1996 graduate of Flinders University (2008–12). Pratikno also went on to become R ­ ector of UGM (2012–14), and currently serves as the Minister of the State Secretariat in the cabinet of President Joko Widodo (Jokowi), a position he has held since 2014 (Abrar 2015). These alumni have certainly helped to strengthen networks between UGM and their former schools, for example, through collaborative research and staff exchanges, which are usually followed by further agreements that expand to

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include other activities such as student mobility and dual degrees. For example, several departments at UGM have opened International Undergraduate Programs (IUP), in some cases teaming up with Australian universities to allow students to graduate with a dual degree from each institution. As alumni ties have translated into new academic collaborations, initial imbalances have evolved into more equal partnerships. Student mobility is a good example. Although student mobility programs typically involve groups of students from Australian institutions visiting Indonesia, increasingly the subjects they undertake are jointly designed and taught by academics from the two ­countries. Australian students also sit in the same classroom as Indonesian students in these subjects, and collaborate with them. The various joint subjects offered by the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Arts in partnership with UGM’s Faculty of Social and Political Sciences follow this model. Covering topics such as comparative social policy in Indonesia and Australia and comparative regionalism, classes are held at UGM but academics from each country present their own distinct perspectives on the issue. These subjects also facilitate cultural exchanges between Australian and Indonesian students. As the number of these collaborative classes increases between various Indonesian and Australian institutions, adding to existing initiatives such as the Australian Consortium for In-Country Indonesian ­Studies (ACICIS) and the New Colombo Plan, the pendulum of student exchange is beginning to swing towards a more balanced relationship, albeit one in which many more Indonesian students will study in Australian institutions than vice versa for the foreseeable future. Not all recent collaborations between UGM and Australian universities derive from alumni ties. A recent large-scale research project on money politics in ­Indonesia grew from matching research interests and expertise between scholars at the Politics and Governance (PolGov) Research Centre at FISIPOL with the Coral Bell School of Asia and Pacific Affairs at ANU. Co-led by Edward Aspinall from ANU and Mada Sukmadjati, a young German-educated scholar from UGM, the project involved a team of researchers from across the archipelago and produced a book on patronage and clientelism published in both Indonesian and English (Aspinall and Sukmajati, 2015 and 2016). A second project on alternative views of the international order, covering the enduring impact of Indonesian leadership at the 1955 Asia-Africa Conference, similarly grew from shared research interests between the Department of International Relations at UGM and counterparts at the University of Queensland. Another collaboration developed by chance when a visiting expert on youth studies from the University of Newcastle, Professor Pamela Nilam, delivered a public lecture in 2012 at UGM’s Youth Studies Centre (YouSure). Two UGM ­junior lecturers have just finished their PhDs at Newcastle, one of whom co-authored international journal articles with his supervisors, while Professor Nilam took up a visiting scholar position at YouSure in 2013, jointly producing a handbook on youth studies in Indonesia with that centre (Azca, Widyharto and Sutopo 2014).

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Narrative from Down Under: The Flinders-UGM Story The relationship between Flinders University and UGM has progressed from personal to institutional links over the past decades. The origins of the relationship can be traced back as far as the 1970s and 1980s, when Indonesian postgraduate students arrived in Australia, many with Australian government scholarships to complete both their Masters and doctoral studies. These two universities were originally so unequal in terms of educational and research resources and funding that some Indonesian postgraduates essentially had to learn from scratch how to study and conduct research while they were at ­Flinders University. Among the postgraduate students from UGM were Sunyoto Usman and T ­ adjuddin Noer Effendi, who studied under the supervision of the sociologist Professor Riaz Hassan and economist and population expert Chris Manning.3 As mentioned, another arrival from Gadjah Mada University was the young Indonesian political scientist Pratikno. In the early 1990s, he pursued doctoral studies at the university on the dynamics of local politics under the supervision of Jim Schiller and Colin Brown. These student-supervisor relationships later developed into more professional ties, including regular visits by Flinders academics to UGM and joint field research and publications. The arrival of Indonesian postgraduate students at Flinders University also coincided with the growing aspiration on the part of Flinders University to strengthen the teaching of Indonesian language for local Australian students in South Australia. Several Indonesian postgraduates worked as tutors in the program, improving students’ access to native speakers and thus the overall quality of language instruction. The flow of Indonesian postgraduates and the appointment of academic specialists on Indonesia were mutually reinforcing. As Flinders appointed more ­Indonesianists, including Anton Lucas, Jim Schiller, the late Barbara Schiller and Colin Brown, the university was able to attract more postgraduates. These academics then built up their academic credentials by supervising many Indonesian postgraduate students, a process that has taken place in a number of Australian universities, including Monash, ANU, the University of Melbourne and Murdoch. Many of these Indonesian postgraduates have, in turn, gone on to become influential in their fields over the decades following their return to Indonesia, and have taken opportunities to deepen relations with their alma maters. Pratikno, for example, has become a central figure in collaboration between Flinders and UGM, both as Rector and now as a Minister.

3 

Manning later moved to ANU and has recently retired and become a visiting scholar at UGM.

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Personal Roles and Narratives The remainder of this chapter deals briefly with the authors’ personal experience of Indonesia-Australia educational ties. A particular focus is the extent to which each of these academics encountered so-called ‘imbalances’ in the educational relationship, and whether their experience of these imbalances has hindered or assisted their career development, as well as how they have been able to redefine the imbalances to build more equal relations. Priyambudi Sulistyanto began his academic career at Flinders University, where he studied under the supervision of Jim Schiller in early 1990s. Unusually for an Indonesian postgraduate student, and guided by his supervisor’s own research interests, Sulistyanto decided to study Burmese rather than Indonesian politics, with a focus on the uncertainties of democratic transition in Burma under the military rule. After completing his Masters at Flinders, Sulistiyanto did his doctoral research in Southeast Asian politics at the University of Adelaide. Sulistiyanto has not spent the entirety of his academic career in Australia and Indonesia. He also worked at the National University of Singapore (NUS) from 2000 to 2006, where he used NUS’s resources to collaborate on various research projects with two other Australian alumni who had returned to UGM, Pratikno and Dr Aris Arif Mundayat. UGM’s Centre for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS) arose out of this collaboration. Sulistiyanto returned to Australia in 2007, taking up an academic position at Flinders University. Here he continued to engage with UGM scholars on joint research projects on various political topics, deepening the two institution’s collaboration. Although Sulistiyanto first came to Australian universities as a student, over the past decade he has shared his expertise on Southeast Asia with Australian students and enriched access to the region for Flinders University and its students. While Sulistyanto undertook both a Masters and a PhD program in South ­Australia in the 1990s, Najib Azca completed only his Masters degree in Australia, writing a thesis on the role of the security forces in communal conflict under the supervision of the senior Indonesianist Harold Crouch from 2001 to 2003. He then continued his studies in Amsterdam, writing a doctoral thesis on the postconflict life trajectories of jihadi combatants. Azca deepened his engagement with Australian universities and academia after being appointed Vice Dean for research and collaboration in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at UGM (2012–16). In this role, he was responsible for promoting and enhancing academic collaboration with international universities, as part of efforts for UGM’s ‘Locally Rooted, Globally Respected’ campaign under Pratikno’s leadership as rector.4 Azca’s academic engagement with 4  In 2013, Azca joined Pratikno and a group of other UGM scholars on a visit to various ­Australian universities aimed at deepening and expanding collaboration. Pratikno received an Honorary ­Doctorate from Flinders University during this trip.

440  Muhammad Najib Azca, Atin Prabandari and Priyambudi Sulistiyanto ­ ustralia’s ­academia was enhanced following his selection as a Visiting Scholar of A the ­Indonesia Initiative of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Melbourne for three weeks in 2015. As Vice Dean, Azca also used the visit to expand student mobility and staff exchange between his home faculty and the Faculty of Arts, including negotiating the University of Melbourne’s inclusion as a destination for the overseas studies component of UGM’s International Undergraduate Program (IUP) of International Relations.5 Finally, Azca’s engagement with Australian universities has evolved to include joint supervision, following his recent appointment as the head of UGM’s Centre for Security and Peace Studies (CSPS) UGM. Finally, Atin Prabandari is the most junior scholar among the authors, taking up a position as lecturer in the Department of International Relations at UGM in 2011. Upon her return to UGM after completing her Masters degree at the ANU, Prabandari was entrusted to teach Government and Politics of Australia and ­Australian Foreign Policy. The two subjects require students to follow domestic political developments in Australia and to simulate Australian parliamentary debates on policy issues, a process enriched by the involvement of various guest lecturers from Australian institutions. One of these visiting scholars, Professor John Murphy of the University of Melbourne, then joined with Prabandari and a fellow Australian alumnus colleague, Dr Dafri Agussalim, to organise a convention on Australia Studies in Indonesia in 2015. The convention led to the establishment of the association of Indonesian lecturers interested in Australia Studies as an effort to ‘fill the knowledge gap’ on Australia among Indonesia students and academics through exchanges of knowledge among Indonesia academics and their Australian counterparts. Prabandari also serves as manager for her faculty’s Global Engagement Office, which has facilitated various student mobility programs and staff exchanges with Australian institutions since its establishment in 2013. These efforts undoubtedly contribute to balance the asymmetric relationship as they facilitate increased mobility of Indonesian academics and students to Australia and contribute to more equal knowledge exchanges between academics from the two continents. Some short-course initiatives for Australian students have also come from this office, facilitating exchange of knowledge and cultural immersions for students from both countries, with the courses usually open to Indonesian students as well.

Conclusion This chapter has sought to illustrate the various ways in which collaborations between Australian and Indonesian scholars are gradually resolving what are 5  In a further deepening of collaboration between the two institutions, Azca and one of his UGM colleagues, Purwo Santoso, were also invited to join a multi-country collaborative research project on ‘Frontiers, State and Conflict in the Asia Pacific’. The project is being led by Professor Jonathan Goodhand, affiliated with SOAS of the University of London, and the University of Melbourne.

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commonly perceived to be deep discrepancies in bilateral educational ties. ­Australia’s relative strength in terms of financial support and flexibility has provided the bedrock for this collaboration but as each country has brought its own comparative advantages to the table, a more mutually enriching relationship has begun to develop. Indonesia and Australia both face the prospect of the so-called ‘Asian Century’, in which Indonesia is projected to join China, India, Japan and Korea as an emerging Asian giant. A critical question for both countries, eloquently articulated by Kanishka Jayasuriya (2012), is how can they reach the high roads of innovation and productivity that will mark the Asian Century? A better educated public will be a major part of the answer for each country. Our developing bilateral education ties can help us move together in that direction but there is still much to be done before the imbalances can finally be overcome.

References Abrar, Ana Nadya (2015) Tak Pernah Gentar Berubah: Narasi Sejarah Panjang Fisipol 1955-2015 (Yogyakarta, FISIPOL Press). Ananta, Wiji (2013) ‘SBY Disadap, Kerja Sama Pendidikan RI-Australia Tetap Lanjut’, Liputan6.com, 2 December, . Aspinall, Edward and Sukmajati, Mada (eds) (2015) Politik Uang di Indonesia: Patronase and Klintelisme pada Pemilu Legislatif 2014 (Yogyakarta, PolGov). Aspinall, Edward and Sukmajati, Mada (eds) (2016) Electoral Dynamics in I­ndonesia: Money Politics, Patronage and Clientelism at the Grassroots (Singapore, NUS Press). Azca, Muhammad Najib (1998) Hegemoni Tentara [Military Hegemony] (­Yogyakarta, LKiS). Azca, Muhammad Najib; Widdyharto, D; and Sutopo, Oki R (2014) Buku Panduan Studi Kepemudaan: Teori, Metodologi dan Isu-Isu Kontemporer (Yogyakarta: YouSure UGM). Brennan, C (2013) ‘A Bridge across the Arafura: Growing Australian-Indonesian Research Collaboration in the Asian Century’, . DET (Department of Education and Training) (2014) ‘Indonesia and Australia: Power of Education and Soft Diplomacy’, . Ford, M (2013) ‘An Indonesia Strategy in Search of a Commitment’, The ­Australian, 10 July, . Jayasuriya, Kanishka (2012) ‘Asian Century White Paper is Big on Rhetoric, Small on Ideas’, The Conversation, 30 October, .

442  Muhammad Najib Azca, Atin Prabandari and Priyambudi Sulistiyanto McCarthy, J and Ibrahim, R (2010) ‘Review of Social Science Capacity Building Support to Indonesia’s Knowledge Sector’, Knowledge Sector Initiative Report, AusAID, Jakarta. NCP, ‘New Colombo Plan Fact Sheet’, . Purdey, Jemma (2011) From Vienna to Yogyakarta: The Life of Herb Feith (Sydney, UNSW Press).

22 The Unexamined Gift: Australia’s Aid Relationship with Indonesia ROBIN DAVIES

The execution of the Australian drug traffickers Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan just two weeks before Australia’s 2015 federal budget was to be delivered added an extra political dimension to already-slated cuts to Australia’s overseas aid program. Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s Coalition government had foreshadowed in late 2014 that it would reduce Australia’s overseas aid budget by A$1 billion in the 2015 budget, and by a further A$350 million the following year. This reduction was of an unprecedented magnitude—one-third of the aid budget in real terms. Budget night would reveal where the cuts were going to fall. There had been media speculation that Indonesia might bear a disproportionate share of the aid cut if the executions went ahead. Various commentators spoke for and against this course of action. Tony Abbott himself appeared to draw a link between aid and the fate of Sukumaran and Chan in February 2015: We will be making our displeasure known, we will be letting Indonesia know in absolutely unambiguous terms that we will feel grievously let down. … Let’s not forget that a few years ago when Indonesia was struck by the Indian Ocean tsunami Australia sent a billion dollars’ worth of assistance … [and] a significant contingent of our armed forces to help in Indonesia with humanitarian relief. (Bourke 2015)

Abbott’s remark was widely reported and badly received in Indonesia, nearly provoking a formal rebuke from the Indonesian government. Vice President Jusuf Kalla had overseen Indonesia’s tsunami response a decade earlier. He said, ‘If it was not considered humanitarian aid, we will return it’. His sentiment was embodied in an acerbic ‘Koin untuk Australia’ (Coins for Australia) social media campaign. Indonesia’s foreign ministry spokesman, Arrmanatha Nasir, was questioned a few days before the release of Australia’s budget about the possibility of retaliatory aid cuts. He was speaking for a country that in 2014 received A$542 million in Australian aid, A$40 million more than any other country. In this context, his remarks were surprising: Indonesia at the moment is no longer a country that needs aid for development … any aid given by Australia is their effort … to strengthen our partnership … it’s their right to give, but Indonesia is not asking (Chung and AAP 2015).

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Ultimately Australia reduced its aid to Indonesia by 40% in the 2015 budget. While this was a heavy cut, many other countries fared no better in proportional terms. Indonesia’s bilateral allocation fell to A$323 million in 2015, a single-year loss of A$219 million. The hole in Indonesia’s development budget was at least several times that amount, assuming the Indonesian government had been counting on stability in its allocation over Australia’s three-year forward estimates period.1 The cut demoted Indonesia to a distant second in the league table of Australian aid recipients after Papua New Guinea, whose allocation fell by only 5% to A$477 million. The Indonesian government’s reaction to the disappearance of this large quantity of anticipated assistance was mild, and voiced by the same spokesman: This is not directed to a single country and that has to be kept clear in our mind. … Aid is being reduced to countries where the potential economic growth for the future is bright. … Indonesia right now can fulfil its own development costs … Indonesia is not a country that relies on foreign countries for [its] development. (Alford 2015)

Although Indonesian governments did not make such unequivocal statements before 2015, the underlying sentiment had been building for up to a decade. The notion that Indonesia has been allowing foreign countries a ‘right’ to operate aid programs without viewing them as integral to its national development strategies would be well recognised by those involved in the management of bilateral development assistance programs in Indonesia in recent years. The origins of this ‘aid us if you want to’ sentiment can perhaps be traced to the events following the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004. After the tsunami devastated coastal regions of Aceh and North Sumatra, the Indonesian government at first hesitated to ask for international help, but soon did so. Help arrived with the chaotic force of another tsunami, and Indonesia continued to grapple with its partners’ generosity for several years. Indonesia’s growing ambivalence about foreign donors was clearly signalled when the Yudhoyono administration discontinued the Consultative Group on Indonesia (CGI) in 2007. The CGI was a longstanding annual forum in which major bilateral and multilateral donors made aid pledges and discussed policy directions with the Indonesian government.2 There was, it should be said, quite a degree of overstatement in the spokesman’s remarks. They echoed the economic nationalism of the now President Joko Widodo and his opponent Prabowo Subianto during their 2014 presidential election campaigns. The platforms of both major parties, PDI-P and Gerindra, contained many references to the loss of sovereignty associated with foreign investment and foreign debt, including debt incurred for development assistance programs. In one media interview, Prabowo cited perceptions of Indonesia as a ‘third-rate country that’s always begging for foreign aid’. In reality, Indonesian ministers and

1 

The forward estimates period comprises the current financial year and the three subsequent years. The CGI was established in 1992. A similar group, the Dutch-chaired Inter-Governmental Group on Indonesia, existed from 1967 to 1992. 2 

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ministries are not always able to access financial and technical resources from domestic sources for urgent or innovative purposes, and they certainly do value certain forms of external assistance. Like other middle-income countries,3 Indonesia can well use some level of ongoing aid, and arguably has greater capacity to make good use of it than many other countries. Asserting no need for aid is not the same thing as asserting no desire for it. If the Indonesian foreign ministry’s reaction to Australia’s aid cuts was jarring to Australian ears, it was not because it implied a complete indifference to aid. Instead, this reaction revealed Australia’s pride in the size of its aid program in Indonesia to be misplaced. More importantly, it showed that both Australia and Indonesia have a job to do in ensuring that Australia’s aid is more valued than tolerated. Much as it is insignificant by comparison with Indonesia’s neartrillion-dollar economy, Australia’s aid contribution of more than A$300 million per annum is nevertheless substantial in terms of what it can buy.

Australia’s Aid to Indonesia in Context There have been two major, related shifts in the context for foreign aid to Indonesia since the 1960s. First, Indonesia has transitioned from low- to lowermiddle-income country status, which has implications for the level and type of aid that it is able to access.4 Second, Indonesia’s annual repayments on past Official Development Assistance (ODA) loans have grown to exceed foreign aid inflows, so that net aid to Indonesia is now below zero. Owing to this development, Indonesia is increasingly perceived as a ‘graduate’ from aid, even though in gross terms it continues to receive substantial amounts of aid from several sources. Since the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) began compiling comparative statistics on aid flows in 1960, Indonesia has received the equivalent in today’s prices of just under US$100 billion in cumulative net ODA from all measured sources, both bilateral and multilateral.5 Over this period, it received 2.1% of all foreign aid flows to developing countries. However, over the most recent five years for which data are available (2010 to 2014), Indonesia’s net aid was just US$1.9 billion, 0.3% of global aid flows over the same period. In 2013, Indonesia’s net aid was almost zero at US$89 million. In 2014, for the first time, it was well below zero at −US$ 388 million.

3  A country is classified as middle-income if its per capita income is between roughly US$1,000 and US$12,000, as calculated by the World Bank. 4 The subgrouping of lower-middle-income countries, to which Indonesia belongs, contains countries whose per capita income is below about US$ 4,000. ­Indonesia had previously achieved lowermiddle-income status in 1993 but fell back into the low-income ­category after the Asian financial crisis. 5  This and other aid expenditure figures given here are expressed in constant 2014 dollars.

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Australia’s aid to Indonesia has followed a strikingly different trajectory. Indonesia was Australia’s largest aid recipient over the five-year period from 2010 to 2014, receiving US$2.3 billion or over 12% of the US$18.6 billion that Australia provided as bilateral aid to developing countries. Papua New Guinea, for comparison, received US$2.2 billion from Australia over the same period. While Australia’s aid to Indonesia fell in dollar terms in both 2013 and 2014, Indonesia’s share in Australian aid was not much affected. Indonesia’s historical aid receipts from all sources and from Australia, in both dollar and share terms, are compared in Figure 1.

Figure 1:  Annual aid receipts of Indonesia Data source: OECD aid statistical database.

Although net aid to Indonesia is now sub-zero, Indonesia continues to consume considerable amounts of new concessional assistance from several sources. In particular, ‘soft’ loan financing from multilateral development banks and the large bilateral lenders, especially Japan, continues to play an important role in supporting Indonesia’s public investment programs.6 Though soft loans generate some level of debt, developing country governments generally perceive them as less likely than grant aid to infringe on national sovereignty because borrowed money is much more under the direct control of the government. 6 Indonesia is no longer eligible for soft loan financing from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, but continues to receive it from several other sources. In addition, ‘hard’ loans from the two banks just mentioned are sometimes combined with grants to soften their terms where the investments in question create regional or global benefits.

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Indonesia’s gross annual receipts of around US$2 billion per annum are on a par with those of China and India, much larger middle-income countries. In 2014, Indonesia’s gross receipts of US$2.1 billion comprised US$1.2 billion in grant funding—US$440 million of which was provided by Australia—and US$900 million in ODA loans. In gross terms, the largest donors to Indonesia from 2010 to 2014 were Japan (US$4.2 billion), Australia (US$2.3 billion), the multilateral agencies taken together (US$1.7 billion), the US (US$1.2 billion) and Germany (US$1 billion). Indonesia has also received assistance from China that is not captured in OECD statistics. Information published by Indonesia’s national development planning agency, Bappenas, indicates that the present portfolio of active soft loans from China could be worth more than US$500 million (Bappenas 2015). Indonesia joined the ranks of the lower middle-income countries in 2003, just before Australia’s aid to Indonesia commenced its steep ascent. Figure 2 illustrates the accelerating trajectory of Indonesia’s GNI-per-capita growth over the past four decades, interrupted only by the Asian financial crisis, and also the declining significance of external aid over the same period.

Figure 2:  Indonesia: GNI per capita vs ODA as a proportion of GNI Data sources: OECD aid statistical database and World Bank World Development Indicators database.

There is currently much soul-searching within the community of OECD donor countries about the role of aid in middle-income countries. Donors’ aid policy narratives tend to be geared toward the poorest countries, yet the number of lowincome countries has halved since 1994, from over 60 to around 30. All but two of the remaining low-income countries, namely North Korea and Zimbabwe,

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are classified as Least-Developed Countries by the United Nations and are therefore considered to face stubborn, structural barriers to development. Largely as a consequence of these income-category shifts, somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of the people living in extreme poverty—that is, living on less than US$1.90 per day7—are now in middle-income countries. Moreover, China and other non-OECD bilateral donors are directing much of their foreign assistance to middle-income countries, mostly in credit form, with explicitly dual objectives: financing development and developing export and import markets. There is evidence that middle-income countries themselves see an ongoing but increasingly behind-the-scenes role for assistance from OECD donors (Davies and Pickering 2015). However, many of them, including Indonesia, now devote fewer central bureaucratic resources to engaging with and coordinating donors. They prefer increasingly to engage in a more distributed, issue-specific way. These developments are beginning to give rise to various lines of thought among OECD donors. For example, they might in future raise the ‘graduation’ thresholds at which they cease providing aid to countries. Alternatively, they could take a more phased approach to graduation once existing thresholds are reached. They might consider ramping up their own soft lending programs in middle-income countries. They could decide to use their aid to middle-income countries mainly for the production of regional and global public goods, such as infectious disease surveillance and control, or climate change mitigation. They might reflect, also, on how grant and in-kind aid can be used to address the specific development challenges faced by these countries—such as the establishment of adequate and financially sustainable social protection systems. At the time of writing, little has actually changed in the way that donors operate in most middle-income countries. Nevertheless, it is possible some donors will move toward co-operation programs that contain relatively higher levels of technical assistance in complex public policy domains, more direct support for civil society and the local private sector, more indirect assistance through regional and global funds established to pursue global health and environmental goals, and perhaps in some cases—despite the inefficiency involved in tying aid procurement to a donor’s own suppliers—more aid associated with their own countries’ exports and outward investment. More than many other middle-income countries, Indonesia has taken steps to position itself as a contributor to the provision of global public goods in the environmental domain, thereby improving its chances of retaining access to some level of foreign aid. This positioning began with former President Yudhoyono’s

7  The original and familiar US$1-per-day absolute poverty line has been twice updated by the World Bank in light of new information on living costs in developing countries. The first update, in 2008, resulted in an increase to US$1.25 per day. The second update, in late 2015, resulted in a larger increase to US$1.90 per day. The actual incidence and distribution of absolute poverty is not greatly affected by these revisions.

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climate change mitigation pledge to the G20 in 2009,8 and Indonesia’s subsequent US$1 billion climate change mitigation partnership with Norway. Under the latter partnership, and through other mechanisms such as the short-lived IndonesiaAustralia Forest Carbon Partnership, Indonesia has received substantial assistance to develop national arrangements aimed at reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and measuring the reductions achieved relative to baseline levels. In principle, this assistance will increase Indonesia’s chances of profiting from participation in future ‘forest carbon’ markets. Indonesia has also benefited from grant financing from the World Bank’s Clean Technology Fund to soften the terms of a US$175 million loan for geothermal power generation. This is another case in which Indonesia has benefited from the willingness of international donors to allocate concessional financing to middleincome countries for global public goods, in recognition of the fact that some of the benefits generated by such investments will not be captured by those countries.

Tiger, Terrapin, Terror: Aid Through Australian Eyes Since the early 1980s, Australian aid to Indonesia has passed through several distinct phases.9 The transitions from each phase to the next were sometimes driven by policy changes in Australia and at other times by developments in Indonesia. They had surprisingly little to do with the big contextual shifts outlined in the previous section, which had much more impact on aid from other sources. The first and longest of these several phases might be termed the ‘tiger’ phase, from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, during which Indonesia was considered primarily as a major future market for Australian exports. This focus reflected the prevailing wisdom that Indonesia would probably cease to be a recipient of aid by about the first decade of the 2000s, well reflected in the optimistic assessments contained in the World Bank’s 1993 report, The East Asian Miracle. The 1984 Jackson review of Australia’s aid program resulted in the adoption of an explicit commercial objective for Australian aid, in addition to its diplomatic and poverty reduction objectives. The aid program’s armoury included the Development Import Finance Facility (DIFF) which, from 1982, began providing grant funds from the aid budget to soften the terms of export credits offered by Australia’s Export Finance and Insurance Corporation. 8  President Yudhoyono pledged to cut Indonesia’s emissions by 26% relative to an (undefined) business-as-usual scenario by 2020, or by 46% with sufficient international assistance. Most of the heavy lifting was expected to be done by reducing deforestation and forest degradation. 9  The prehistory of Australia’s aid to Indonesia included the Colombo Plan, much food aid and various ad hoc project initiatives in the 1960s and 1970s—such as funding for the long-running Aeronautical Fixed Communications Network project, support through UNESCO for the restoration of the temple at Borobudur, and the provision of vehicles and equipment. For a good account, see Eng (2014).

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DIFF, for a time, accounted for around half of Australia’s aid to Indonesia. It helped finance, for example, the production and installation by Transfield of some 2,500 steel bridges across the country over the period 1983 to 1990, at a cost to the aid budget in current prices of some A$65 million. Conversely, Indonesia accounted for about half of all DIFF expenditure. Non-DIFF expenditure in Indonesia was directed primarily to rural development and education-related programs with an emphasis on the eastern provinces. The Australian government published studies in this period assessing and advertising the commercial benefits of aid to Indonesia and China, and these two high-growth, ‘Asian tiger’ countries were at that time often mentioned in the same breath. Two events—the 1996 change of government in Australia, which was unusually significant for the aid program, and the 1997 Asian financial crisis—brought to an end the tiger phase of Australia’s aid relationship with Indonesia and marked the beginning of what might be termed the ‘terrapin’ phase. The incoming Coalition government adopted a ‘poverty reduction in the national interest’ aid narrative— more or less in line with the ‘one clear objective’ recommendation of the 1997 Simons review of Australian aid—and dropped the commercial objective. Commerciallyoriented programs, including DIFF, were terminated. As a result, Australia’s aid to Indonesia was substantially reduced. In today’s prices, it fell from about A$240 million to just over A$170 million, and stayed at about that level until 2004. During this period, Australia did not loom large as a bilateral donor. Australia was providing less aid than the US and the Netherlands, and far less than Japan. Nor was Australia very active in policy dialogue with the Indonesian government. Australia’s aid program essentially stagnated. This period included, aside from the onset of the Asian financial crisis, the referendum on the independence of TimorLeste in 1999 as well as the Tampa crisis of 2001. Both sides generally saw the aid relationship as a smallish bright spot. Indonesia, however, was not much interested in seeing Australian aid grow, and was not very comfortable with its bias in favour of the eastern fringes of the archipelago. Indonesia’s national development planning agency, Bappenas, frequently questioned this geographic focus, pointing out that the Indonesian government itself channelled additional resources to the poorest provinces. For its part, Australia had come to view Indonesia as something of an economic terrapin in the years after the 1997 crisis, and wished to focus its efforts on technical assistance for better governance and programs targeting the poor such as urban food aid and rural water supply efforts. The aid program’s heavy emphasis on good governance, which included such things as support for more effective corporate tax collection, was in line with prevailing aid fashion10 and also with the then foreign minister Alexander Downer’s preferences. The relative stability of the aid relationship was a modest countervailing factor during the Timor-Leste 10  This fashion was based in part on research published around the turn of the century by the World Bank’s David Dollar and Paul Collier, among others, purporting to show that aid is demonstrably effective in promoting growth when provided under conditions of good governance.

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crisis, as it had been during the Konfrontasi conflict in the 1960s, when Australian and Indonesian military forces clashed in Borneo (Eng 2009). Aid served to provide what former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans liked to describe as ‘ballast’ in the bilateral relationship (Evans 1988). The terrapin phase came to an abrupt end with the terrorist attacks on two nightclubs in Kuta, Bali, in October 2002, which killed 202 people including 88 Australians and 38 Indonesians.11 The attacks created a will on both sides to cooperate more closely and, among other things, led Australia to pledge a 25% increase in the bilateral aid program, with effect from the 2003 budget. The additional funding was to be focused in part on post-bombing infrastructure and community development programs in Bali, but also on Islamic education—on the assumption that education could help mitigate the processes of radicalisation— police cooperation, and support to combat the financing of terrorism. The election of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to the Indonesian presidency in 2004 was an important development, as Yudhoyono had effectively overseen the Indonesian response to the Kuta bombings and was known to be positively disposed toward Australia. Terrorists attacked the Australian embassy in Jakarta shortly before Yudhoyono’s inauguration, and his first year in office included another attack at Jimbaran Bay in Bali, the first deaths in Indonesia from avian influenza (H5N1), and the occurrence of particularly bad peatland fires leading to a serious haze event affecting Malaysia. The seemingly ineffectual nature of Indonesia’s response to these various events further underlined its propensity to generate headaches beyond its own borders. The international community now tended to view Indonesia much more as a large incubator for a range of transnational problems or ‘terrors’, as well as a mostly moderate force among predominantly Muslim countries. This dual status as incubator and moderator, combined with Indonesia’s unusually relaxed attitude toward donor priority-setting, spurred an increasingly sizeable overlap between donor countries’ diplomatic, security and aid priorities. Such an overlap clearly existed with respect to Australian aid. That said, Australia did not allocate particularly large sums of money in support of its diplomatic and security objectives. Like other donors, Australia was simply unable to identify many practical options for achieving its aspirations in areas such as the control of avian influenza or the promotion of religious pluralism and tolerance. The IndonesiaAustralia Forest Carbon Partnership, established in early 2007,12 was a notable exception. Conceived as a ‘very real and practical contribution’13 to reducing

11  The author’s involvement with Australian aid to Indonesia began at about the end of the terrapin phase. He was the senior AusAID official in Canberra with responsibility for Australia’s aid to Indonesia for a year from September 2002. He served as the head of AusAID’s office in Jakarta from 2003 until 2006. He continued to engage with the Indonesia government in the 2007–09 period in relation to the A$100 million Indonesia-Australia Forest Carbon Partnership. 12  The partnership under that name was announced in 2009 when Kevin Rudd visited Indonesia, but its core elements had been put in place during the final year of the Howard Coalition government in 2007. 13  This was Alexander Downer’s description of the main component of the partnership, a large project to rehabilitate and protect an area of peatland in Central Kalimantan.

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carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, this A$100 million program aimed to make Indonesia a moderator, rather than an incubator, of climate change. It closed prematurely, however, having spent only about 65% of its budget and with its achievements having fallen far short of its aims.14 Ordinary Australians on the whole know little about Indonesia (see chapter five) and less about Australia’s aid to Indonesia, hearing about it only very sporadically and in connection with various ‘packages’ put together in response to natural disasters, bombings and disease outbreaks. Indonesia is perceived as Australia’s local darkest Africa, where problems might spawn and ramify. Yet, strangely, many Australians do not perceive Indonesia as a place where abject poverty exists— despite the fact that around 20 million of its 250 million people live below the global absolute poverty line of US$1.90 a day, while another 100 million people live not far above that threshold.15 In these circumstances, aid will naturally be expected to purchase influence, safety and stability by acting directly on the sources of Australians’ various fears, rather than by seeking more indirect, longterm impacts on growth and poverty.

Cops, Carbon, Cattle: Aid Through Indonesian Eyes It is questionable whether anybody in Indonesia will have perceived the aid relationship as passing through the several phases described above. From Indonesia’s side of the table, over most of the past half-century, Australian aid has looked consistently insignificant. The principal transitions, from Indonesia’s perspective, have been from one passing transboundary concern to another. Developing countries, leaving aside the ones that barely function, tend to fall into one of two clusters—those that depend fairly heavily on aid and bargain with donors about priorities and programs, and those that depend very little on the aid they receive and use it selectively and strategically from a position of dominance over donors. Indonesia falls into neither cluster, and thereby represents a special, if not unique, environment for aid. It is not even remotely aid-dependent. Even if one considers gross rather than net aid receipts, Indonesia’s gross receipts are around one third of one per cent of GNI. But, unlike some other countries in the nondependent category, Indonesia does not invest much effort in the governance of external aid. China and South Africa, by contrast, have very clear views about what they want, from whom and within what timeframe. The relative insignificance of aid, together with other factors, makes Indonesia particularly incomprehensible to donors. The country is both vast and rapidly 14  The partnership’s history and demise are discussed in Davies (2015), and also in Olbrei and Howes (2012). 15  According to Newspoll (2013) report, around one-third of respondents were aware of the actual level of poverty in Indonesia. Of the others, half believed it to be lower than it is, half higher.

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evolving. Democratisation is rolling out to the provinces and districts, the legislature is finding its role, the role of the state vis-à-vis the private sector is in flux, the judiciary is in the spotlight, and the best way to handle separatism and other forms of dissent is constantly debated, along with the domestic role of the armed forces. Added to this, government officials are increasingly paralysed by the fear of being accused, fairly or not, of corruption, and major natural disasters regularly knock government processes sideways, even if they do not necessarily have a large economic impact at the national level. It is therefore an important fact of life for most mortals working on or in Indonesia that it is very difficult to keep even passably up to date with what is happening in the spheres of politics, bureaucracy, economics, religion and social change. Indonesians themselves seem accustomed to being in the dark about all sorts of structures and processes and tolerate all manner of redundancies and uncertainties. All of this makes it particularly trying for donors wanting to make sense of things, identify the locus of decision-making on this or that issue, promote efficiency, transparency and order, and gain a sense of what ‘Indonesia’ regards as an appropriate path for donors to take collectively and individually. And, more to the point, it helps explain why the government is not necessarily riveted by the question of what donors are up to. Australian governments have always intended that their aid should make a strategic contribution to growth, stability and poverty reduction in Indonesia, in the interests of both Indonesia and its neighbours. Indonesia’s own intentions with respect to Australian aid have been more modest, if not actually articulated, and not entirely compatible with Australia’s. Conscious of Australia’s wish to maintain good bilateral relations, Indonesian ministers and officials see Australia’s aid program as a handy port of call when in a tight spot. This is, of necessity, an ad hoc role—one that does not lend itself to dressing in strategic frameworks. In many matters, Indonesian officials are willing to see Australia not only as responsive but also as an honest broker, less bullying and dogmatic than international organisations, precisely because Australia does wish to maintain a positive bilateral relationship and is therefore not seeking to pursue an overly narrow ‘reform’ agenda. Australia is seen as a middle-weight partner. Our role is to be there when needed, without too much heavy baggage. Indonesian perceptions of Australian aid are, for the most part, sketchy at best, even in internationally-oriented parts of the bureaucracy, let alone in the regions.16 This reflects in part Indonesia’s relative indifference to bilateral donors’ aid priorities, as well as the absence of any single forum in which the overall shape of the aid program is regularly considered. But it also reflects the fact that Australia’s program has chopped and changed a good deal over the past decade. ‘Initiatives’ and ‘packages’ have emerged and faded with bewildering regularity. To mention a selection, there has been a Bali package, a counter-terrorism package, an avian 16  In a poll conducted by the Lowy Institute (2012), only 14% of Indonesian respondents were aware that Australia was, at that time, Indonesia’s largest aid donor. One-third of respondents were aware that Australia was one of Indonesia’s top two aid donors. One-fifth of respondents agreed strongly that Australia had been an important aid partner for Indonesia.

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influenza package,17 an HIV/AIDS package, the post-tsunami jumbo package that was the Australia-Indonesia Partnership for Reconstruction and Development, and a forest carbon partnership. More recently, the diplomatic difficulties caused by Australia’s abrupt suspension of live cattle exports to Indonesia in 2011 led to the establishment of the Indonesia-Australia Partnership on Food Security in the Red Meat and Cattle Sector. There has also been much political appetite for the creation of bricks-and-mortar institutions such as the Jakarta Centre for Law Enforcement Cooperation (2004) and the Australia-Indonesia Facility for Disaster Risk Reduction (2008). These consume considerable money and effort, then tend to become decrepit once the spotlight moves elsewhere.18 Australia, it is generally thought, aids Indonesia in order to further its foreign policy objectives. It wants to keep on the right side of key ministers, so provides advisers. It wants to export its views on economic management and reduce the risk that it will have to contribute to bail-outs, so again provides advisers. It wants to familiarise Indonesians with Australia, so provides scholarships and study tours. It wants to advance its trade and security interests, so provides targeted packages of support to this end—in areas such as aviation security, anti-money laundering, ‘de-radicalisation’ in prisons, and live cattle processing. It wants to contain crossborder threats such as people-smuggling and infectious disease, particularly those emanating from the eastern provinces, so provides geographically-specific projects of various kinds. Most of this is understood, tolerated and occasionally appreciated by the Indonesian government. As mentioned, Australia’s emphasis on aiding the eastern provinces, however, has not always been appreciated. This emphasis is often assumed by Indonesians to be greater than it actually is, and is occasionally assumed to be less to do with the region’s proximity to Australia than its congenial religion (around a third of eastern Indonesia’s population is Christian, much higher than the national proportion). Indonesian observers of a more negative bent regularly suggest that aid is either carelessly or deliberately allowed to fall into the hands of agents of separatism in remote provinces. Allegations of this nature have sometimes become a small irritant in the relationship. One study on Australia’s aid undertaken by the Indonesia Institute of Sciences (LIPI) in 2005 arrived at the conclusion that this aid was heavily weighted in favour of counter-terrorism and NGO funding, including funding for Australian NGOs. In fact, counter-terrorism funding was and remains very minor in proportion to the overall program and funding for NGOs likewise, with Australian NGOs very rarely receiving funding outside significant emergency situations. One can only assume that LIPI thought publicly-available information on these points was misleading.

17  This still exists as the ‘Indonesia-Australia Partnership on Emerging Infectious Diseases (Animal Health)’. 18  The Australia-Indonesia Facility for Disaster Risk Reduction was closed in 2015. The Jakarta Centre for Law Enforcement Cooperation still operates but is not the major regional public good originally envisaged. It now receives very limited support from Australia and other international sources.

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Indonesian views of Australian aid partly mirror, and are no doubt shaped by, those of Australian media commentators and public intellectuals. The latter generally take the view, if they take a view at all, that Australia’s interests are best served when aid is used to keep channels of communication open, contain disease and the unwanted movement of people, contribute to domestic stability, and promote religious pluralism and tolerance. There tends to be an inflated view on the Australian side of what can be achieved in these areas with the resources and influence available, and very little, if any, interest in more mundane development objectives. While popular, or at least non-specialist, perceptions on both sides tend to be fairly simplistic and not reflective of the broad range of things that happen under the aid program, they have something in common: they see aid as a sort of connective fluid, promoting easier co-existence and dampening shocks. This, again, is the ‘ballast’ doctrine. Given Indonesia’s modest expectations of Australian aid, it is perhaps not surprising that in its relationship with Australia, Indonesia has never used the refusal, slowing or suspension of aid as a weapon in the diplomatic arsenal. Soekarno’s famous rebuke to the US—‘go to hell with your aid’—was uttered long ago, in 1964 and in a Cold War context. More recently, the Soeharto government cut off ties with the Netherlands in 1992 after the latter’s attempt to apply policy conditionality in connection with Indonesia’s actions in Timor-Leste. Indonesia is now even less dependent on aid than in the 1990s and therefore even better placed to say ‘go to hell’. It was not inconceivable that the Indonesian government would say this to Australia after the executions of Sukumaran and Chan if it perceived Australia to be reducing aid in retaliation, but it chose not to do so. For Australia, aid is, and has long been, one way of maintaining engagement when things are rocky. Indonesia, by contrast, has simply never seen aid as a sufficiently important form of engagement to break off. Moreover, suspending aid as a diplomatic gesture would tend to vest importance in it; Indonesia would effectively be acknowledging its continuing status as an aid recipient, something that is now rarely done.

The Extravagant Gesture The Indian Ocean tsunami at the end of 2004 was the perfect storm for Prime Minister John Howard’s government in Australia. While he and his Cabinet were clearly deeply moved by the scale of the destruction wrought by the tsunami, they were also keenly alert to the opportunities offered by this historic disaster. It provided an opportunity to ‘reset’ the bilateral relationship between Australia and Indonesia by making a generous gesture. It also provided a cornerstone for Howard’s legacy-conscious commitment, made in September 2005 at the UN General Assembly, to double Australia’s overseas aid program between 2005 and 2010. It did not, however, fundamentally change either Australian or Indonesian perceptions of the bilateral aid relationship.

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It is little known that the Howard government’s generous gesture was preceded by a smaller one of a similar kind. In September 2004, a little more than a year after Australia’s aid was increased in the wake of the first Bali bombings, the Australian embassy was itself the target of a terrorist attack which killed 11 Indonesians and wounded many more. John Howard approved a A$1 million Victim Assistance Program to provide medical and financial help to families affected by the attack. Alexander Downer subsequently increased funding for this program to A$3 million. The program was quite unusual and not publicised. It consciously disregarded the risk that Australia might be seen to be accepting some kind of responsibility for the impacts of the attack on the local population.19 It was a genuine expression of compassion, and was the stronger for not being publicised. It was a small foretaste of the colossal gesture to come. On Boxing Day, 26 December 2004, the Indian Ocean tsunami hit the provinces of Aceh and North Sumatra. Ultimately, it was determined that the world’s most powerful earthquake in forty years had caused the deaths of somewhere toward 170,000 people in Aceh and North Sumatra, constituting almost three-quarters of all fatalities attributable to the tsunami in the region. Nobody will ever know exactly how many people were borne out to sea or buried in mass graves. Another major earthquake further devastated the islands of Nias and Simeulue off the western coast of Sumatra in late March 2005, killing a further 1,000 people. The emergency response to the Indian Ocean tsunami attracted an unprecedented US$13.5 billion in funding, of which some US$5 billion was for ­Indonesia. Unusually, almost 40% of the former amount came from private donors, mostly the general public. Australian NGO appeals raised about A$350 million from ­individuals and corporations, the bulk of which was for Indonesia. Australia’s total official commitment to emergency response and long-term rehabilitation and reconstruction programs in Aceh and Nias, while possibly lower than private donations, was also large, at about A$250 million (Figure 3).20 At the time of the disaster, Aceh was more or less a closed province, off limits to all but a few international organisations. The Indonesian government had been negotiating on and off for years with the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), with some help from neutral international mediators. While those negotiations seemed to be making some progress in the period before the tsunami, UN organisations and official bilateral donors were as a rule kept out of the province, or represented by Indonesian nationals whose movements were circumscribed. It was thought these organisations’ presence or their actions might in some way give legitimacy or encouragement to the independence movement.

19  No Indonesian direct employees of the embassy were killed or injured. A gardener was killed in the embassy grounds. A number of Indonesian police officers and contracted security guards working near the front entrance of the building were seriously injured. Most of the victims were passers-by. 20  Data on total support for Indonesia are from the Financial Tracking Service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Data on Australian private donations are ACFID (2005).

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Figure 3:  Australia’s $250 million post-tsunami assistance to Aceh and Nias Data source: ‘The achievements of the Australia-Indonesia Partnership for Reconstruction and Development in Aceh and Nias’, Australian Government, December 2006.

The Indonesian government was perceived as slow to open the pulverised province and request international assistance. Journalists and some of the more freewheeling early responders, including some staff of international NGOs, quickly crossed its borders at will. But official donors, and particularly their military personnel and assets, could not enter without permission. After some initial reluctance, this permission was soon given emphatically. After arriving in the provincial capital of Banda Aceh on the day after the disaster and seeing the devastation for himself, a shocked Vice President Kalla said, ‘Just get them in.’ The subsequent traffic jam of international donor agencies has been well documented. The Tsunami Evaluation Coalition rued the ‘competition, duplication and waste’ that characterised the operations of exceptionally well-funded international organisations (Tsunami Evaluation Coalition 2007). Official donors and private blow-ins also frequently supplied things without reference to demand or need and, almost without exception, competed to attach themselves to ‘flagship’ emergency interventions or, even early on, reconstruction projects. Australia’s flagship, hard-won owing to competition from Germany, was the reconstruction of part of the Zainoel Abidin General Hospital in Banda Aceh. Some donor agencies had a limited understanding of, or in some cases little interest in, the strengths and weaknesses of local and international partners in Indonesia. As a result, they aggravated the traffic jam by spreading their largesse too widely. Labouring beneath this writhing mass of international actors was a small set of organisations with actual delivery capacity. The International Organisation for Migration did a large and under-appreciated job of mobilising trucks and moving goods and people overland within Aceh and between Aceh and Medan. The UN World Food Programme, despite having no presence in the province before

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the disaster, got going quickly; likewise, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). The NGO Save the Children, with pre-existing networks, played an important role in reuniting families. Médecins Sans Frontières, which had sometimes been active in Aceh before the tsunami, moved in with characteristic speed and determination, providing rapid medical and relief services across the province. Most important, though, were the efforts of Indonesian actors. The Indonesian military (TNI) had been stationed in the province in large numbers (and therefore suffered large casualties). TNI soldiers did much of the search, rescue and recovery work, debris clearance and distribution of humanitarian supplies, some of which came from their own stocks. Among other local and national organisations, the Indonesian Red Cross (PMI) mobilised volunteers from across Indonesia. The major Indonesian Muslim organisations, Nahdlatul Ulama and particularly Muhammadiyah, played an important role through their schools, hospitals, health clinics and volunteer networks. In addition, the local affiliates of international NGO federations, including CARE and World Vision, were able to mobilise people and goods quickly to provide assistance across the province, including the most remote islands. The Indonesian actors just mentioned had mainly manpower and some institutional capacity to offer, and the most effective international actors had quite specific mandates. This meant there were sizeable gaps in the collective response, particularly in the early weeks. Sanitation, for example, was a large problem for displaced people, there was no strategic approach to the provision of shelter for such people, and certain medical supplies were in shortage even while others were in glut. There was much more for donors to do than simply getting behind the effective actors already in place. However, most donors were preoccupied with their flagships and the demands of their own national NGOs. Australia’s response, through the then Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID)21 and the Australian Defence Force (ADF), was distinguished by its concern to fill gaps and build on pre-existing relationships. AusAID’s emergency response team worked very closely with a developmentminded ADF team in Jakarta, Medan and Banda Aceh to get people and supplies to where they were most needed via C‑130 Hercules transport aircraft and Iroquois helicopters. The ADF’s pre-existing relationships with relevant Indonesian National Armed Forces (TNI) generals proved invaluable in securing both initial permissions and ongoing cooperation. There was an almost bottomless need for medical and surgical care in the early days after the disaster. Although field hospitals and medical teams soon proliferated beyond need, Australia’s various state-based medical teams played an important role, complementing that of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) team, working from a co-opted private hospital. A sleepless Western Australian pharmacist, Phillip Passmore, played an invaluable role in helping local authorities triage pharmaceuticals, identify gaps, surfeits and out-of-date products,

21  This agency ceased to exist in October 2013, when responsibility for overseas aid was transferred to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

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and in organising the supply of products needed to meet critical shortages, such as tetanus immunoglobulin and specialised antibiotics. Australian officials organised on an interim basis the charter of a ship, a light plane and some smaller boats for the transportation of food supplies to neglected and inaccessible coastal areas and islands, effectively giving the World Food Programme some early delivery capacity while it put in place its own more extensive charter arrangements. They attended to the needs of people on the island of Simeulue and supported an Australian medical NGO to build on its pre-existing operations around Nias and the Mentawai Islands. Their early commitments of support for the Aceh provincial government and the Rehabilitation and ­Reconstruction Agency for Aceh and Nias (BRR) were unique and highly appreciated. A little later, Australia’s support for cash-for-work and village development programs was an efficient and appropriate way of supporting incomes, providing a wider economic stimulus and rebuilding local government capacity. The capacity of Australian officials to get sensible things agreed and done in Aceh and North Sumatra owed much to the quite unexpected and extravagant funding gesture announced by John Howard in Jakarta on 4 January 2005. Australia, he announced, would provide Indonesia with an additional A$1 billion in aid over the five years from 2005 to 2009 to be used for ‘the reconstruction and development of Indonesia’. This, he noted, was the largest Australian aid ‘package’ ever provided. According to Howard, President Yudhoyono reacted to the announcement by saying ‘he had been overwhelmed by it and he would never forget it’ (Channel Nine 2005). The sheer size of the commitment made it a flagship in itself, such that there was less need for Australia to erect monuments to its own generosity in Aceh and more capacity for Australian aid officials to direct funds to things that seemed actually useful. Meanwhile, the US and Japan vied to build highways. The Australia-Indonesia Partnership for Reconstruction and Development (AIPRD) was, in fact, a strange beast, announced in the context of the tsunami yet not intended primarily for rehabilitation and reconstruction in affected areas. Indonesia’s then Coordinating Minister for Social Affairs, Alwi Shihab, was bemused to learn that only a portion (later calculated to be about 18%) of the total was to be spent in Aceh and North Sumatra.22 The balance was to be spent elsewhere in Indonesia, with A$500 million set aside for the soft-loan financing of large-scale road rehabilitation and primary school construction. The procurement of goods and services for loanfinanced programs was limited to Indonesian and Australian suppliers. The use of loan financing and partially-tied procurement were major departures from current practice. DIFF packages were, in effect, soft loans but had not been available for a decade. Loan financing was attractive to the Australian Treasury because soft loans figure as assets in the national accounts, but this seems unlikely to have been the only reason for the use of loans. It is more likely that in the view of the Australian Cabinet at that time, Indonesia was again coming to be perceived as a country that was moving beyond the need for aid in its standard forms.

22 

Personal recollection of the author.

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In political terms, the Howard government’s logic appeared to be that Australia had an opportunity to make a dramatic gesture which would help repair the bilateral relationship in the wake of the Timor-Leste crisis of 1999. However, any sufficiently large gesture would inevitably exceed the absorptive capacity of the tsunami-affected regions, given the ready availability of reconstruction funding from other sources. Moreover, confining Australia’s funding to a small corner of the nation would not be as beneficial in the long term for the bilateral relationship. Whatever the logic might have been, the Rudd Labor government elected in 2007 was no less enthusiastic about committing large sums of aid to Indonesia. In fact, one of the Labor party’s election commitments in the area of overseas aid had been to agree to a A$75 million ‘debt for health’ swap with Indonesia. This was subsequently implemented, despite being intricate, relatively small and quite unnecessary from a debt sustainability perspective. Rudd’s determination to grow the Australian aid budget—which was not unrelated to his determination to secure Australia a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council for the 2013–14 biennium—further steepened the trajectory of Australian aid to Indonesia, with planning for around A$1 billion in annual expenditure by about 2017.23 The impact of the 2007–08 global financial crisis was not, as might be assumed, an important factor here, as Indonesia was not badly affected. The potential impacts of the crisis on Indonesia were in any case dealt with separately when Australia pledged US$1 billion to a US$5.5 billion multidonor contingent financing facility for Indonesia in 2009. This facility was, in fact, never activated. (It still exists, having been rolled over several times.)

What goes up must Come Down: The Inevitable Correction Owing to the post-tsunami package and the broader aid growth commitments of both the Howard and Rudd governments, Australia’s aid to Indonesia rose very steeply from 2005 at a time when other donors’ aid was falling away and Indonesia itself was becoming increasingly indifferent to foreign assistance. This was clearly a fragile situation, and one that was ripe for rupture. Despite ten years of democratic stability under the two Yudhoyono administrations (2004–09 and 2009–14), as well as steady per-capita income growth, the ­Yudhoyono era is generally considered disappointing from an economic development perspective. At the end of that era, in 2014: the Indonesian economy remained

23  Rudd undertook in 2007 to increase Australia’s aid to 0.5% of GNI by 2015, which would have taken it close to A$8 billion per annum, twice the amount that Howard had pledged to spend. This ‘double doubling’ was much advertised in the context of Australia’s Security Council campaign.

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too flat to deliver significant improvements in living standards for large sections of the population; corruption had been tackled in a piecemeal rather than systemic way; little had been achieved in public service reform; the national budget was still seriously burdened by unsustainable fuel and energy subsidies; and the climate for foreign investment continued to be inhospitable. Little progress had been made on reducing deforestation, and Australia’s forest carbon partnership with Indonesia had ended in disappointment. By 2013, Indonesia was once again looking like a terrapin—steadier on its feet now, but moving well below its potential. This was the situation at a time when Australia was high and dry as a very generous bilateral donor of grant aid to Indonesia. By 2013, Australia’s aid to Indonesia had approximately quadrupled in real terms relative to 2002. Net aid from Indonesia’s other main sources had been heading for zero in 2004, the year after Indonesia achieved middle-income status. While the 2004 tsunami caused a sizeable spike in aid from all sources in 2005, and some subsequent fluctuations as post-tsunami commitments were met, aid from non-Australian sources tailed off again over the next few years.24 Formal aid coordination by the Indonesian government largely stopped happening in 2007. Bappenas, the national planning and aid coordination agency, grew progressively weaker in capacity and influence as time went on, particularly after the departure of Sri Mulyani as its minister at the end of 2005. Australia, then, was looking decidedly lonely as a donor from about 2010 (Figure 4), with no real peers and nobody to talk to in the Indonesian government. Ironically, the tsunami, which had led the Australian government to embark on a policy of steeply increasing aid, had led the Indonesian government to move in the opposite direction—to cease identifying itself as an aid supplicant. Indonesia, in common with China, India, Brazil and some other middle-income countries, began to describe itself a provider of ‘South-South’ cooperation, even if the assistance involved was quite minor and ad hoc. This situation was inherently unstable. Australia’s aid to Indonesia had grown to an incongruous level. It should have been very difficult to maintain that Indonesia, a country whose net aid receipts were already about nil in 2013, needed anywhere near A$540 million in Australian aid each year. After all, Indonesia was, and is, an emerging middle power—a member, with Australia, of the recently formed MIKTA middle power grouping25 and of the G20, which has assumed greater significance since being elevated to a leaders’ level forum in 2008. In practice, only a small portion of Australia’s large expenditure ever received much attention at the political level on either side. This was essentially the portion that related to irritants in the bilateral relationship, trans-boundary problems

24  Aid from the US in Indonesia is something of an exception in that it has been relatively steady in the post-tsunami period, although at a level about one-third of Australia’s. 25  Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, Turkey and Australia.

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with the potential to affect Australia, or matters in which particular Indonesian ministers had a strong personal interest. The lion’s share of Australia’s aid was spent where it could easily be spent, on large, fast-disbursing infrastructure and cash transfer programs.

Figure 4:  Aid to Indonesia from major donors Data source: OECD aid statistical database.

Even though surprisingly few people on the Australian side ever raised questions about the sheer volume of aid to Indonesia, it was bound for a correction as soon as Australia’s aid budget began contracting. The Australian Coalition government applied only a minor reduction to Indonesia’s allocation in its first round of spending cuts in early 2014, which were to bring the aid budget down to A$5 billion and subsequently keep it stable at that level in real terms. However, it could not avoid a substantial correction in its second round of cuts in 2015, which reduced the aid program to A$4 billion en route to A$3.7 billion in 2016. The correction, though, could well have been larger. Instead, as noted in the preamble, the Australian government chose to apply a flat 40% reduction to most country programs other than those for Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Island countries. Indonesia, therefore, suffered no more than most of Australia’s aid partners despite having benefited disproportionately from aid increases since 2005. It might well be that a larger cut was considered, but rejected for fear that it would be interpreted as a retaliation for the imminent executions of Sukumaran and Chan. If so, the executions might have had the paradoxical effect of protecting rather than imperilling Indonesia’s bottom line.

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Examining the Gift: Where to Next? Despite the recent large reduction in Australia’s aid to Indonesia, Australia is still providing around A$300 million per annum in bilateral aid to a country that says it has no need of aid.26 Both sides, one would think, need to think carefully about how to get the best from this still substantial contribution. There is no sensible way of judging whether A$300 million, or any particular amount, is too much for a given developing country considered in isolation. In most developing countries, relatively large amounts of aid could likely be spent effectively, even if that does not always happen. If one thinks about the fixed or indeed shrinking pie that is Australia’s aid program, there is a case for the view that Indonesia should get less of the pie than it now does, even after the 2015 cuts. The real question, however, is how most effectively to spend whatever level of aid that Australia chooses to give Indonesia—or the aid that Indonesia allows Australia to give it. Aid has been a prominent part of Australia’s relationship with Indonesia for over 40 years, and has many achievements to its credit—though too few are recorded. In the increasingly remote past, Australia financed infrastructure, first with grants and later with mixed credits. Some of this is still in evidence. Overall, it is likely these investments delivered adequate returns in terms of the economic and social development of certain parts of the country. The same could be said of Australia’s investments over a long period in flood control, water supply and sanitation. Australia applied considerable energy also to animal health, university development, technical and vocational education and integrated rural development. It is less easy to be confident of the degree of success of Australia’s efforts in these latter areas. Contemporary evaluations were fairly equivocal and there is now not very much evidence of their passing. Australia’s efforts in basic health and education are more recent and limited in scope geographically. Their local impacts appear to have been positive in various respects but, in common with most donor interventions in these fields, not in the most fundamental respects—that is, they have not produced significant improvements in educational results or health indicators. Over the years Australia has financed an estimated 18,000 Indonesian students to undertake postgraduate studies in Australia. With some notable exceptions such as former Vice President Boediono, former Finance Minister Chatib Basri, and former Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa, these people tend to be less in evidence in senior ministerial positions than their scholarship provider, the Australian government, might have hoped. In the regions, however, one tends to meet them surprisingly often. They speak proudly of their ties with Australia and are particularly well-disposed toward the idea of other forms of engagement with Australia through whatever their current institutions might be. 26 According to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s 2016–17 budget documents, Australia provided A$312 million in bilateral aid to Indonesia in 2015–16, and will provide A$296 million in 2016–17.

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Australia has contributed to policy and institutional reforms in areas such as tax administration and treasury management, less by example than by the continuous efforts of senior consultants. (Attempts to build ‘twinning’ relationships between Australian and Indonesian public sector agencies have rarely advanced very far.) In this process, and in part through longevity of engagement, Australia has established strong connections with senior economic officials. Australia has also made tentative but important attempts to build relationships with Muslim social organisations—Muhammadiyah, Nahdlatul Ulama, and the JPPR election monitoring coalition. Finally, and far from least, Australian aid has had a diffuse but positive impact on the lives of many communities through support in various forms for local health and education facilities, community groups and small enterprises, and through emergency and reconstruction assistance in the aftermath of a series of disasters, most notably the 2004 tsunami. Of this kind of assistance there is often little to show. It is hard to find, hard to draw a line around, and hard to certify as sustainable—but it improves the wellbeing of people for at least a time and sometimes even a temporary improvement can make a lasting difference, particularly in the life of a child. There have, of course, also been shortcomings. There has really been no major institutional change as a result of Australian assistance. Australia has facilitated reforms in the Ministry of Finance and improvements in the functioning of small institutions such as the National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) and Indonesia’s financial intelligence unit, but has not made any larger dents in the public service. For quite some time now, no really meaningful relationships have existed with regional governments and Australia has provided minimal support for the decentralisation process even in the regions where it historically concentrates its project assistance. Academic linkages have long been in a poor state. There has been quite limited recognition and support of non-subsidised Australia-Indonesia linkages, such as student exchanges and voluntary medical work. Following the fading out some time ago of large and integrated rural development programs in eastern Indonesia, the eastern islands emphasis became quite illusory—which is not to say it absolutely has to exist but that some sort of regional concentration would clearly generate economies of scale. Australia continued to have activities in the east but did not bring them together as effectively as it could have. Initial attempts to replace rural sector, growth-oriented programs with more poverty-oriented basic social service programs were not very satisfactory or for that matter well-founded in pragmatic analysis of likely impacts and opportunity costs. The latter programs were simply too limited in scope and too detached from governments at all levels; and the legacy of the former programs was allowed largely to wither. There was more than a whiff of faddishness about the shift in emphasis and the way it was implemented. Even if it is accepted that Australian aid has achieved enough to justify the expense, most observers would probably agree that the whole has not, as Australian governments might have hoped, added to more than the sum of the parts. For a

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long time, in fact, the parts have been arguably too numerous and too ephemeral. The program in 2013 was spread across a great many sectors, objectives and activities, with only the education sector showing any tendency to dominate (Figure 5). In addition, the great majority of Australia’s aid is provided to, and through, Indonesia’s public sector. The question now is where to apply Australian aid, which remains substantial, to best effect in a rapidly changing country that no longer wishes to be perceived as a supplicant.

Figure 5:  Allocation of Australian aid to Indonesia, 2014 Data source: OECD aid statistical database.

Indonesia’s own statements about the place of aid, interpreted intelligently, point toward a general answer to this question. Indonesia’s public sector has little need of grant financing from donors. Where it needs money, it will borrow it from one of the several development banks operating in the region—including, in the near future, the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank—or issue bonds. Australia could conceivably become a bilateral lender, as it did briefly after the tsunami, but this would have the unfortunate effect of undercutting multilateral institutions that have stronger financial management and loan preparation capabilities. However, there is a better option. Indonesia’s public sector still has need of in-kind assistance in many areas of public policy, and might, on occasion, have need of grant financing in order to test-drive innovative programs that are not yet trusted to draw on the national public purse. Looking beyond the public sector, Indonesian civil society organisations play a large role in the delivery of private but cheap health and education services, and could use a lot more help to build their capacity and improve the quality of the

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s­ervices they ­provide. In addition, small-to-medium enterprises play a substantial role in development by including poor people in their supply chains and providing goods and ­services that are essential to the poor. Such enterprises could receive more support to start up or expand, particularly where local financial institutions are too risk averse to support businesses with genuine potential. In principle, the Indonesian government should itself be responsible for public engagement with civil society and private actors. In practice, however, it has higher priorities to deal with in the public sector realm. The same is true of the governments of most middle-income countries. Assistance of the kind outlined above does not lend itself to corporatised, ‘projectised’ delivery. Corporately-managed, expatriate-led implementation of projectised technical assistance and investment projects has been the norm throughout the last 30 years or so. This approach is high-cost27 and often ineffective. The personnel involved see themselves as primarily responsible to their own consulting companies. Project designs, whether prepared at the outset or on a rolling basis, are normally highly specified and difficult to alter. The sums of money involved are such that donors are loath to write a contract for more than three to five years, partly to protect themselves from risk but partly also to accommodate companies who expect regular bidding opportunities. This manner of aid delivery is the norm basically because it is relatively easy and safe for donor agencies, especially when the projects in question perform poorly. However, projectised assistance, for many reasons, tends to be short-term, rigid and inward-looking. Public policy assistance has to come mostly from governments or people with fairly current experience and contacts in governments. Assistance to civil society and the private sector has to come mostly from civil society or the private sector, or from people with fairly current experience in those domains. Providing such assistance is, therefore, quite a fiddly proposition that goes well beyond contract management. It could, however, pay off handsomely in terms of development impact, and could also, if well done, do much to enhance bilateral relations in a general sense—not just government-to-government relations. For the latter purpose, it is important to consider carefully what structures are established for the joint governance of individual programs and for the aid program as a whole. These structures would preferably engage a wide cross section of Indonesians. There is little point in having only a single, ministerial-level body, for example. The intention should be to ensure not only that the program is responding to actual needs but also that the aid program, as a topic of conversation, occasions a high-level of interaction between Australians and Indonesians. Now that Australia is almost alone as a provider of substantial, grant-based aid to Indonesia, it should naturally happen that Indonesian government and non-government actors look in Australia’s direction for certain kinds of help that cannot be obtained domestically. However, they are unlikely to do so until 27  Quantifying overheads is difficult but, very roughly speaking, these will tend to be one-quarter of a project’s cost for the lead contractor, and can be higher once subcontracting overheads are taken into account.

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Australia communicates more clearly what it wants to do in Indonesia, and how, and also restrains its tendency to tie up most new funding in ‘packages’ targeting largely intractable irritants and threats. Several hundred millions of dollars should clearly buy a lot of impact and goodwill, if used flexibly, responsively and for purposes not served by other sources of assistance.

Conclusion Since at least 2005, Australian governments have viewed aid to Indonesia in largely quantitative terms, letting it be known that the size of the bilateral aid program reflects the importance of the bilateral relationship. John Howard’s post-tsunami decision to increase aid to Indonesia by A$1 billion over five years is widely considered a diplomatic master-stroke that helped to reset the bilateral relationship in the wake of the East Timor and Tampa crises. As a result of this and subsequent allocation decisions, Indonesia was a disproportionate beneficiary of commitments on the part of the Howard and Rudd governments to double Australia’s aid, and then double it again, over the decade to 2015. Indonesia was viewed as a place where money could be spent effectively and with particularly high diplomatic, security and economic dividends. A correction was inevitable once the Abbot government decided, in late 2013, to prune Australia’s aid program severely. That this correction occurred immediately after the executions of Sukumaran and Chan, yet was not treated as a retaliation, speaks for the quality of diplomacy on both sides. At the same time, it says something about the contemporary significance of Australian aid. It suggests, moreover, that Howard’s grand gesture, and Rudd’s later elaboration of it, was unnecessarily extravagant and in some ways unfortunate. The emphasis on spending so much more money caused Australia, and indeed also Indonesia, to miss an opportunity to rethink how Australian aid might best be used in a rapidly changing country. At the same time, Australia’s hundreds of millions of dollars in aid—whether A$300 million or A$500 million per annum—are negligible in proportion to Indonesia’s national income and public expenditure. If allocated with too much emphasis on ease of disbursement, Australia’s aid will deliver little more than windfall gains to Indonesia. The 2015 correction in the size of the bilateral aid program provides an overdue opportunity to reposition aid in the relationship. In middle-income countries in general, and especially in Indonesia, aid is likely to be most effective when provided to support the formulation of public policy, the development of non-government service delivery organisations, and the growth of the private sector (particularly small-to-medium enterprises). In each of these areas, there should be a role for Australian public and private sector actors. Shifting priorities toward these objectives would also deliver diplomatic dividends. Not doing so would leave a large amount of money effectively idling, leaving the stage open for further aid cuts.

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Further cuts of any great size would be unfortunate because Indonesia retains a large capacity to benefit from well-targeted aid, and Australia will surely again need to rely upon its aid to provide some ‘ballast’ in the relationship during difficult times. Both parties in this aid relationship have a job to do in reflecting and agreeing upon what they value about the exchange. Indonesia is a country where a great many positive things are already happening without any particular help from donors. The heavy machinery of traditional aid programming is now of little use and little interest to most people in the Indonesian bureaucracy. Indonesia can well use a substantial allocation of Australian aid but does not need to consume some 12% of Australia’s aid, or over one-fifth of Australia’s aid through country and regional programs. It should be able to provide a high development return to the level of aid that, after the 2015 correction, is now available to it. In summary, Australia should become less preoccupied with its own generosity to Indonesia and more preoccupied with developing deep and durable relationships with selected elements of Indonesia’s government and nongovernment sectors. Australia would do better to become nimbler in response to Indonesian needs and to diversify its aid-fuelled relationships beyond the public sector. Aid should figure much more in the background than the foreground, and should be used far less as the vehicle for reflex responses to short-term problems and preoccupations in the bilateral relationship. Aid rarely has an appreciable impact when used in this way. The Indonesian government, too, should devote more thought to the allocation of an increasingly scarce free good. There is little point in merely tolerating aid, and Indonesia, like other middle-income countries, can afford to admit that it can well use aid, even if it can live without it.

References Alford, Peter (2015) ‘Budget 2015: Indonesia Says It Accepts Foreign Aid C ­ utbacks’, The Australian, 13 May. ACFID (Australian Council for International Development) (2005) ‘NGO ­Tsunami Accountability Report’, 1 June, . Bappenas (2015) ‘Laporan Kinerja Pelaksanaan Pinjaman dan/atau Hibah Luar Negeri’, Triwulan 1, . Bourke, Latika (2015) ‘Bali Nine: Tony Abbott Urges Indonesia to “Reciprocate” for Australia’s Tsunami Assistance and Aid Generosity’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 18 February. Channel Nine (2005) ‘Interview with Ray Martin, A Current Affair, 6 January 2005’, PM Transcripts, . Chung, Frank and AAP (2015) ‘Indonesia Unconcerned about Foreign Aid Cuts’, news.com.au, 8 May.

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Davies, R (2015) ‘The Indonesia-Australia Forest Carbon Partnership: A ­Murder Mystery’, Centre for Global Development Working Paper 60, 20 April, ­ . Davies, R and Pickering, J (2015) ‘Making Development Cooperation Fit for the Future: A Survey of Partner Countries’, OECD Development Cooperation Working Paper 20, February, . Eng, P van der (2009) ‘Konfrontasi and Australia’s Aid to Indonesia during the 1960s’ 55(1) Australian Journal of Politics and History 46. Eng, P van der (2014) ‘International Food Aid to Indonesia, 1950s-70s’, Working Paper No. 2014-19, Working Papers in Trade and Development, Arndt-Corden Department of Economics, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, September, . Evans, Gareth (1988) ‘Australia’s Relations with Indonesia’, an address by Senator Gareth Evans QC, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, to the Australia Indonesia Business Cooperation Committee, Bali, 24 October, . Lowy Institute (2012) Shattering Stereotypes: Public Opinion and Foreign Policy—Lowy Institute Indonesia Poll 2012’, . Newspoll (2013) ‘Australian Attitudes towards Indonesia’, report commissioned by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 28 August, . Olbrei, E and Howes, S (2012) ‘A Very Real and Practical Contribution? Lessons from the Kalimantan Forests and Climate Partnership’ 3(2) Climate Law 103. Tsunami Evaluation Coalition (2007) ‘Synthesis Report: Expanded Summary’, January, .

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23 Economic Policy in the AustraliaIndonesia Relationship: Unbound Potential, Everlasting Anticlimax MATTHEW BUSCH

If you are reading this book, there is a good chance you have heard before about how the Australia-Indonesia economic relationship is tragically ‘underdone’. Although Australia’s leaders in government and business spend little time thinking deeply about Indonesia, when presented with the opportunity, they often cannot say enough about the imperative of their fellow citizens awakening to the outsized opportunities of the economic colossus located immediately to its north. As they often point out, Australia trades far more with New Zealand, a country with a population of just four million people, than with Indonesia, an emerging economy of 250 million.1 Politicians are especially guilty of such straw man arguments. There is something for everyone to embrace: for the free marketeers of the Liberal Party, the perpetual dawn of trade liberalisation just around the corner; for the agrarian socialists of the National Party, a growing market crying out for quality ­Australian food and fibre (if only Canberra could get it right); and for the Labor Party, a chance to remind us of Paul Keating’s revolutionary notion of treating Indonesia as a sovereign and respectable nation. What all agree on is that we must do more with Indonesia, in all ways, really, but especially in terms of our trade and investment. Recent years have seen something of a renaissance of this tendency, particularly after the resurrection of the ­ Indonesia-Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (IA-CEPA) in 2016. Trade Minister Steven Ciobo said then that ‘The trade and investment relationship … is nowhere near as strong as it should be given our geographic proximity, given the relative affluence of the Australian market and 1  According to the Australia Indonesia Business Council’s submission to the parliamentary inquiry on trade and investment relations with Indonesia, 12,000 Australian companies do business in New Zealand (population: 4 million) with total investment of A$86 billion, whereas only 300 ­Australian companies are in Indonesia (population: 250 million), with a total investment of A$11 billion. (­Australia Indonesia Business Council 2017).

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the numbers in the Indonesian market’ (Kotsios 2016). Shadow Treasurer Chris Bowen agreed, saying in Jakarta in October 2016: From Australia’s point of view the growing Indonesian middle class and the fact that Indonesia will be the world’s fourth-biggest economy by 2050 means … it would be negligent if we as a nation didn’t forge closer economic engagement with a such a large, fast growing economy so close to us.2

Sometimes counterparts across the Timor Gap join the fray too. In 2016, thenTrade Minister Tom Lembong extolled the potential benefits of IA-CEPA: The first thing that springs to mind … is what I regard as the frankly stunning complementarity between the two economies … Indonesia needs expertise and training and teaching, and Australians have excelled in the education space, the polytechnic space, in systems and quality control and discipline. And conversely of course Indonesia offers a very large market and a very large economy, but to progress it, to develop it, we need exactly all the things that Australia has to offer, and of course Australia will make a pretty penny, as you might say, providing those services to us … (Ciobo 2016)

What is problematic, however, is that ‘doing more’ is easier said than done, and no amount of upbeat rhetoric about the mutual benefits of closer economic integration can overcome that. In truth, our leaders and businesses have been talking for decades about the importance of expanding the economic relationship. ­Indonesia and Australia, though bound inexorably through geography, are nevertheless deeply divergent in terms of culture, development, and the way they perceive and advance their national interests. Australia wins when it is on good terms with Indonesia, and we should celebrate when our two countries mutually arrive at forward-looking and constructive ideas. As this chapter will argue, however, this should not prevent us challenging either the assumptions or rhetoric underpinning our discussion of how to boost bilateral economic integration. The chapter is structured as follows. A brief overview of key statistics is followed by discussion of how Australia’s primary interest in Indonesia has been about security first and foremost. This sets the scene for the chapter’s main argument— that the Australia-Indonesia economic relationship is ‘underdone’ because of the structural challenges to bringing the two closer together. Australia and Indonesia do have a fair bit in common economically but this does not make their economies a natural fit. Instead, the rhetoric of ‘do more’ obstructs talking realistically about inherent problematic features of the Indonesian economy, including scant desire for a level playing field for foreign players. Beyond being wrongheaded, it is also unproductive because it distracts from progress on an attainable scale. Too often, this rhetoric simply imputes opportunity through observation of Indonesia’s status 2  This comes from a speech Chris Bowen gave in Jakarta during 2016 (Bowen 2016). Bowen is responsible for several sensible ideas about improving the economic relationship, including an annual economic ministers meeting (akin to what already occurs for both leaders and defence ministers). He also has called for the use of investment—rather than two-way trade—as the baseline statistical barometer for the relationship.

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as a large market with a growing middle class, with little assessment of actual complementarities between the two economies. Why chastise businesses for not doing more when there are serious impediments to doing so? Some Australian businesses have, of course, succeeded in Indonesia, and their stories are instructive for understanding how future progress can be made. Conversely, there are also ­Australian investors who in recent years have deliberately decided to exit ­Indonesia, and these stories are equally important for understanding the risks that await even the savviest entrepreneur. However, because of the nature of this book, and for reasons of space, I avoid in-depth discussion of specific Australian direct investments in Indonesia. To further explore some of the challenges facing foreign investors, this chapter also canvasses the major attributes of President Joko Widodo’s approach to economic management, including how it relates to historical factors and the interpretations of Indonesia watchers in Australia. Following this, the chapter offers a discussion of the most recent development in the bilateral economic relationship, mainly the announcement of trade deliverables that arose from President Widodo’s February 2017 visit to Australia. A short conclusion revisits the main points and suggests that Indonesia and Australia should indeed continue to strive for more robust economic links, albeit with a healthy dose of realism.

Statistical Snapshot To understand the relative scale of the economic activity we will be discussing, it is useful to begin with some data. Two-way trade between Indonesia and ­Australia was worth more than A$11 billion in 2015–16, according to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT).3 Australia’s major exports to Indonesia are wheat (A$1.1 billion), live animals (A$586 million), and sugar (A$461 million). From Indonesia, Australia imports crude petroleum (A$1.2 billion), specialised machinery and parts (A$736 million), and simple wood products (A$206). Merchandise trade is larger than services, with Australia logging A$1.3 billion in exports (nearly half of which is education-related travel) and A$2.8 billion in imports (of which A$2.2 billion is tourism). Terms of trade for merchandise are essentially balanced, with Australia registering A$5.7 billion in imports to A$5.5 billion in exports. Merchandise trade has, however, been essentially static for the last five years—and has even fallen slightly in recent years. According to a 2015 report produced by PwC, ANZ, and the ­Australia-Indonesia Centre, the ‘synergy’ of the trade relationship has deteriorated, with declining Indonesian imports of goods from Australia for which the latter has a comparative advantage.4 The speed of the decline has accelerated 3  4 

Statistics are from the DFAT Indonesia Country Fact Sheet current as of May 2017. See ‘Succeeding Together’, www.pwc.com.au/asia-practice/assets/succeeding-together-10nov15.pdf.

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over the last decade. Indonesia’s share of Australia’s total imports has remained constant, at approximately 2% of total imports, for a quarter of a century. Neither country appears in the other’s ten-largest trading partners. For Australia, ­Indonesia is its twelfth-largest source of imports (2.1% of total imports) and its tenth-largest export market (2.3% of total exports). In terms of investment, Australia has current direct investment stock in Indonesia of over A$5.5 billion but in most years, net direct investment flows are relatively small, often less than A$500 million in investment.5 Indonesian direct investment in Australia is of a far smaller scale, registering a stock of A$7 million in 2015, and is of such a small amount that the statistics are often embargoed. Comparing this performance to other countries in the region,6 Indonesia has overtaken Thailand, the traditional regional leader, as a destination for Australian exports. Thailand, however, remains the standout in Southeast Asia in terms of importing goods to Australia, a position that reflects its advantageous position within skilled manufacturing value chains. Looking regionally, Australia’s economic relationship with Vietnam has grown significantly in recent years, while South Korea, though a more mature trade and investment relationship, remains an area of significant growth for both imports and exports. On current trajectories, it is actually Vietnam that may well emerge as the more significant mediumterm partner for Australia, despite starting from a far lower base. For example, Vietnam is already the third-largest source of students, behind China and India, for Australia’s booming higher education exports.7 Despite this, there are still far fewer soaring paeans in Australia to the future importance of the Australia-­ Vietnam bilateral economic relationship than to that with Indonesia.

Framing the Challenge The paltry trading and investment links discussed above persist, despite Indonesia and Australia’s physical proximity, divergent levels of development and income, and relatively high levels of familiarity, especially among elites. Commentators too often lament how little Australia ‘understands’ of Indonesia, even as polling sometimes exposes disturbing misconceptions among average citizens, for example, the nearly two-thirds of Australians who are unaware Indonesia is a democracy (Lowy Institute 2016). This is not, and never will be, the level at which most relations are transacted, and there are plenty of people at senior levels of government, 5 These statistics are from the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ 2015 numbers, the most recent ­available year: . 6  This is based on data available through DFAT, . 7  In 2016, according to data from the Department of Education and Training, Vietnam was the third largest source of student enrolments—narrowly ahead of Thailand and Malaysia. In terms of commencements, Vietnam was the fourth largest, behind Thailand. See .

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business, and the military with strong Indonesian expertise and language skills. In fact, Australia is well ahead of virtually all comparator countries on knowledge of Indonesia. It accomplishes nothing to ignore this and engage in pointless selfflagellation because some punters believe Indonesia still has a military government. On the Indonesian side, senior Indonesians who have studied or trained at Australian institutions are also distributed widely across business, government, and the military. Stepping back, it is important, though not unusually novel, to acknowledge the countries’ often divergent strategic priorities. It is frequently observed how Australia’s foreign policy—writ large and including its trade and investment ­outlook—has in recent decades ‘looked north’ away from its historical emphasis on the markets of Europe and the UK to the emerging economies of East Asia. In fact, both countries look north, with Indonesia in the past decade increasingly turning to Asia for a substantial share of its foreign direct investment, and also the growth markets, especially China, for large exports of commodities like minerals and coal, natural gas, palm oil, and rubber.8 Australia, however, looks past Indonesia, and Indonesia looks in the opposite direction entirely. When Australia does look at Indonesia, its strategic interests means that hard-headed foreign policy issues seize top billing in the relationship, with questions of security, regional architecture, terrorism, and sovereignty placed above those of greater economic integration. As a Singapore-based scholar observed in 2005 about these diverging security perceptions: Indonesia lies on Australia’s northern security perimeter and is the source of Australian security concerns about illegal migrants, fishing in its territorial waters, environmental pollution, and terrorism. Seen from the Indonesian perspective, Australia is Indonesia’s southern frontier; it is the source of many criticisms about human rights and democracy in Indonesia, and or intrusions into Indonesian domestic matters such as [Papua], Aceh, and East Timor.9

Such frictions—the relationship’s ‘peculiar chemistry’—are inevitable and not without spill-over into the economic sphere.10 One example of this was in 2013, when the lumbering IA-CEPA negotiations were effectively shuttered—along with a litany of other areas of official cooperation—following the leak of information about alleged Australian espionage activities against senior Indonesian officials. 8  In recent years Chinese investment has increased rapidly but it is important to not overlook decades of substantial Japanese investment in Indonesia (see, for example, MacIntyre 1991b). Investment from Japan, as well as other North Asian countries like Taiwan and South Korea, was instrumental in building up Indonesia’s light manufacturing industries—especially textiles and apparel—in the 1980s and 1990s (see also Pangestu 1991: 199). Even today there remain extensive commercial diaspora communities from these countries in Jakarta and its surrounding industrial areas. 9  See Kesvapany (2006: 28). This article is from a volume of papers given at the 2005 ­Indonesia Update conference—‘Australia, Indonesia, and the Region’—at the Australian National University (Monfries et al 2006). It is amazing how even a decade later this assessment remains accurate. 10  This turn of phrase is borrowed from the political economist Andrew MacIntyre (1991a). It is all the more notable because of its claim, despite the author’s scholarly interests, that politico-defence dimensions are the most essential aspect of the relationship: ‘Notwithstanding protestation to the contrary, security considerations have always been at the heart of Australia’s interests in the relationship …’ (MacIntyre 1991a: 146).

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There are of course plenty of Australian investors—small and large, corporate and family—who have succeeded in Indonesia.11 What they usually have in common is some connection to Indonesia: a long-standing partnership with an influential commercial family; a business case tailored specifically to the local business environment; or the use of an existing project as a beachhead for further expansion, often through supplier or distributional linkages. The main point is that Indonesia’s business culture is network-driven, and those who have achieved success are usually those that have invested many years to cultivate the access, connections and local wisdom that are together a virtual prerequisite for success in the market. Success stories often leverage very intimate and expert understanding of Indonesia that exists among small groups within the corporate, academic and ex-government spheres. Beyond these concerted efforts, rarely given centre stage because such incremental, bottom-up stories do not pass muster in terms of accentuating the dual immediacy and fleetingness of the Indonesian opportunity, the two economies often pass one another by. For most politicians and commentators, it is simply not good enough to have a country with Indonesia’s population, recent track record of economic growth, and geographic position as its twelfth largest trading partner. But it is not for lack of expectations that bilateral economic relations remain, as discussed above, in the doldrums. Consider this paraphrasing of a discussion in 2005 with the Australian trade commissioner in Jakarta: Indonesia is already the second-largest market for new exporters from Australia … [and] the size of the middle class is much larger than that of Singapore. This makes ­Indonesia an attractive destination for a wide range of products and services, especially for ­Australian companies that can put their knowledge of Indonesia to good use.12

So, if Australia truly desires to expand its economic relationship with Indonesia, then why do such low levels of trade and investment activities persist? Why can we not ‘do more’ by putting our minds to it? To begin, Indonesia and Australia’s economies are not particularly ­complementary. Both countries have long been tied to the export of primary commodities for a large component of overall economic activity. Australia and Indonesia are the world’s two largest coal exporters, with Australia wresting back the mantle from I­ ndonesia in 2015.13 Coal remains Indonesia’s largest export by value, worth over 8% of total exports in 2016.14 Australia is about to become the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG), a title that for many years was held by Indonesia. 11 

Indonesian direct, non-portfolio or property, investment into Australia is far smaller. Kiryoan (2006:153). IEA (2016: 6). On a tonnage basis, Australia supplied 29.9% of the world’s coal exports in 2015, while Indonesia was close behind with 28.1%. A large share of Australia’s coal exports is metallurgical coal, while nearly all of Indonesia’s exports are steam coal for power generation. 14  Coal and palm oil fluctuate in holding the top spot on account of commodity prices. In the boom years, for example 2012, the share of exports from coal and palm oil together was over 20%. If combined with hydrocarbons, copper concentrate, and rubber, the share of exports from this group was over 40% in the same year. See data available from the Observatory of Economic Complexity via http://atlas.mit.edu. 12 

13 

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Indonesia also has substantial reserves of iron ore, nickel, and gold, which, although not widely exported to date, would certainly be competitive with Australian exports if Indonesia were to attract the investment necessary to exploit them. Indonesia has high demand for some Australian goods, especially wheat, which represents a quarter of Australia’s current exports to its northern neighbour. This trade could well increase in the future due to Indonesia’s lack of suitable land for large-scale wheat cultivation. Beyond this, however, the most attractive economic sectors for Australian commercial interests are often not particularly ripe for liberalisation on account of Indonesia’s priorities and interests. Australia’s educational sector, for example, sees Indonesia as a large and unusually untapped market (Topsfield and Cook 2017), but Indonesia’s education sector is essentially closed to foreign investment. The scale of higher education exports to Indonesia is not trivial but trails well behind markets like China, India, and even Vietnam. For other Australian exports to Indonesia, for example live cattle or raw sugar, these markets are subject to interminable policy entrepreneurship, as Indonesian policymakers tinker constantly with technical regulations in an effort to protect less competitive domestic industries and steer foreign firms to behave in a way consistent with the ultimate objective of building up indigenous industries. For cattle, this manifests in numerous quotas, weight limits, import ratios, and other manipulations. Even when exporters find a bit of regulatory reprieve (as with a return in 2017 to annual permits for live cattle exports), Australian exports then run up against price challenges as the market is opened up to cheaper substitutes, like buffalo meat from India (Burton 2017). It would be wrong to claim these economies have no areas that could be expanded and create mutual benefits. The reality, however, is that these areas—such as mining, professional services like legal and accounting, education, and health—are areas that are either subject to onerous regulatory control or effectively closed to foreign investment. Australia’s Indonesian counterparts, both in government and business, are understandably concerned that the unfettered access the boosters of liberalisation and greater economic integration promote would simply set up Indonesian companies to be wiped out in a deluge of Australian players with superior technical capacity, human resources, and capital. In short, there is not much genuine interest in creating a level playing field for foreign players in most of these sectors. As the following section will show, the inherent challenges of operating in Indonesia without a level playing field mean most foreign businesses will find it very tough to grow and expand their trade and investment there.

Opportunities and Challenges of the Indonesian Economy My claim about the importance of talking realistically about the attractiveness and mutual desire for closer economic integration is not intended to suggest the

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Australian tendency towards overblown rhetoric or unattainable expectations is to blame for the current ‘underdone’ state of bilateral economic integration. Instead, what is most counterproductive is the creation of a discourse that heaps opprobrium on our representatives and officers for not ‘doing more’ to improve and expand our relations with Indonesia. This is similar to the aforementioned tendency of lamenting how Australians ‘know nothing’ of Indonesia. Some ­Australian businesses that have elected not to pursue Indonesian opportunities have done so with clear eyes about and the risks and opportunities of this market. But too much focus on simply talking up the need to grow the relationship also overlooks the often very extensive work that has, in fact, already been done. Regrettably, the overbearing rhetoric of ‘doing more’ can too often impede informed discussion about the realities of the opportunities that do exist for Australian businesses. Indonesia holds tremendous commercial opportunities for those who get it right but it is far from an open and transparent market, as implied by facile statements about the promise of the middle class and the imminent arrival of Indonesia as a global economic superpower. As mentioned above, plenty of Australian businesses have succeeded in Indonesia, and will continue to do so. Usually, these businesses have strong partnerships, often through joint ventures, and sell specific goods or services tailored to the Indonesian market through a manageable distribution channel to a well-defined group of consumers. What is unlikely to happen, however, is a spontaneous outpouring of demand for Australia’s goods and services simply because Indonesia continues to experience strong economic growth. It is also important to evaluate the differing context of levels of economic growth in a developed economy, like Australia, and an emerging economy, like Indonesia, which can make greater gains from deploying an expanding labour force to increasingly productive sectors. This is a double-edged sword, as these economies must then leverage this declining demographic dividend to ‘grow rich before growing old’, with its citizens living longer while birth rates decline with growing wealth and education. As a result, these economies require—and, indeed, are capable of—higher rates of growth to catch up through skilled job creation or infrastructure investment. Indonesia’s current 5% annual GDP growth rates fall short of this. With up to 70% of workers toiling in the informal sector and the economy still dependent on commodities exports, Indonesia requires higher economic growth to provide the jobs and public goods necessary to transform its economy. Human capital also lags on account of a low quality educational system and the lack of sophistication in the small and medium enterprises sector (SMEs). High rates of labour informality mean many workers labour in SMEs, and this prevents progress on a host of other matters, such as improving sectoral linkages, leveraging human capital, and even collecting tax.15 15  See Rothenberg et al. (2016) for a discussion of Indonesia’s informal sector and how recent ­policy initiatives such as the Investment Coordinating Board’s (BKPM) ‘one stop shop’ for investment ­permits have failed to entice Indonesian SMEs into the formal sector.

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As economist Stephen Grenville noted in 2005, ‘there is not a clear view (or a revival of an earlier understanding) that if Indonesia is not growing at 6-7 per cent per year, it will slip backwards economically’ (Grenville (2006: 159). The assessment by analysts of President Widodo’s 7% growth target as implausible in light of current policy settings underscores the durability of Indonesia’s development challenges, especially its lack of some market institutions taken for granted in more developed economies. Unfortunately for Indonesia, many of its competitors have spent the last 20 years attracting the capital and technologies needed to create higher quality jobs, reduce logistical costs, and boost the state’s capacity to invest in public goods. From a foreign investor’s perspective, Indonesia’s economy is heavily regulated, all the more so with respect to foreign trade and investment, and there are substantive structural barriers that render it a difficult competitive landscape for foreign players. These barriers cannot be removed with the simple stroke of a pen, as tariffs are not the primary constraint to greater economic integration. On paper, Indonesia has a rather open trading system because it lowered many tariffs and dismantled licensing regimes after the Asian Financial Crisis that began in 1997. Much of this liberalisation came either through multilateralism, such as ­ASEAN-led free trade agreements, or when the country was forced to adopt a litany of neoliberal reforms as a result of IMF-led conditionality following the Crisis.16 In any event, it is non-tariff trade barriers and challenges in Indonesia’s investment regime that are the primary constraints for foreign players seeking to trade with, and invest in, Indonesia. The economy features widespread acceptance of de facto and de jure price controls, administrative quotas, and technical regulations that serve, in effect, to leverage state control over the market. Officials openly discuss price targets for staple goods ahead of surge periods (often coinciding with the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan). The government concerns itself with quixotic policy initiatives, such as the ‘One Fuel Price’ (BBM Satu Harga), which mandates a standard price across the archipelago for petrol from filling stations. High prices in remote regions, especially in the eastern provinces of Papua and West Papua, reflect the logistical costs of transporting and distributing fuel in remote and infrastructure-poor places. Although such a policy might make sense from a social justice perspective, it will force the state oil company and other consumers to effectively subsidise the costs, both in terms of the price differential as well as the capital to construct an expanded distribution network necessary to overcome scarcity-induced price spikes. A not dissimilar idea in the upstream natural gas sector envisions a ‘gas aggregator’ to purchase all of Indonesia’s natural gas production at a single national price. 16  The cost of rescuing Indonesia’s financial sector eventually surpassed 60% of GDP. In return for IMF-led rescue packages, Indonesia accepted more conditions than any other country has ever done. For a full list of conditions see Feldstein (2003: 396–99). On the IMF packages and political economy in Indonesia see Greenville (2004: 83) or Robison and Rosser (2003: 183).

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The domestic market is riddled with interventions such as these. There is a two-track economy for domestic versus foreign investment, despite the 2007 Investment Law’s instruction that there was to be no delineation between foreign and domestic capital. This has never been acknowledged, and every year further implementing regulations emerge with separate rules for local and foreign investors. Indonesia maintains a so-called ‘Negative Investment List’ that caps foreign ownership in many sectors. The list targets too many sectors to recount but it has grown dramatically over the years in terms of its complexity and restrictions for foreign investors. Its revision, approximately every two years, is a wholeof-government undertaking that attracts extensive lobbying from the domestic corporates seeking to add or maintain protected sectors in the list. The implementation of decentralisation, a political necessity following the highly centralised capitalism that prevailed for three decades under the New Order government, has created confusion, an explosion of low capacity subnational governments, and a proliferation of veto players intent on leveraging their slice of bureaucratic turf for maximum gain. Indonesia does not have functioning rule of law, and the judicial system is riddled with breath-taking levels of corruption. This is even more pronounced for foreign players (especially those subject to potentially punitive consequences under the terms of overseas anti-corruption legislation, such as the UK Bribery Act of the US Foreign Corruption Practices Act), because they are unable to engage in the same practices as their local opponents. Indonesia has improved in the World Bank’s ‘Doing Business’ rankings in recent years—after President Widodo established it as an explicit benchmark for his ministers’ performance—but improvements are coming from a low base. Enforcing contracts remains a particularly stubborn challenge, and many businesses do not view the court system as a viable option for handling disputes and choose to bypass it entirely, wherever possible.17

Policy Uncertainty: A Two-way Street? Policies are unclear and prone to change, although this is far from being a uniquely Indonesian affliction. The impact of politics on trade and investment policies in Australia also should not be overlooked. Indonesian businesses, although fewer and further between, have also struggled to come to terms with the changeable and, at times, politicised, nature of trade and investment policy in Australia. Probably the most prominent example is the June 2011 suspension of Australian live cattle exports to 12 Indonesian abattoirs following the airing of an investigative 17  According to the World Bank’s ‘Doing Business’ report as of May 2017, Indonesia ranks 166 out of 189 countries for enforcing a contract, sitting between Zimbabwe and Barbados. Regional competitors such as Philippines (136th), Vietnam (69th), Thailand (59th), and Malaysia (42nd) all rank ahead of Indonesia. Notably, the average cost of enforcing a contract in Indonesia is 116% of the claim’s value.

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report showing the mistreatment of cattle in some facilities.18 Amid popular outcry in Australia, the move was even more damaging because the ban came down precisely at the time of year when northern producers were mustering cattle to prepare their shipments. Although the ban was lifted a month later, few I­ ndonesian import permits remained. It was also difficult to sell these cattle elsewhere in ­Australia because those that were prepped for export to Indonesia were relatively immature feeder cattle, as the Indonesian market prefers lightweight animals that are then fattened in local feedlots. These animals were not suitable for slaughtering, and the ban deeply damaged the US$1.4 billion northern cattle industry. Most importantly, market insiders talk of how the incident ‘broke trust’, convincing the Indonesian government and its importers that Australian supply could not be relied upon.19 The number of head exported fell by nearly half in the year following the ban and some argue the trade has never really recovered. The I­ ndonesian government also tinkers extensively with the cattle trade to promote its longstanding desire to empower domestic producers. It imposed steep cuts on import quotas for both live cattle and boxed beef for 2015, while also banning outright the A$40 million secondary cut import business. Secondary cuts were reinstated in 2016, and quotas were upped the same year. During 2016, the live head export business was worth over A$600 million for nearly 600,000 feeder cattle—close to the level that existed before the 2011 ban. Boxed beef, which is up 60% in value terms over the five years to 2016, has, in response, become an increasing share of the Australian beef trade with Indonesia, with total value of over US$320 million.20 There are other examples of the problems created by Australian policies. At times, concerns have been raised when Indonesian investors sought to purchase agricultural land. In the sugar industry, Indonesian investors could also be forgiven for expressing confusion about the direction of policy. Consider Wilmar International, which bought a 75% stake in Sugar Australia, which is the operator of sugar refineries in Queensland and Melbourne.21 The firm was at the centre of a marketing dispute with cane farmers after it terminated supply agreements with the major non-for-profit growers cooperative in Queensland.22 The dispute, which threatened to spill over into the Coalition party room, eventually saw the federal government intervene to impose a code of conduct on the industry. Foreign investors, some from Indonesia, invested in a deregulated sugar ­industry,

18 

For an overview of Australia’s live export trade, see Petrie (2016). See, for example, Topsfield (2016), for quotes from Indonesia’s coordinating economics minister about Indonesia needing to diversify away from Australian supply, even as Australia retains its position holding the largest share of Indonesia’s total beef imports, and sole supplier of live animals to its market. 20  These statistics are from the 2017 Indonesia market snapshot (Meat and Livestock Australia 2017). 21 Wilmar is often referred to publicly as a Singapore company because of its domicile but its controlling shareholder and co-founder, Martua Sitorus, is Indonesian. 22  See Commonwealth of Australia (2015) for an overview of the Australian sugar industry, including its deregulation. 19 

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but Queensland introduced a marketing bill in 2016 that many, including the Productivity Commission, deemed to be a re-regulation of the industry (Gerber 2016). If this had happened in Indonesia, Australian investors would rightly complain about investment uncertainty and politicisation of economic policy.

Economic Reform à la Widodo Just as reason can be found to chastise the Australian business community for its deficient relationship with Indonesia, so there will also always be claims of reform being on the march in Indonesia. Sometimes the upbeat language of ­Indonesian officials, keen to reassure foreign investors that their boss is making change and pushing back against the politico-bureaucratic opponents of change, seeps into both press reporting and analysis of Indonesia. In part, this reflects the country’s high-level links. Some of Indonesia’s most accomplished and high-profile academics-turned-ministers—many liberal, market-oriented economists—have studied in Australia. As a group, they are often referred to as ‘technocrats’ because they are non-career politicians from an academic or technical background. These technocrats do battle with ‘vested interests’ that exploit the political system to stymie markets. Indonesia watchers eagerly pick up cabinet rosters, tallying up the number of technocrats versus political appointees. There are portfolios—Finance, and usually Trade, for example—that are traditionally reserved for technocrats, while other portfolios, sometimes referred to as ‘wet’ for the access to graft they deliver, are rarely filled with technocrats. The lynchpin for this potted model of economic policy in Indonesia is ‘­Sadli’s Law’, named for economist Mohammad Sadli and famous for the prescription that bad times bring good policies (and good times the reverse). Economists make ­liberal use of the aphorism, especially when otherwise at a loss to explain ­Indonesia’s chronic tendency to squander boom time opportunities. The maxim has it that when the economy worsens, the cabinet’s band of technocrats gets the president’s ear, and market-oriented reforms arrive on the scene once more. This an almost a self-fulfilling prophecy: whenever the economy dips a bit and a president turns to the non-politicians in the cabinet, it must be technocratic, and thus good, policy. What it glosses over, however, is the political dimension of pivotal policy changes. Instead, it is often the cathartic political times—sometimes brought on by economic strife—that have made for these pivotal economic policy changes. For example, oil price collapses in the mid-1970s and, later, the 1980s prompted ‘bad times’ by shutting off the taps for both the state budget, as well as an oil ­revenues-funded heavy industries drive. State-owned enterprises were instruments of accumulation for state petrodollars, which were in turn funnelled through an opaque procurement system to a gestating class of military linked-indigenous entrepreneurs. The regime already relied heavily on a group of mostly ethnic

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­ hinese conglomerates in other areas of the economy, and so when it downgraded C the heavy industries drive it introduced an import licensing regime that created monopolies and saw profits flow largely to connected indigenous entrepreneurs. It took several years for the strategy to be abandoned—hardly a linear path to ‘good policy’. Furthermore, even when technocrats were tallying some wins (such as the abandonment of the import licensing system), ‘bad policy’ proliferated elsewhere. At the same time, government procurement was moved out of the state-owned enterprises, where technocrats had made inroads during the years of fiscal discipline, and into the equally opaque State Secretariat.23 The ‘Sadli’s Law’ approach also overlooks the contestation of technocratic reform, as well as performers’ natural tendency to play to their constituency. Thus, during the New Order, there was an ‘annual ritual’ of technocrats convening several weeks prior to the meetings of Indonesia’s international donors to announce reform packages to ‘loosen the purse strings of foreigners’ (Emmerson 1999: 158). In reality, there were also intense struggles to win approval for certain reforms, while foreign supporters were implicitly expected to overlook it when reform packages sometimes coincided awkwardly with non-reformist measures. In this tradition, a key feature of President Widodo’s economic leadership has been his rolling ‘deregulation’ packages. Although often greeted in the foreign press with breathless proclamations of reform being on the march, these packages have done little more than tinker with the margins of the regulatory apparatus.24 During the first half of the Widodo presidency, Indonesia has faced soft—although not collapsing—demand for its major exports amid ongoing structural adjustment in the Chinese economy. Facing these headwinds, Widodo has rolled out aggressive state-led infrastructure spending, while using political messaging to foreground his absorption with ‘kitchen table’ issues, such as expansion of access to health and education for his core constituency of poor voters. Both approaches contrast with his predecessor Yudhoyono, who, although responsible for expansions of health and educational programs, adopted a more cosmopolitan political identity. Yudhoyono also touted aggressive infrastructure targets but they hinged on the private sector investments that never materialised amid a mediocre investment climate and preferential treatment for domestic firms. Widodo has also inherited—and has, at times, sought to unwind—some of Yudhoyono’s more grandiose initiatives, for example, a chaotic ore export ban conceived with the intention of forcing investment in minerals processing facilities. This culture of over-regulation and protectionism extended especially to imports, which government officials treated as if there were some form of toxic substance that needed to be eradicated at all costs. Widodo initially did little to stem these policies, introducing restrictions on everything from beer sales to foreign exchange transactions and imposing new tariffs. A bizarre episode saw the 23 I wrote about this in Busch (2015a). See also Glassburner (1976), McCawley (1978), and ­Soesastro (1989). 24  I have written elsewhere about President Widodo as Indonesia’s ‘tinkerer in chief ’ (Busch 2015b).

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Trade Minister ban second-hand clothing imports because of what he claimed was the risk of HIV/AIDS contamination. At the time, the President seemed to have little interest in the economy. It was only the combination of poor economic performance (annual GDP growth was forecast to slump to 4.7% and the rupiah was at levels not seen since the days of the Asian Financial Crisis) and his own flagging approval ratings (which fell from over 70% to 50% in less than a year) that led him to act in late 2015. The president then moved decisively, calling for ‘massive deregulation’ and promising ‘hundreds’ of packages, if needed. This introduced the main economic policy of Widodo’s first term: a rolling series of economic policy packages—as of May 2017 there have been 14—focused on cutting red tape, rolling back trade and investment restrictions, and promoting the domestic economy. Since then, economic growth has ticked up modestly but annual GDP growth has hovered around only 5%, far off the president’s advertised target of reaching 7% annual growth by the end of his first term. During 2010, GDP growth approached this level, reaching 6.5% annual growth. ­Widodo’s instinct to address regulatory excess is sensible but Indonesia’s continued soft economic performance underscores how stronger stuff is needed to return to commodity-charged levels of growth. In effect, Indonesia suffers from a competitiveness problem as a result of its low-quality infrastructure, high costs of regulatory compliance, and the low quality of its legal system and the resulting difficulties for enforcing contracts. Improvements are being made, and Indonesia has improved its standing in some global ‘doing business’ rankings but many of the rolling ‘deregulation’ packages have proven to be little more than nibbling at the edges. They have not done much to attract large chunks of investment, nor to shift the economy away from commodities exports and domestic consumption. As discussed above, although Indonesia has a history of ‘technocratic’ reforms, these changes have often only accompanied major political shocks. Absent any serious shock to the prevailing political economy, Widodo’s ‘reforms’ have underscored the president’s preference for quick and simple changes. They have been accompanied by some savvy reaching out to the foreign investment community and international financial press, often deploying the administration’s most polished and internationally recognised figures. For a period, it was virtually impossible to hear a cabinet minister speaking about Widodo’s economic packages without coming across words like ‘functional’, ‘practical’ and ‘efficient’. The president clearly enjoys extolling his business experience but he also indulges in the unfortunate tendency of many contemporary politicians, including some in Australia, to pretend running a government and an economy are the same as running a small business. Unsurprisingly, the focus on rapid-fire, easy reforms has not yet engendered the root and branch style reforms needed to address the economy’s medium range problems and secure growth. In fact, many have actually introduced further entry points for state control or manipulation of markets. Examples such as providing interest tax exemptions for exporters holding earnings onshore in longer,

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r­ upiah-denominated deposits, or the acceleration of some forestry approvals, are little more than tinkering at the margins for the economy. At worst, the approach has facilitated the inclusion of a grab-bag of poor policies, as bureaucrats empty their filing cabinets and dust off two-bit policy proposals. New subsidies for electricity, rice and diesel fuel, preferential credit for SMEs, and a scheme to steer cheap natural gas to state-protected industries like fertiliser production, are simply a continuation of interventionist protectionism with cleverer branding under the banner of ‘deregulation’ packages. Other items, such as the revival of a mouldering plan to discount tax rates on the revaluation of fixed assets, are little more than one-off tricks to boost the balance sheets of the most moribund state-owned enterprises. Such sleight of hand ignores the immense difficulties of overcoming structural challenges. They also provide a bit of clear air, especially in the international financial press, for the Widodo government, as it has set about expanding state control over many economic sectors and aggrandising the developmental role for stateowned enterprises. The state has returned to the fore as the source of economic services such as infrastructure, price controls, and subsidies, and also as the force responsible for nurturing local industries and hectoring foreign investors to tailor their plans to benefit ‘the people’. In the oil and gas sector, for example, President Widodo, cheered on by the Jakarta elite, scotched the approval of an offshore liquefied natural gas project, citing the prospect, backed by one economic nationalist minister, of a ‘multiplier effect’ for local communities. Widodo instead ordered that it be built onshore in one of the most remote and underdeveloped parts of the country. In doing so, he disregarded a credible study commissioned by the line minister that showed an onshore development would cost 30% more. Although Widodo simply adjudicated a dispute between two ministerial rivals, he ultimately overruled the side with evidence in favour of the appeal of a more aggressive and nationalistic approach. As a consequence, the approximately US$15 billion project is, as of February 2017, not seen as economically feasible without further incentives (Wood Mackenzie 2017). In practice, this inveterate ad hocery means the Widodo approach has delivered spotty results. Combined with his ‘deregulation packages’ (some of which actually expand state control, despite their branding suggesting otherwise), the effects have been muted. Even President Widodo has taken to publicly venting his frustrations. In April 2017, he castigated ministers for the promulgation of regulations unfriendly to investment with palpable exasperation: ‘This is a sickness. I have said, do not issue any more regulations that obstruct [investment], but still they come, I do not know whether from the ministers or directors general.’ (­Triyono 2017). The president’s apparent frustration reflects the huge challenges facing Indonesian leaders and his own limited patience for broader macroeconomic and political economy challenges. More than anything, it showcases his preference for action and simple, technical adjustments, with limited interest in complex, structural policies.

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State of Play in the Bilateral Economic Relationship in 2017 An example of the tendency to overstate progress, especially on economic matters, came when President Widodo paid a brief visit to Australia in February 2017. His trip represented the fulfilment of a previously scheduled state visit that was cancelled in November 2016 after large demonstrations in Jakarta. The initial visit was planned across several days and included high profile events like an address to the Australian parliament. The rescheduled visit was decidedly more efficient, with the schedule stripped back to a Saturday-Sunday affair in Sydney with a brief joint press conference to roll out a handful of trade concessions. It also included a dinner and a walk in the Royal Botanic Garden for what President Widodo’s press office badged ‘morning walk diplomacy’.25 As they have done previously, President Widodo and Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull played up their shared business backgrounds, the product of a bond forged during Turnbull’s first trip to Jakarta in November 2015. That visit was a welcome circuit breaker after a particular low point in relations, exacerbated by a complete absence of chemistry between Widodo and Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who had an innate style that immediately put Indonesians offside. He was even more unpopular in Indonesia after a series of gaffes, the most catastrophic of which was his statement Indonesia should grant clemency to convicted drug traffickers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran in return for Australia’s extension of humanitarian assistance following the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami. By contrast, the centrepiece of Turnbull’s 2015 visit was the incredible sight of him and the president shedding their jackets and ties to tour unannounced through a sweltering Jakarta textile market—an example of the so-called blusukan visit that is Widodo’s signature political set piece. We should not dismiss the seemingly genuine and warm personal rapport between Turnbull and Widodo. Former Australian Ambassador to Indonesia Bill Farmer said Abbott had a ‘tin ear’ for international relations, and Abbott’s troubled dealings with Indonesia are a reminder that the bilateral relationship is not immune to a toxic and aggressive personality. Australia will not soon be free of the inherent security challenges that come from such a large and divergent near neighbour, and as a consequence it must always strive to be on good terms with Indonesia. This will not always be easy—such is the gap between the countries in terms of wealth, culture, and national interests—but when our leaders get it right they should be commended. Where this gets lost, however, is framing progress as attainable if Australia simply ‘does more’, rather than seeing it as the product of slow-going negotiation, linkages, and, frankly, economic development in 25  See Topsfield (2017). A press release read, ‘Morning walk diplomacy may become one of the powerful ways to improve bilateral relations for the better in the future’.

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I­ndonesia. Unfortunately, there is little realism about the depth of the challenge that remains to boost bilateral economic integration. Widodo and Turnbull presented their stripped down, no-frills program as a sign of the no-nonsense, ‘functional’ character of their leadership and relationship. In reality, the abbreviated visit betrayed how little there is to discuss, including economically. It certainly highlighted Widodo’s utilitarian approach to the bilateral relationship: why spend four days in Australia when you can accomplish the same thing in a day and a half? Compare this with Turnbull’s subsequent visit to India in April 2017, which spanned four days and included a wide diversity of commercial and cultural events—all this even as Turnbull admitted (in contrast to the claims about IA-CEPA) that free trade negotiations with India had stalled. The contrast underscores the lack of economic complementarity between the I­ ndonesian and Australian economies. Widodo’s February visit ranged over the usual perennial issues of security and counterterrorism in addition to a special focus on trade deliverables, including further confirmation of hopes for the delivery of IA-CEPA by the end of 2017. The centrepiece was, however, the uncommon sight of Indonesian and Australian heads of government standing side-by-side and announcing trade deliverables. Although symbolic in nature and designed to give the leaders’ something to present as momentum amid ongoing IA-CEPA negotiations,26 the deals announced were trivial in terms of their actual impact, notwithstanding soaring praise from politicians. Under the deal, Indonesia agreed to reduce import tariffs on ­Australian sugar from 8% to 5% to parity with Indonesia’s ASEAN trading partners—most importantly Thailand. In 2015, the tariffs on Thai raw sugar imports had been cut to 5%, after which Australia’s annual raw sugar exports to Indonesia fell by 80% to 200,000 tonnes. This sugar went elsewhere but an industry association reported that the cost of finding a new home for nearly a quarter of Australia’s total raw sugar exports was A$30 million. Another change announced by Turnbull and Widodo revived annual, rather than quarterly, permits for Australia’s live cattle imports, while introducing a slight relaxation of the upper limits for the weight and age of cattle. In return, Australia agreed to remove tariffs on Indonesian pesticides and herbicides. Despite the theatre, and the welcome political imagery of two business-friendly leaders ‘delivering’ some ‘red meat’ for their domestic constituencies, scratching the surface betrays some inconvenient realities about the difficulties of opening up the Indonesian market for Australian exports. For Turnbull, it was the chance to deliver for canegrowers at a time when the marketing dispute in Queensland 26 For a thoughtful reading of the economic relationship, including the observation that even despite small stakes Australia must play a long game because the pair are ‘neighbours forever’, see Hill et al (2017). It is without a doubt true that ‘[Australia’s] interests are much more important than securing additional market access here and there … [and] these bilaterals establish a framework for ongoing discussions that, when the moons align, could really be substantive.’ We should be wary of analysis couched in open-ended statements about ‘when the moons align’ but the general point that Australia and Indonesia must strive to be on good terms is welcome.

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threatened to spill over into his own party room. For Widodo, the changes are not likely to deliver meaningful access to Australian exporters. That his agriculture minister, a major contributor to his presidential campaign war chest, has business interests in the pesticides and sugar sectors is also an example of the inseparable blend of business and politics that permeates the Indonesian system and distorts economic policymaking. In the case of sugar, even with Australian sugar back on stable footing this is far from a game changer, as Indonesia’s sugar industry is heavily state-controlled. The market is segmented into two categories: a protected household retail market serviced by domestic plantations; and an industrial food and beverage market serviced by the domestic refining of raw sugar imports (like those from Australia and Thailand). The Ministry of Trade issues annual import quotas, and state-owned companies dominate the recipients. Artificially high price floors are imposed to protect the plantations that sell sugar into the retail market, the lion’s share of which are also state-owned. Efficiency is, as one might predict, very low, and many sugar mills date from the colonial era, some nearly a hundred years old. Price floors mean retail sugar is more expensive than that which is sold to industrial users. These price differentials mean there are tremendous opportunities for black marketeering, and windfall profits are created when insiders dump product refined from raw sugar imported at market prices into the protected domestic market. Insiders believe this racket to be worth billions of dollars per year—and that even before considering the State Logistics Agency’s large stockpiles, intended to smooth prices. Nevertheless, prices almost always surge around holiday periods, like the Islamic fasting month, and those with sugar push into the market to reap further windfalls. During 2016, the speaker of the DPD (Dewan Perwakilan Daerah), Indonesia’s other elected body (which cannot pass laws and is largely symbolic outside niche roles such as impeaching the president and amending the constitution), was arrested accepting a bribe from a West Sumatran sugar distributor seeking to lobby the Agency for a piece of its sugar distribution business. As a final, and perhaps most important point, the boost for Australia is likely to be temporary at best. Indonesia was once the world’s second largest sugar producer, and those in the business believe it could easily achieve self-sufficiency simply by addressing some of the inefficiencies described above. Indeed, eventually Indonesia’s regulators, anti-monopoly watchdog, and law enforcement authorities will catch up with the most egregious examples of market manipulation. When that happens, and market barriers are dismantled, Queensland raw sugar exports will simply be unable to compete with home-grown Indonesian cane. As for live cattle, the changes are hardly market access breakthroughs. As discussed above, Indonesia’s policy settings for Australian cattle imports have fluctuated wildly in recent years. Often introduced under the guise of self-sufficiency, the changes also tend to send domestic prices spiralling. As in the sugar industry, those with fortuitous access to supply or quotas can often turn a nice profit. The changes are also, however, part of Indonesia’s larger and longstanding desire to reduce its dependence on cattle imports and build its own indigenous cattle i­ndustry.

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Such dreams go back to the 1970s, and, although unlikely to be realised anytime soon, that does not stop politicians looking to burnish their nationalist credentials from intervening in the industry. As a result, the technical requirements governing imports have changed before, and will almost certainly change again. There are also plenty of administrative tools that can be used without imposing ­specific quotas. So, for example, rules that fix the ratio of an import consignment’s breeder cattle to meet self-sufficiency goals can function as a tactic to limit imports w­ithout using quotas. Similarly, in the case of the February 2017 deal, the move to increase the average weight limit for live cattle imported to Indonesia is only useful for ­Australian exporters if there is consumer interest among Indonesian feedlots for heavier cattle (Brann 2017). Initial indications suggest not, especially as regulations continue to require cattle to spend a minimum of 120 days in feedlots before they can be sold for slaughter. As a result, there is no incentive for feedlots to buy heavier animals that will be excessively fat once the required feedlot stay has elapsed. Such state-led interventions are common across Indonesia’s economic landscape and, though intended to promote policy goals such as ‘self-sufficiency’ or ‘added value’, they also usually have a domestic constituency that further complicates the political economy of untangling or renovating the regulatory framework. Progress, as in the case of sugar, may also be fleeting. Indonesia’s decision to accept imports of Indian buffalo meat is an existential threat to all types of Australian beef exports,27 which are simply unable to compete with Indian product on price. Most ­Indonesian consumers are just not wealthy enough for Australia’s prestige reputation to carry much weight. Taken together, these cases underscore the implicit challenge for delivering what Turnbull and Widodo insisted in their February 2017 joint statement would be an IA-CEPA to ‘transform our economic partnership’. In the works for over a decade, it is likely the agreement will be delivered in 2017, as governments on both sides, especially in Australia, have essentially guaranteed its passage. The question, however, is, as always, how much can the parties get without giving away the metaphorical farm. IA-CEPA is branded as a ‘21st century’ trade agreement that will go beyond the ‘conventional’ tariff-reduction framework of free trade agreements to get at ‘behind the border’ barriers to trade and investment. If implemented, this would, hopefully, begin to get at some of the most pressing market access issues for Australian businesses. It would also, again hopefully, facilitate greater ­people-to-people links, including more training and educational opportunities for Indonesian students and workers. Australia, of course, has a long track record of negotiating numerous bilateral trade agreements but Indonesia is not an active trade negotiator, and virtually 27  See McConchie (2017). Although Indian product is inferior from a quality perspective, this matters less given most Indonesians consume their beef in the form of meatballs (bakso) or other processed preparations. This also contributes to lower demand for fatter cattle. The CEO of the NT Live Exporters Association said in May 2017, ‘Butchers and retailers haven’t been able to compete price-wise with other products like Indian buffalo meat’ (Burton 2017).

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all of its trade liberalisation has come through multilateral processes linked to Indonesia’s membership in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).28 Although negotiators have been rightfully discreet about the focus of the negotiations, it is reasonable to conclude there is a focus on education and vocational training, greater market access to Australia for Indonesian workers, and some efforts to facilitate easier access for some specific goods from each country. Broadly conceptualised, IA-CEPA is precisely the sort of initiative Australia and Indonesia should undertake, as there are few magic bullets to overcome the ample politicoeconomic challenges to greater integration. Its chapter on ‘economic cooperation’ is a new concept for Australian trade agreements, including a proposed joint trade facilitation program. Such new forms of cooperation could prove a success in the future but it will take much effort to achieve liberalisation in contentious sectors such as education, mining and energy, and labour markets (a key area of interest for the Indonesian side).29

But What Can Be Done? Of course, it is natural to still wonder what can be done, a quandary that, as mentioned above, has impressive continuity. Stephen Grenville argued in 2006 that Australia and Indonesia had relatively limited economic importance to one another and concluded there was relatively little to be done beyond pushing participation in regional economic arrangements, and providing targeted assistance to help Indonesia return to its pre-Asian Financial Crisis rate of economic growth (Grenville 2006: 161–62). It is difficult to argue Australia has failed to act in either respect. This is also emblematic of an enduring frustration with the consistent ‘do more’ refrain, because Australia already has a truly extensive slate of initiatives, both in the narrow economic sphere as well as on a host of other bilateral issues. Saying Australia really needs to get out and ‘do more’ to boost its relations with Indonesia betrays a lack of knowledge of this. At times, Australia is even willing to ‘do more’ on economic policymaking than its partners would probably prefer, given the highly contested and nationalistic nature of recent years’ debates in Indonesia about economic policy. Nevertheless, Australia has, over the years, funded a number of economic interventions aimed at providing expertise and support to Indonesia’s policymakers. The Australiafunded Australia Indonesia Partnership for Economic Governance (AIPEG) partners with the Coordinating Economics Ministry to provide policy advice and

28  This insight is from Hill et al. (2017). In fact, when the ASEAN-China FTA came into full force in Indonesia during 2010, public resistance from Indonesia’s industrial class often seemed to misapprehend the multilateral character of the liberalisation. 29  See Satchwell (2017), an article about the challenges and opportunities for the agreement written by a member of a business partnership group advising on IA-CEPA.

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training to counterparts in government, with the objective of advancing evidencebased policy. The Australia-funded Indonesia Infrastructure Initiative (INDII) previously helped with preparation of some Public Private Partnership (PPP) ­projects30 but Indonesia’s PPP program failed almost across the board on account of a lack of interest from investors and inadequacies in the Indonesian legal system for the PPP model. INDII also provided grants to subnational governments for water and sanitation projects and provincial road repairs but it was closed down in June 2017. Efforts several years ago to advance the Mining for Sustainable Development initiative, then under the AusAID banner, failed to pique much interest among Indonesian counterparts. This was not surprising, given both the introduction of resource nationalist policies over the last decade as well as the high concentration of politically-connected domestic conglomerates and state-owned enterprises in Indonesia’s mining sector. Australia assisted Indonesia with the drafting of its National Ports Master Plan in 2014. The ports sector has been closed to majority foreign investment through the Negative Investment List but there was hope that President Widodo’s infrastructure drive, combined with his ‘Global Maritime Nexus’ policy initiative, might open opportunities for foreign investors. This has so far not been the case, as most of the new funds and opportunities have gone to state-owned enterprises. Finally, Australia’s support for Indonesian engagement in regional economic forums, as recommended above, is a broadly sensible policy but must also be deployed so as to create outcomes in Australia’s interests. Indonesia will shortly have a larger economy than Australia, and Australia must be alert to cases when Indonesia’s activities in such forums are only beneficial for Indonesia’s economic interests narrowly defined, rather than the broader liberal economic agenda. For example, in recent years one of Indonesia’s primary objectives through APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) has been to push a pet project of having palm oil, of which Indonesia is the world’s largest exporter, included among the forum’s ‘environmental goods’ list. Under the list, products that contribute to sustainable development or ‘green outcomes’ qualify for reduced tariff rates in intra-APEC member trade. Although there has been some progress on making Indonesia’s palm oil industry more sustainable by boosting output through higher yields, better waste management, and, most importantly, reduced reliance on the conversion of forest areas to expand palm oil plantations, it is wrong to argue that palm oil is a product that promotes sustainable development or environmentally beneficial outcomes. Nevertheless, Indonesia sought to advance this proposition when it hosted APEC in Bali in 2013. It agitated, over the objections of many APEC partners, 30  See Syarizka (2017) for reporting about East Java’s Umbulan Water Supply System, a project developed under a PPP scheme. Although around since the early-1970s, the project was nominated as a PPP only in 2010. INDII seems to have helped with the project, which then, according to an industry player, ‘died before coming back’ in 2016 with support from several state-owned infrastructure funding and guarantee facilities. Despite success, however, there was still general concern that other similar bulk water supply projects were not likely to attract much commercial interest.

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to reopen the list of environmental goods agreed at the previous year’s meeting in Vladivostok. Then-Trade Minister Gita Wirjawan made the effort at the centrepiece of Indonesia’s APEC year, and the initiative played well at home, as palm oil represents nearly 8% of its exports and regularly competes with coal for the country’s top export.31 It failed, however, to generate interest during the officials’ and ministerial level meetings leading up to the leaders’ summit. ­Nevertheless, the issue was raised again at the summit, with reputed confusion when a draft l­ eaders’ statement included language supporting the initiative, even after it had been scotched at planning meetings throughout the year. Australia should prepare for similar discussions under IA-CEPA, and efforts to expand the market access to the Australian market for Indonesian ‘green’ palm oil is, according to press reports, an item Indonesia has sought to include in the negotiations. ­Australia must be equally opportunistic in seeking to advance its own economic interests.

Bilateral Economic Ties: Towards a More Informed Discourse In this chapter, I have sought to provide an accessible overview of the AustraliaIndonesia economic relationship. The chapter has explored some of the main challenges to greater bilateral economic integration. Both countries have a tendency to ‘look north’ to the security and economic lights of North Asia but for Australia, which has a hardwired security interest in Indonesia, there will almost always be a strategic asymmetry in terms of the importance it must assign to Indonesia. Counter-intuitively, in light of their divergent development experiences, the pair share some commonalities, especially as both have prospered selling their natural resources to the world. Some commonalities entail challenges for expanded economic integration, and Indonesia is already cautious about opening its economy in many areas of Australian expertise. The chapter then provided a discussion of some of the challenges of Indonesia’s economy for outsiders, before exploring some of the challenges to reform. Finally, it offered a brief survey of the trade deliverables from President Widodo’s February 2017 visit to Australia, before a brief discussion of what can be done even in light of the challenges. I do not mean to argue that there is no reason to continue striving for greater economic integration with Indonesia. Instead, this chapter argues that doing more commercially with Indonesia is difficult for a variety of substantive, structural factors—and high rhetoric should not be deployed to downplay this. Efforts will seem fruitless and frustrating at times, but Indonesia and Australia should keep trying because they will always be each other’s ‘strange neighbour’ and economic 31 Based on statistics from the Indonesian Ministry of Trade: .

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integration is essential for collective security.32 Australia must be particularly attuned to this in light of Indonesia’s lesser development status, ineffective educational system, and vulnerability to emerging megatrends such a climate change. On the upside, however, Indonesia also has its own strengths related to its large population and presumably large future development capacity, and it is therefore far more important for Australia to build bridges there than it is for Indonesia to do so here. This will drive the asymmetric nature of the relationship, both now and in the future.33 I would argue, however, that it is in Australia’s interests to dispense with the overweening praise for Indonesia’s economic achievement of becoming, for example, the world’s fourth largest economy in 20 years’ time.34 Of course, statements like this are deployed in part to help alert the Australian public and elected officials to the scale of the opportunity next door. This is an understandable tactic but the flipside is that it arouses unreasonable expectations, provokes hubris in Jakarta, and does not actually earn Australia anything in terms of its bilateral dealings there. It also papers over the reality that Indonesia has minimal interest in opening up its economy to create a level playing field for foreign players. It also frames everything in terms of a false non-choice—of Australia having to get on board, no questions asked—based on something that is yet to happen and is far from guaranteed. Indonesia will almost certainly be a bigger economy than ­Australia, and this will occur in short order. But the kneejerk reaction that automatically equates sheer economic size to state power or international leadership is well wide of the mark.35 It is also hardly a recipe for persuasion: if our officials wish to advance the case for economic liberalisation and reform, what is the point of telling ­Indonesian counterparts their economy is bound to emerge as Germany in two decades time? Although I am sceptical about the real impact of foreign lobbying on domestic policy choices, our leaders’ speechwriters would nevertheless do well to leave the flattery on the shelf. Perhaps most damaging, the rhetoric of ‘doing more’ promotes an ill-informed discourse in Australia. As a consequence, business and officials struggle to articulate: —— what can be done to boost bilateral economic integration (not a terrible amount given clear Indonesian preferences for strong state control and ­heavily circumscribed foreign investment and trade); —— what is being done to support greater bilateral economic control (quite a bit, including generous and sometimes marginally tolerated efforts); and —— what the likely economic endgame for Australian businesses is. 32  See also Hill et al. (2017), which argued Indonesia is Australia’s ‘longest game’ because the pair are ‘neighbours forever’. 33  See White (2013) for a version of this argument, unfortunately one that reflexively and uncritically conflates economic size with strategic influence and global power. 34  This is a widespread finding that has been publicised, with slight variations, by the consultancy McKinsey & Company, Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), and professional services firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC). See Oberman et al (2012), Moriyasu (2015), and PwC (2017). 35  See Robison (2016) for a cogent articulation of this argument.

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Another force driving such flattery is the inevitable desire of rolling Australian governments of either persuasion to show that they are the ones that really ‘get’ Indonesia. Much of Australia’s foreign policy is bipartisan but unfortunately this does not always extend to its relations with Indonesia. As shown through the Abbott government’s ‘more Jakarta, less Geneva’ slogan (which proved to be a false promise), governments cannot resist the urge to put down the previous mob. We would be better off to dispense with this as well, as our Indonesian counterparts are more than aware of this tendency, and would understandably prefer Australian politicians find other political footballs to kick about come ­election time.

Conclusion Earlier in this chapter, I wrote that ‘What is unlikely to happen, however, is a spontaneous outpouring of Indonesian demand for Australia’s goods and services.’ This does not mean that Australia should stop trying—on the contrary. Doing business in and with Indonesia presents tremendous opportunities for the right type of businesses. To acknowledge and facilitate this is the responsibility of Australia’s state, territory, and commonwealth governments because doing so is in Australia’s national interest. Focusing on expanding the bilateral relationship to include more input and linkages forged at the level of state and territory g­ overnments—where relations can be free of the traditional security concerns and hone in on economic and commercial issues as their major points of ­emphasis—would be a good place to start. The state government of ­Victoria already has an international network of more than 17 Victorian Government Business Offices (VGBOs), including in Jakarta, that are tasked with growing the state’s trade and investment around the world. This also allows for gathering of close-to-the-ground and sector-specific knowledge about opportunities, potential business linkages and partnerships, and ways in which a state can leverage its strengths to expand engagement. It is also in Australia’s national interest, given its baseline security considerations with respect to Indonesia, to have a northern neighbour that is stable and prosperous. Even if it takes time, some Indonesians will demand more of ­Australia’s goods and services as they become better off: beef and wheat for expanding dietary variety; education and training for skilled workers; legal and audit services for internationally focused corporates; and so on. For reasons outlined in this chapter, this may well be a niche trade, largely for high-end goods and services accessed at premium prices by a select group of Indonesian consumers and companies. What is not, however, in Australia’s national interest is the reflexive praising of the reform, transparency, and future power of the Indonesian economy in a fashion that is neither realistic nor advances Australia’s commercial and economic agenda

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in Indonesia. It is foolish to ignore the protectionism and dirigiste tendencies that permeate economic policy in Indonesia and then turn around and castigate ­Australian businesses and officials when they naturally fail to meet our unreal and ill-informed expectations.

References Australia Indonesia Business Council (2017) ‘IA-CEPA: A New Platform for ­Indonesia-Australia Economic Relations’, submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Trade and Investment Growth. Australia-Indonesia Centre, ANc, and PwC (2015) ‘Succeeding Together: ­Maximising the Potential for Joint Opportunities between Australia and ­Indonesia’, . Brann, Matt (2017) ‘Indonesian Weight Changes Making Live Cattle Trade ­Easier’, ABC Rural, 2 May, . Burton, Lydia (2017) ‘Live Cattle Exports to Indonesia Slow as Beef Price Pressure Takes a Toll.’ ABC Rural, 5 May, . Busch, Matthew (2015a) ‘Things Look Bad for Indonesia’s Economy, but Don’t Expect Rapid Reform.’ Lowy Interpreter, 19 August, . Busch, Matthew (2015b) ‘Tinkerer in Chief: One Year of Economic Leadership under Joko Widodo’, Lowy Interpreter, 5 November, . Bowen, Chris (2016) ‘The Case for Australia and Indonesia Working Together’, . Ciobo, Steven (2016) ‘The Opportunity That Is Indonesia’, 17 March, . Commonwealth of Australia (2015) ‘Current and Future Arrangements for the Marketing of Australian Sugar’, . Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (2017) ‘Indonesia Fact Sheet’, . Emmerson, Donald K (1999) Indonesia Beyond Suharto: Polity, Economy, Society, Transition (Armonk, NY, ME Sharpe). Feldstein, Martin S (2003) ‘Economic and Financial Crises in Emerging Market Economies’, NBER Conference Report (Chicago, University of Chicago Press).

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Gerber, Jacob (2016) ‘Queensland Sugar Re-Regulation Costs Outweigh Benefits, Says PC’, Financial Review, 21 July, . Glassburner, Bruce (1976) ‘In the Wake of General Ibnu: Crisis in the Indonesian Oil Industry’ 16(12) Asian Survey 1099. Grenville, Stephen (2004) ‘The IMF and the Indonesian Crisis’ 40(1) Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 77. Grenville, Stephen (2006) ‘Australia and Indonesia in the Wider Context of Regional Econmic Relations’ in John Monfries (ed) Different Societies, Shared Futures: ­Australia, Indonesia, and the Region, Indonesia Update Series (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies). Hill, Hal, Patunru, Arianto, and Resosudarmo, Budy (2017) ‘A Trade Breakthrough with Indonesia Is Only for the Patient’, Australian Financial Review, 5 March, . IEA (2016) ‘Key Coal Trends’, Coal Information, www.iea.org/publications/ freepublications/publication/KeyCoalTrends.pdf. Kiroyan, Noke (2006) ‘The SBY Promise to the Business World’ in John ­Monfries (ed), Different Societies, Shared Futures: Australia, Indonesia and the Region (­Singapore, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies). Kotsios, Natalie (2016) ‘Sugar a Sticky Issue in FTA’, The Weekly Times, 14 ­December, . La Batu, Safrin (2017) ‘KPK Goes All in on BLBI Case’, The Jakarta Post, 26 April, . Lowy Institute for International Policy (2016) ‘The Lowy Institute Poll 2016’, . MacIntyre, Andrew (1991a) ‘Australia-Indonesia Relations’ in Desmond Ball and Helen Wilson (eds) Strange Neighbours: The Australia-Indonesia Relationship (Sydney, Allen & Unwin). MacIntyre, Andrew (1991b) Business and Politics in Indonesia (North Sydney NSW, Allen & Unwin). McCawley, Peter (1978) ‘Some Consequences of the Pertamina Crisis in Indonesia’ 9(1) Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 1. McConchie, Robin (2016) ‘Beef and Live Cattle Exports to Indonesia Face Challenges from Indian Buffalo Imports’, ABC Rural, 23 September, . Meat and Livestock Australia (2017) ‘Market Snapshot—Beef—Indonesia’, MLA Industry Insights, .

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Monfries, John (ed) (2006) Different Societies, Shared Futures: Australia, I­ ndonesia, and the Region, Indonesia Update Series (Singapore, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies). Moriyasu, Ken (2015) ‘2050 Survey: Indonesia Set to Become Fourth-Largest ­Economy’, Nikkei Asian Review, 25 June, . Oberman, Raoul; Dobbs, Richard; Budiman, Arief; Thompson, Fraser; and Rosse, Morten (2012) ‘The Archipelago Economy; Unleashing Indonesia’s Potential’, McKinsey Global Institute, . O’Rourke, Kevin (2017a) ‘Reformasi Weekly Review—28 April 2017’, PT Reformasi Info Sastra. O’Rourke, Kevin (2017b) ‘Reformasi Weekly Review—5 May 2017’, PT Reformasi Info Sastra. Pangestu, Mari (1991) ‘Foreign Firms and Structural Change in the Indonesian Manufacturing Sector’ in ED Ramstetter (ed), Direct Foreign Investment in Asia’s Developing Economies and Structural Change in the Asia-Pacific Region (Boulder, Colo: Westview Press). Petrie, Claire (2016) ‘Live Export: A Chronology’, Research Papers 2016-17, Parliament of Australia, . PwC (2017) ‘The Long View; How Will the Global Economic Order Change by 2050?’, . Robison, Richard (2016) ‘Why Indonesia Will Not Be Asia’s next Giant’, ­Indonesia at Melbourne, 13 July, . Robison, Richard, and Rosser, Andrew (2003) ‘Contesting Reform: Indonesia’s New Order and the IMF’ in Peter W Preston (ed), Political Change in East Asia, Vol 1, International Library of Social Change in Asia Pacific. Satchwell, Ian (2017) ‘Australia-Indonesia Trade Deal: Dealing with Great Expectations’, Lowy Interpreter, 7 March, . Soesastro, M Hadi (1989) ‘The Political Economy of Deregulation in Indonesia’, 29(9) Asian Survey 853. Suparman, Fana (2017) ‘Syafruddin Temenggung Ajukan Gugatan Praperadilan’, Beritasatu.com, 10 May, . Syarizka, Deandra (2017) ‘Peletakan Batu Pertama Umbulan Bulan Ini’, Bisnis Indonesia, 6 March, 7. Topsfield, Jewel (2016) ‘Indonesia to Import Cattle from Other Countries to Reduce Reliance on Australia’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 28 January, .

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Topsfield, Jewel (2017) ‘Malcolm Turnbull to Make Surprise Visit to Jakarta next Week’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 28 February, . Topsfield, Jewel, and Henrietta Cook (2017) ‘Push for Australian University Campuses in Indonesia under Free Trade Deal’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 22 February, . Triyono, Agus (2017) ‘Masih Ada 23 Peraturan Menteri Hambat Investasi’, Kontan. co.id, 5 April, . White, Hugh (2013) ‘What Indonesia’s Rise Means for Australia’, The Monthly, June. . Wood Mackenzie (2017) ‘Masela (Abadi) (LNG)’, Asset report.

24 A Business Perspective DEBNATH GUHAROY

If the tie between Australia and Indonesia is indeed our most important bilateral relationship, we are not paying it the attention it deserves. An all-too-obvious reality makes bond-building between the two neighbours difficult: the stark difference in our two cultures, our history, our social values. Knowing that we are so different, I am amazed not only by our inability to understand but also our unwillingness to appreciate the Indonesian perspective. When we do try to understand, there are positive outcomes. But too often in our discussions with our neighbours we instinctively stick to our out-dated default positions, steeped in myth and prejudice. We live with mutual suspicion. In our business community, we are afraid of the unknown. What we know, we don’t like. These are not mere opinions, they are conclusions based on reliable research in recent years. In June 2015, a Lowy poll showed only 34% of Australians believed that Indonesia is a democracy. From a global perspective, this is a ridiculous view for so many from a well-educated country to hold. As options available to voters, Australia has two big political parties, with three little ones that struggle to make themselves heard. Indonesia has three major parties but another seven who make themselves available as crucial coalition partners. Australia has three media barons, one of whom is a kingmaker known around the world. The national broadcaster is under pressure to become a ‘state’ broadcaster. There is very little diversity of opinion. In contrast, Indonesia now has at least five major media groups, none of whom were able to sway the voter single-handedly at the last election. Its free press is as vocal as any in the world, no mean achievement for a democracy just 19 years young. Especially one that has come out of three decades of military dictatorship that followed three centuries of belittling colonialism. Not too long ago, Australia was recognised as the most generous country in the world in terms of refugee intake per capita of population. Today, we are seen as the most draconian of developed countries, determined to ‘stop the boats’ because both sides of politics have read the poll that says 70% of Australians want them stopped. This at a time when there are 60 million displaced people in the world, Germany has opened its doors to 800,000 refugees. Britons, under pressure, chose Brexit instead. At our doorstep, the Indonesians took in thousands of Rohingyas after a few weeks of confusion and disarray. If our leaders are going to follow

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popular opinion based on little knowledge and much xenophobia, who will do the leading? If you are wondering what any of this has to do with trade and business, the simple answer is ‘a lot’. Much as we’d like to believe that business has little to do with politics and the only god is money, we must remember that people in business are also human. They are fathers and mothers, conservatives and liberals, Australians and Indonesians—not just directors and proprietors. If anger and hate are at headline strength too often, we turn to our hearts not just our wallets. More often than not, our actions and reactions are ill-conceived and poorly executed, when I believe we should know better. Education, affluence and the good life we enjoy make us a privileged people. Privilege brings responsibility. That responsibility should start at home and embrace our neighbours as well. In September of 2014, PwC commissioned Roy Morgan Research to survey Australian businesses with the broad objective of measuring Australia’s engagement with Asia. In fact, it ended up measuring disengagement, showing the surprising extent of collective Australian apathy in this, the Asian Century. PwC published a report titled ‘Passing us by’, detailing the findings and offering advice. It is a good read for anyone interested in Asia, business or otherwise. The trouble is, most of us are simply not interested. It may be useful to reiterate some numbers from the Roy Morgan survey. Rounded off, ABS tells us there are about a million businesses registered across Australia. Of these, 6,000 are big and 80,000 are medium-sized businesses (I have left small and micro businesses out of the picture for now). Altogether, there were some 400 Australian companies engaged in business with Indonesia a decade ago. Of these, only about 250 have any staff on the ground there today. Collectively, we are Indonesia’s eleventh largest trading partner—not even in the top 10. Of all the A$9 billion invested in Indonesia, the overwhelming majority is from a handful of companies in the mining and resources sectors. Tiny Singapore is the No.1 investor in Indonesia. Japan, No.2, is the most-favoured investment destination for business. The Americans, the Germans, the British, the French, the Scandinavians and even the Spaniards are climbing up the Indonesian FDI rankings. In sharp contrast, Australia’s No. 1 investment destination is New Zealand—not just historically, but in recent years as well. More Australian dollars went into Kiwi commerce in 2014 than to the top 10 ASEAN countries combined. We have over A$85 billion invested in a country of four million people, and more than 12,000 of our businesses actively engaged there. The numbers speak volumes about the Australian business psyche. While every apple, every block of cheese and every bottle of wine exported from our shores is a reason for celebration, we need to look at the transactional nature of our business dealings with a great deal more introspection. Andrew Robb, perhaps the world’s most hard-working Minister of Trade at the time, ought to be congratulated for pulling off a perfect trifecta of FTAs in just the one year in which he held that office: China, Japan, South Korea. They will hopefully stimulate greater engagement with Asia. Both Prime Minister Turnbull and President

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Widodo have repeatedly expressed their enthusiastic support for the IA-CEPA (the Indonesia-Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership), as have the trade ministers of both countries. All agreements between the two neighbours take on greater meaning in these turbulent times. With Liar-in-Chief Trump tearing up the TPP on his first day in office, bilateral trade agreements have taken on even greater importance. The recent agreement on military cooperation puts the South China Sea in even sharper focus. Cooperation between our uniformed forces has remained strong for decades, despite the occasional bumps. With a rising China and an unpredictable US, greater cooperation between Australia and Indonesia would have a calming effect across the region. A joint US-Australia flotilla across the 9-dash line would invite retaliation by China and hurt Australian commercial interests. A robust Indonesia-Australia trade agreement would send a very different signal to China, one they would treat with respect. The importance of vital trade routes is a good example of the convergence of business and politics. The IA-CEPA negotiations are currently underway. The Indonesia-Australia Business Partnership Group, the IA-BPG, comprises the bilateral pairs of: the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Kamar Dagang dan Industri (ACCI-KADIN); the Australian Industry Group and the Asosiasi Pengusaha Indonesia (AIG-APINDO); and the Australia Indonesia Business Council and the Indonesia Australia Business Council (AIBC-IABC). This bilateral group has made a written submission at the request of both negotiating teams, drawing attention to the overarching need for economic cooperation in general, right through to sectoral opportunities in particular. The panoramic report is titled ‘Two Neighbours, Partners in Prosperity’. Both teams have been urged to attempt an ambitious agreement, with emphasis on the words ‘comprehensive’ and ‘partnership’. Both the lead negotiators have acknowledged the recommendations as an invaluable starting point for their discussions. At their invitation, the IA-BPG remains engaged in the process, listening to periodic updates, offering suggestions, and assisting with the socialisation of interim milestones. Promoting the IA-CEPA in its entirety when the document is released at the end of 2017, to ensure the broader community in both countries understand its benefits, will be another important task for the group. I believe that negotiators will produce a ground-breaking document, going where no conventional FTA has gone before. Ironically, there is a significant risk that the IA-CEPA may further entrench the Australian preference to export to Indonesia, rather than invest in it. The IA-BPG is pushing hard for the inclusion of mechanisms that would act as attractive catalysts for investment. Most people in business anywhere in the world would agree that exports alone cannot ensure a country’s prosperity forever. The exceptions, of course, are oilproducing countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, for obvious reasons, although there is now some doubt about how long they will continue to enjoy prosperity. China’s changing of gears to a new focus on stimulating domestic consumption illustrates the point. Confidence can only be generated by investments that grow in value, provide returns and build relationships. The overwhelming majority of Australian businesses are just not ready to go down that path in Asia tomorrow.

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To summarise, the response to Asia from most of the 1,216 respondents for the PwC report was something like this: —— —— —— ——

too different; don’t understand; that makes it too risky; so we’re not going.

This kind of thinking ensures that two out of three Australian companies have no plans for Asia in the near-term. Making matters worse are two other key factors. First, if return on investment is, say, 15% in ‘risky’ Indonesia, it is 10% in ‘safe’ Canada. Shareholders, influenced by market analysts, are keener on ‘safe’ than ‘risky’. As a consequence, CEOs of some of the biggest companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange get their noses bloodied every time they utter the word ‘Asia’. They end up looking for a safe bet in New Zealand or Scotland, just to keep their noses out of harm’s way. This reality is discouraging many of our best and biggest, keeping them away from Asia. Instead of leading the way, our risk-averse big company boards are poor role models for our SMEs. Only the adventurous few are exceptions to the rule. Secondly, much of our media does a fine job of ‘beating up’ on Asia any chance they get. Xenophobic and parochial in the main, too many of our journalists seem unable to understand the very essence of doing business in a developing country: problems are many, but most problems are opportunities. Risks are higher but so too are the rewards. Indonesia, in particular, has an additional hurdle that our media will harp on, subtly or otherwise—in a word, ‘Islam’. Although the PwC survey did not address the topic directly, many of the interviews I conducted personally ended up with that off-the-record discussion. We could safely conclude that this particular fear also drives more of our companies even further away from our near neighbour, the country with the world’s biggest Muslim population. How many Australians know that it is constitutionally not an ‘Islamic country’ as it is often labelled by our journalists? The most reassuring discovery from the survey was the fact that almost nine in ten Australian companies who had invested in Asia were pleased with their experience. All would maintain their interests and many would explore more avenues for growth. Equally, it became obvious that facts have the ability to dispel fiction—knowledge builds confidence. The biggest problem is that there is inadequate knowledge of Asia in Australia, in terms of both quantity and quality. Information about each country and the characteristics of each industrial sector of interest is the first step needed to empower our businesses to engage with Asia. The problem is even more acute in Indonesia. With the resources boom behind us, the ‘good old days’ are not likely to come back to the ‘lucky country’. While two-thirds of our export earnings have traditionally been from the export of our resources, 80% of our GDP today is from the services sector. While we are more than capable of developing our food and agricultural exports, or attracting more tourists to our shores, our lack

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of investment in Asia will prevent the transition we need to make for our own economic well-being. We need to be a smarter nation. We need to invest to secure our future, not just export and import while the sun still shines. Today’s America may rest on the shoulders of their defence industry but it is companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft who will keep that country ahead of the rest in the years to come. People as diverse as the Chinese and the Scandinavians have understood this, but we appear not to. Let’s hope that Prime Minister Turnbull will translate his words into action and lead the country to a new future in the ever-changing world of disruptive technology. The fact that business can be a force for good is best demonstrated by the recent history of our region. At the end of WWII, the Japanese were the most hated people in occupied Indonesia. Today, they are among the most loved. That turnaround in their relationship was not engineered by a sudden turn of the Emperor’s heart but by companies like Toyota, Honda and Mitsubishi. They invested, delivered value, brought SMEs with them, created jobs, and helped lift the quality of life for millions over the decades that followed. Most importantly, they looked at returns over the long term, without the restraint of the 90-day cycle that our stock markets enforce. The Japanese have more in common with Indonesians than do Australians but Australian businesses remain popular in Indonesia, as they do in many places around the world. Though we have no Samsungs or LGs to fly our flag, we consistently come a close fourth after the Koreans as ‘most preferred country of manufacture’ in Indonesia. Sadly, we have sold companies like Goodman Fielders, Arnotts and CUB. And, unlike our Kiwi cousins, we seem unable to build a brand in the way Fonterra has done with Anchor, all across Asia. Brands build stronger futures, especially in Asia, where economies are driven by consumers, not by resources exports or stock exchanges. Miraculously, both sides of politics in Australia understand the need to engage with Asia. Business remains unconvinced, if actions are anything to go by. China as our No.1 trading partner belies the truth. First, China is not all of Asia. Second, our relationship is transactional, with little presence on the ground. Perhaps our biggest test for engagement with our neighbours is, however, the one just across the Indian Ocean. We are not a major power—economic or military—nor will the relative size of our population ever allow us to be. Common sense tells us that is the likely reality for the foreseeable future. We also know that Indonesia is destined to become the fourth-largest economy in the world by 2050. Today, their navy is incapable of reaching our shores in force. We ‘stop the boats’ with ease, pushing them back in to Indonesian waters at will. In about 15 years, the situation may be very different. An equally powerful Indonesian navy would change the equation. Are we going to wave the ANZUS treaty in their faces when that inevitable day dawns? The Kiwis had the good sense to stand up, a nuclear-free nation in every sense, with the ‘Pure New Zealand’ brand bringing home the dollars from far and wide. Australia, in contrast, is unable to shake off its ‘Deputy Sheriff ’ label, to the detriment of our oft-stated desire to be a part of Asia. We need to chart a more intelligent course forward. Common sense demands we make friends with our neighbours.

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We also need to remember that Asia is not a homogeneous market. ‘Asians’ are not a race or species. Anybody who has worked at the coalface knows China is not a single market, nor is India. Yet, collectively, Asia is the only engine the world really has to pull itself out of the economic doldrums we otherwise face for decades to come. The logic is simple: as more people come out of poverty and become consumers with disposable incomes, the better the prospects for everyone around the world, developed and developing countries alike. While Latin America and Africa offer economic opportunities too, Asia is best poised to make the difference, with half the world’s population living so close to each other. From an Australian perspective, the old ‘tyranny of distance’ from the developed West has now transformed to the ‘bonus of proximity’ to the developing East. That is where our biggest opportunities lie, now and into the future. But we do run the risk of missing that boat. If our big companies are hamstrung and unable to engage for fear of the response at the ASX, our Federal and State governments have no option but to help our medium-sized family-owned businesses take the lead. To say that Australia is a net-importer of foreign direct investment and imply that we do not have the money to invest overseas is a childish argument that ignores basic truths: —— —— —— ——

Good business starts with good ideas, not money. The world is awash with money looking for good ideas. We are world-class in many sectors; we can create the ideas, act as catalysts. We can own businesses with money borrowed from around the world.

In the overall strategy for Australian engagement with Indonesia, Austrade and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade have listed nine sectors as priorities, in alphabetical order: 1. Advanced manufacturing-automotive aftermarket. 2. Agriculture and aquaculture-food sustainability partnerships. 3. Creative, fashion and design. 4. Education-transnational skills. 5. Healthcare and seniors living. 6. Infrastructure-urban sustainability and transport connectivity. 7. Premium food and beverage. 8. Resources and energy. 9. Tourism. Who would argue with these sectors as priorities? They are the repositories of Australia’s ‘smarts’. They are proof of the fact that Indonesia’s weaknesses are our strengths, their problems are our opportunities—and vice versa. They have a large domestic marketplace, a rapidly growing middle class, and a big labour force. The complementarity of our two economies make the two neighbours ideal partners, not competitors. At the time of writing, Indonesian President Joko Widodo had just finished a two-day State Visit to Australia and Trade and Tourism Minister Steven Ciobo was preparing to take a 120-strong delegation to Jakarta for the

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second Indonesia Australia Business Week—IABW 2017. It’s the kind of effort that will help add ballast to a relationship that all too frequently has its ups and downs. For the first time, the promotional material encourages Australian businesses to explore opportunities to invest in Indonesia and then use that partnership as a springboard into the emerging ASEAN Economic Community. This is a refreshing change. Anyone who asks the question ‘Why ASEAN? Why Now?’ must remember that investment is vitally important for building lasting bonds with a country that dominates the grouping. Investing overseas does not mean taking jobs away. The China market saved Volkswagen, and Asia is Airbus’ biggest customer, as it is for Louis Vuitton or Unilever. Where are all the products designed? Where is the management based? Much in their home countries, of course. We must embrace the truth as a nation soon, or fall short of our true potential. If we wish to grab the opportunity before it is indeed too late, there are two other key ingredients to success in Asia that we need to be mindful of. One is ‘Trust’. We have to earn it and build on it. Trust is at the heart of any meaningful relationship. It is an essential ingredient, the foundation of strong business ties. Trusting someone till there is reason to be suspicious makes good sense. Yet, we enter too many meetings with Indonesians with the false notion that they are all corrupt and we are not. For a country with strong laws and strong institutions, there are too many headlines, too often, that reveal one indiscretion after another, in this, the third-richest country in the world. But we never fail to wag a finger or tell the tale of a corrupt policeman or a crooked businessman in Indonesia. Why is it so difficult to understand endemic corruption in a developing country with inadequate laws and weak institutions? The only way to deal with corruption in Indonesia—or anywhere else—is to walk away from the monster as soon as it raises its ugly head. But, until it does, we must remember the maxim ‘innocent till proven guilty’. Actions speak louder than words. There are many examples of our dealings with Indonesia that illustrate our own failings. Executions of drug peddlers and pushing boats back are complex issues. Buying and selling beef is not, much as we make it out to be. For thirty years we have been virtually the sole supplier of beef to Indonesia. We are still the sole supplier of live cattle. The Red Meat and Cattle Partnership (RMCP) was formed as a bilateral forum to ensure the smooth conduct of business in this crucial sector. A key part of its agenda is to assist Indonesia achieve stability in the supply of this vital form of protein. If you ask the Indonesian delegates to the Red Meat and Cattle Partnership, they will tell you that for thirty years Indonesia has been asking Australia for assistance in building capacity for domestic cattle production. We have made symbolic gestures over the years, like training handfuls of farmers or selling boat-loads of breeding stock. In between, we have raised hell over the ill-treatment of our live cattle at their abattoirs (as indeed we should) but have we invested in animal welfare at the other end? We are experts at everything related to cattle but what have we done to help our neighbours in their search for affordable protein? What have we invested in their country, to promote the long-term future of our trade?

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We’ve been too busy nursing the false notion that helping Indonesians raise cattle locally would slaughter our cattle exports to them. This is nonsense. First, there is evidence to show that imported beef of any kind, boxed from anywhere in the world or live from Australia, is just too expensive for more than 80% of the population. The rise and rise of Indonesia’s middle class has seen regular consumption of chicken and fish climb rapidly, with more than 75% of the population consuming these sources of protein every week. While beef is usually more expensive in most countries, only 20% of Indonesians can afford to eat beef often. In an archipelago with limited infrastructure, the small farmer has an average holding of 2.5 head of cattle. Regardless of the political rhetoric, many of these farmers hold the cattle as assets, to be sold only when there is a wedding in the family or festive prices are unusually high. A census count of standing local stock does not tell the full story. In other words, it is not difficult to conclude that latent demand is much higher than current supply. There is a market that no one is catering to. No amount of imported beef could cater to that demand, cost being the barrier. Doesn’t it make good sense to own half a cow, rather than no cow? That opportunity is screaming out to Australian producers but there are no takers. The government appears shy to encourage such a move because politicians fear a backlash from voters who easily conclude that local competition will chase our export cattle away. Not only is the key question of price and affordability being ignored, so too is taste and quality. With only 20% of Indonesians eating beef at least once a week, and more than 75% eating local chicken and fish regularly, we can conclude that our premium-quality beef exports are safe forever. But we could create a new business of producing lower-priced, lower-quality beef in-market, catering to the overwhelming majority of the population that nobody caters to. Price and quality are inextricable. If we helped Indonesia raise its capacity, we would also be helping ourselves. It really is that simple. Therein lies the rub. For all these years, Indonesians have suspected that we do not really want to help them, we’d rather just take their money. When we talk about aid, the tsunami and executions in the same sentence, we add insult to injury. When we talk about research, they see it as our way of buying time. Right or wrong, those are the perceptions. And perception is reality. So when Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce finally announced an assistance package for Indonesia of breeder bulls, with transportation and logistics support, I celebrated. It was probably too little too late, however. The Indonesians have not only announced that they will take more cattle from Australia and introduce a transparent system of consumer demand forecasting but will also go shopping for beef around the world. What degree of success they may have in their search is immaterial. Our knee-jerk response is that we will ship to China instead. There was no need to come to this nadir. Both countries are foot-and-mouth disease free. Do we really want to take the risk of a bio-hazard next door? The common thread that runs across most of the stressful conversations with our neighbours is that of expectations. Rarely do their expectations of us, and ours of

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them, match. Whether we are talking beef, infrastructure, the death penalty or boat people, we often find ourselves at cross-purposes. The most recent example is the prospect of Australia’s engagement with Indonesia’s highest priority: infrastructure development. Indonesia desperately needs more and better infrastructure to unlock the potential of a gridlocked developing country. We know how to plan, build and manage infrastructure projects. They know that we know, and respect our capabilities. So they come to Australia with a list of airports, seaports, power plants and toll road projects and wonder why we are not taking advantage of the opportunities. When we tell them we need an Infrastructure Policy Dialogue as a first step to ensure we have a common understanding of relevant issues, they concede the need to talk with all the parties typically involved in PPPs (Public Private Partnerships). But when it takes a year to put the first formal forum together, our neighbours lose patience. When we keep talking, round after round, they are frustrated. When we say each project needs a credible feasibility study as a first step, they invite us to do what we are good at. When we say the A$30 million yearly aid budget for infrastructure development cannot be used for such purposes, they simply give up. At the highest levels, the recipient country reminds us that every Japanese aid dollar is tied to trade, but we are living in a time warp of our own creation. The Coalition government announced a major shift in policy three years ago—Aid for Trade—but that memo has yet to reach our bureaucracy apparently. Here’s a no-brainer. Our consulting engineers, our consulting accountants, our lawyers, our environmental specialists are second to none. If we produced the masterplans and feasibility studies for Indonesia’s vital infrastructure projects with our aid funds, we would create hundreds of jobs in Australia. Our credibility and our reputation embedded in those reports would help raise badly needed infrastructure dollars from across the world, helping to turn Indonesia’s dreams into reality. Win-win. So where are we three years later? When life’s as good as it is in Australia, we probably are not in the kind of hurry Indonesians are in to get things moving—and this is a painful difference in expectations that I live with all the time in my dealings with the two countries. Could our quality of life also be a disincentive to toil in the heat and dust of Asia? I think so. Considering all the reasons—good and bad—that are keeping us distant from our close neighbour, it is easy to give up in dismay. We can continue as we are for as long as we can, buying and selling from Asia but not investing there. Or we can try and find another way forward. If market forces discourage our big corporates from venturing into Asia, then our medium-sized, privately owned businesses may just be the ones to lead the way. Unhindered by shareholder scrutiny, it is the intrepid entrepreneur who may seek the thrill of rewards on risks. Conscious of the fear of the unknown, we do not travel too well alone in Asia but the comfort of companions sharing a common interest in projects with promise may well be the answer to our trepidation. Projects that rally collectives could change the way we look at our neighbours, for example: a light truck that could save many of our doomed automotive part manufacturers, a new tourism destination in Indonesia

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we could build and play in, or a co-operative of premium food producers who own a restaurant chain they also supply. Is this the only way? Surely not. But skilled entrepreneurs, working side by side, may well be the ones who change Australian attitudes to Indonesia. Our politicians and bureaucrats can urge business at large—and ‘aid for trade’ may well be our new mantra—but without support and incentives, the necessary change in attitude will simply not happen. We need to understand that it is the investors among us, not only the traders, who will bring about real change in the bilateral relationship. That change will begin when hundreds, and then thousands, of our entrepreneurs engage in partnerships with counterparts in Indonesia. That day seems far away today, almost too daunting to contemplate, but till it comes Indonesians will indeed remain strangers next door. Perhaps one of the most valuable things to remember about doing business in Asia is that relationships are more important than rights. This is another cultural difference we tend to ignore. The legal framework and allied institutions we are accustomed to in the West do not exist in most of the East, even today. Indonesia is making progress but in the meantime it is vitally important to do your homework well and pick your partners wisely. There are several organisations ready to help. The Australia Indonesia Business Council, Austrade and state governments are a good place to begin the search for information, referrals and contacts. The University of Melbourne’s Asialink Business has a ‘Starter Pack’ that is a handy beginner’s tool for a first foray into Asia and the series includes Indonesia. On the other side, there is BKPM, Indonesia’s investment coordination board, the onestop shop for getting a business started. The first trip is about much more than first impressions. Time spent on planning it well is time well spent. But if the first visit does not go well, we must not give up. There simply is not another marketplace of 270 million people—40% of the ASEAN Economic Community—right across the water. Most of their problems are opportunities for Australian business. But if we go there as opportunists, as too many of us are prone to do, the chances of success are limited. Indonesia, like most of Asia, will take time to reap rewards. The risks may be high but the rewards can be incomparable. Getting the relationships right is crucially important. This is true anywhere in the world but it is especially important in Asia. In Indonesia, you do not have to worry too much about your legal rights if you are doing business with friends. In the absence of strong laws and institutions it is vitally important to pick partners well. Finally, Australians and Indonesians alike would do well to remember that we are both large countries geographically. There’s more to Indonesia than just Jakarta and more to Australia than just Sydney. Indonesia has hundreds of distinct cultures and dialects, many with unique cuisines to match. Regardless of the prism we use as professionals, Australians should consider opportunities outside the capital city. In infrastructure, for example, we find it difficult to compete with the Japanese, Koreans and Chinese. But if we create opportunities in the other major islands, we could build for years, do good, and make money. We do not need to tread

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the well-worn path. As a people, we understand tourism. While Bali has turned into an over-burdened destination for tourists from across the globe, Indonesia’s other shorelines are under-developed, crying out for attention. If ever there was an opportunity for Australia in Indonesia, tourism-led-infrastructure has got to be on top of the list. We understand both industries well, better than most in the world. From the President downwards, the focus in Indonesia is on building ‘Ten New Balis”. We would find willing partners—big, medium and small—to do what they need done, to do what we know how to do well. This is just one of many sectors where Indonesia’s problems are, yet again, our opportunities. While we learn to look at Indonesia differently, the trading nature of our relationship will continue to grow. As their economy moves forward, the growing middle class will take more of our goods and services. But it is only when we engage by the hundreds and thousands, in the market and on the ground, that the relationship will really change. As I have explained, it will be up to our mediumsized and family-owned businesses to make that change happen. Prime Minister Turnbull’s rapport with President Widodo augurs well for this troubled bilateral relationship. 2015 was a very challenging year for all stakeholders, taking the ties backwards. 2016 saw calmer waters, thanks in large measure to the two leaders. But leaders alone cannot affect real change in bilateral ties. Business has a major role to play in building people to people bonds. To those who say that the business of business is to make money, not bilateral relationships, I would urge consideration of a few well-publicised predictions: 1. Indonesia will be the seventh largest economy in the world by 2030. 2. The Indonesian consuming class will be 135 million strong by 2030. 3. There will be a market opportunity of A$1.8 trillion in consumer services, agriculture and resources by 2030. Australia will drop out of G20 by 2050. Where would you rather have your investment at that time? In neighbouring Indonesia or distant UK? If we do not wake up to the opportunities at our doorstep, the Asian Century will indeed pass us by. A small country and a middle power, it is time for ‘Team Australia’ to realise that we all have a role to build a stronger future: business, media, academia, technology, military, and government. Together, we can take a holistic approach to the relationship with Indonesia. Together, we can achieve what we cannot individually. A lean task force would be a good place to begin charting our future. We need a plan that will live on, regardless of who is in power. We clearly do not have one yet. For its part, business can indeed be a force for good. That force is not going very far in Asia, even less so in Indonesia.

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25 Young and Connected: How Youth Programs and Organisations Build Links between Australia and Indonesia RACHELLE COLE AND ARJUNA DIBLEY1

Amidst the peaks and troughs of Australia’s ties with Indonesia, youth focused organisations and programs have provided an important, if oft-overlooked, link. As early as 1950, in the first year after the Dutch ceded sovereign control over most of the Indonesian archipelago, Australian university students established the Volunteer Graduate Scheme, an innovative program for young Australian volunteers to work in Indonesia’s newly established bureaucracy (Purdey 2012). New youth-led and youthfocused organisations, such as the Australia-Indonesia Youth Association (AIYA), continue to add to the web of bilateral ties in contemporary times. Formed in 2011 by five graduates of Australian universities—including the authors of this chapter— AIYA now has branches in eleven cities across both nations, and aims to build social and professional connections between young Australians and Indonesians. The few existing studies of youth-focused organisations and programs have argued that meaningful people-to-people contact between young people is important to the Australia-Indonesia relationship because it can help change the way they perceive the other country. While more research could be done to understand why young people are important for the relationship, this chapter focuses on a slightly different question. That is, understanding the mechanics of how youth organisations and programs create conditions to achieve meaningful interpersonal contact. We address this ‘how’ question by drawing on our recent experience as practitioners in building youth relations between Australia and Indonesia, where we regularly interacted with the organisations in this sector. While we draw on our experience as practitioners for this chapter, we have also sought to develop and apply a theoretical framework to understand how youth focused organisations can assist the bilateral relationship. We apply this theoretical

1  The authors are grateful for the invaluable assistance of Kate Stevens who assisted with research for, and the editing of, this chapter.

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framework, developed out of the peacebuilding literature on intergroup contact, to study eight youth-led and youth-focused organisations and programs. This framework is useful to understand the conditions that help or hinder in fostering links between young people. We apply four specific criteria in our framework: (1) the extent to which they create the ‘potential for friendship’ amongst participants; (2) whether they encourage collaboration between participants; (3) whether their objectives serve the mutual interests of both Australians and Indonesians; and (4) the level of support provided to these organisations from institutions (such as governments) that promote people-to-people relations. Among the eight organisations and programs studied, some are government funded and run and some are not; some focus on education and others do not. Most are Australian-driven, reflecting the greater importance Australia has placed on the bilateral relationship. Overall, we find that program structure matters to the ability of the studied programs to foster meaningful relationships between young Australians and Indonesians. To that end, we recommend that organisations: consider the extent to which they are creating the conditions for long lasting friendship by ensuring they have ways of engaging alumni of their programs; create greater opportunities for collaboration between young Australians and Indonesians from a diverse array of backgrounds, expanding beyond the mainly university-educated cadre of individuals who are the focus of current programming; collaborate more in the delivery of people-to-people programs; and focus on quality (and specifically the four-part framework for quality we propose in this chapter) of programming and not just the quantity of program participants. Before analysing the eight organisations and programs, we survey the role of people-to-people links between youths in overall diplomatic ties between Australia and Indonesia.

Public Diplomacy, Public Perceptions and the Importance of Youth Links between the People of Australia and Indonesia Scholars and governments have increasingly paid attention to the notion that direct contact between people can have an impact on broader relations between countries. Citizens, businesses and non-government organisations are more than ever able to interact with their counterparts and the public in other countries thanks to the reduced cost of international travel, increased communication channels and globalised economic and political systems. Increased globalisation and the interpersonal contact it creates has had a profound impact on the way relations between countries play out, and governments are taking this into account in determining how they project themselves abroad. Recognising the impact that greater contact between the publics of nation-states has on international relations, scholars coined the concept of ‘new public diplomacy’ (Melissen 2005). This is a way of studying relations between

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states that takes into account the impact that non-state actors can have. In new public diplomacy theory, country relationships are not limited to those between states and their public but can be between foreign publics themselves. These people-topeople links, it is argued, are important because they can help in making or breaking international government relations (Gawerc 2006: 435–78). This dynamic of people-to-people contact shaping relations has existed since the very start of Australia’s diplomatic relations with Indonesia. For example, in 1945, following the surrender of Japan’s imperial forces, the Dutch—the former colonisers of Indonesia—sought to re-take the archipelago. Indonesia’s strong resistance to the Dutch was supported by parts of the Australian labour movement, the public and eventually the Australian government. In solidarity with Indonesian nationalists living in Australia, Australia’s maritime unions implemented a series of boycotts of Dutch ships stocked with arms and supplies intended for the Dutch military campaign. The boycotts physically hampered the ability of the Dutch to re-enter Indonesia and exerted pressure on the Australian government to recognise Indonesian sovereignty (Cottle and Keys 2008). The support of the Australian labour movement was acknowledged by Indonesian political leaders after independence. This was an early example of how people-to-people contact helped shaped relations between Australia and Indonesia, but it was certainly not to be the last. Given the role that direct links between people can play in relations between countries, governments and non-government organisations have increasingly pointed to people-to-people contact as a way of bolstering government relations. Successive Australian and Indonesian governments have emphasised people-to-people ties as a key element of bilateral relations. For instance, in a 2010 speech to the Australian Parliament the then-Indonesian president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, lamented the fact that many Australians consider Indonesia a ‘beach playground’ and have not developed closer ties with the country (Yudhoyono 2010). Similarly, a report of the Australian Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade in 2004 stressed the importance of building peopleto-people ties as part of Australia’s efforts in public diplomacy (Australia. Foreign Affairs Sub Committee 2004). The Australian government has increasingly funded programs to send journalists, artists and young people to Indonesia, in an attempt to build links between these groups across the two countries (some of these youth programs are discussed further in this chapter). Indonesia too—although to a much lesser extent—has invested in people-to-people programs, including involving youth in regional dialogues (Hill 2016: 364–78).

Youth: An Important Group in Building People-to-People Ties Youth organisations have featured prominently from the very start of official relations between Australia and Indonesia and have played an important role in strengthening ties. In 1950, the year after Dutch transfer of sovereignty back

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to Indonesia, Australian university students returning from an international students’ conference in Bombay relayed a call from their Indonesian counterparts for assistance in providing the country with skilled workers, particularly in the bureaucracy of the rebuilding nation. The call was answered by a committee of young Australians led by Herb Feith (who would later go on to become the doyen of Indonesian studies in Australia). Together, they established what was initially known as the Volunteer Graduate Scheme (VGS). In its first few years, the VGS, with the blessing of the Indonesian government, placed several young Australians in the Indonesian bureaucracy to support the fledgling Republic. The VGS still runs today in a much-expanded Australian-government funded program called Australian Volunteers International. Governments of Australia and Indonesia have also initiated efforts to bring the young people of both countries closer together over the course of the relationship. In the 1960s, the Australian government’s Colombo Plan brought young Asian students to Australia to study at Australian universities, with 940 students participating between 1950 and 1964.2 There have been several studies of the impact of the Colombo Plan scholarship program. Oakman argued that it was an important public diplomacy initiative as it led to meaningful relationships between Australians and Asian—including Indonesian—students.3 Others have even argued that the ‘personal encounters’ between Colombo Plan students from Asia and Australians helped to inform and change Australian attitudes towards Asia (Lowe 2013 175–90). In recognition of these successes of the original Colombo Plan, the Australian government launched the New Colombo Plan in 2015, which provides young people with scholarships to study and work in the region. The New Colombo Plan builds on other previous government schemes designed to incentivise young people to study in Asia including the Prime Minister’s Australia-Asia Awards. Today, the landscape of initiatives focusing on improving ties between Australian and Indonesian young people is vast and includes initiatives run by government, not-for-profit and educational institutions. There are initiatives to encourage young Australians and Indonesians to study in each country, to support Indonesian students in Australia, to encourage religious and broader dialogue between the youth of the two countries, and to provide educational and professional experiences for young people. Studies show that focusing on young people is a worthwhile way to improve relationships between countries. Scholars have argued that such programs are important for building people-to-people ties because they allow exchange students to act as ‘cultural carriers’ spreading positive views about their home countries abroad.4 Recent survey research indicates that 2  There were 943 Indonesian students who studied in Australia under the scholarship between 1950 and 1964. 3  Similarly, Lowe argues that the Colombo Plan generated human-interest stories in the press, which influenced the ways that the Australian public saw Asians (Lowe 2013: 175–90). 4 See, for example, Lima (2007: 234–51). Similarly, other scholars have argued that American exchange programs can increase the development of liberal values in the participant home countries (Atkinson 2010: 1–22).

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youth can help to change perceptions through people-to-people contact. A 2013 Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT)/Newspoll perception survey found that there was a negative correlation between the age of Australian respondents and perceptions of Indonesia, with younger respondents being more favourably disposed to Indonesia than older Australians (Australian Government 2013). This suggests that younger Australians tend to be more ‘open minded’ when it comes to Indonesia, and could thus be a group whose perceptions are more easily shaped than older Australians. Furthermore, recent scholarship on the topic of youth relations argues that there is greater potential for Australia to build people-to-people links with Indonesia through youth, given, among other things, Indonesia’s high youth population (Tanu 2014). Additionally, where young Australians and Indonesians have contact with the other country when they are young, they may be more willing to continue some form of engagement with that country. Data from a 2014 AIYA member survey provides some preliminary findings that suggest that time in-country increases willingness for longer-term bilateral contact. The 2014 AIYA survey reported 68% of its Australian respondents had spent over three months or more in Indonesia. 58% of Indonesian respondents had spent at least three months in Australia. Of the total group surveyed, a large proportion of Australian respondents, 85%, said they would consider a long-term career in Indonesia and 77% of Indonesian respondents would consider a long-term career in Australia (AIYA 2015). While further research ought to be done on the benefits that youth-links have for the bilateral relationship, the existing literature argues in favour of people-to-people programs on the basis that such programs can change perceptions among Australians and Indonesians. This literature has tended to focus on why the links are important and not analysing how these programs create meaningful contact between young people and change perceptions. To develop a framework to assess the ‘how’ question, we turn to another body of literature on peacebuilding people-to-people initiatives.

Understanding How Youth Organisations and Programs Facilitate People-to-People Links We have looked to peacebuilding to analyse how youth programs build peopleto-people links in the Australia-Indonesia relationship, because a rich literature has emerged in that field examining the way that groups interact and how such interactions can change perceptions. Peacebuilding scholars argue that mistrust, misunderstanding and suspicion between two groups creates problems between them that can be difficult to solve and lead to conflict (AIYA 2015). People-to-people links can prevent conflict through integrative ties that help change the mutual perspectives of two or more conflicting groups (Gamson

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and Modigliani 1963: 34–48). While this chapter is not focused on two parties who are in conflict, many of the same issues that face warring groups also mar Australia-Indonesia relations, namely, lack of mutual trust, misunderstandings of each other and, in some cases, a lack of respect. The peacebuilding literature does caution that contact between groups does not, on its own, lead to an improvement in relationships. Scholars have argued that interpersonal contact ‘should be regarded as a necessary but not sufficient condition for producing a positive change in ethnic attitudes and relations’ (Gawerc 2006: 435–78). Indeed there is some support for this in relation to the AustraliaIndonesia relationship, where certain types of contact have been increasing in recent years but with little effect on public perceptions. Indonesians, including those aged from 15 to 29 years, are visiting Australia in increasing numbers, with 130,000 visiting in 2012, a doubling since 2008 (Tourism Research Australia 2013). The number of Australians visiting Indonesia for holiday purposes is also substantial. Around 1.2 million Australians visited Indonesia (mainly Bali) in the year ending 2016 (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2016). Additionally, Australian educational institutions are a popular choice for young Indonesians with approximately 17,712 students enrolled at Australian educational institutions in 2015 (Hill 2016: 364–78). Despite this contact, the publics of both countries continue to misunderstand one other, as the DFAT/Newspoll survey of perceptions showed. The peacebuilding literature argues that instead of just looking at contact, there are key conditions of people-to-people programs that facilitate positive change in attitudes, long-lasting links and a breakdown of prejudices. We will return to these conditions later in this chapter, but first we outline the eight, key youth-focused youth-led organisations and programs operating between Australia and Indonesia that are the subject of our analysis.

Eight Prominent Youth-led and Youth-focused Organisations and Programs We have chosen eight organisations and programs that: were operating in 2015; have a target audience between 18 and 35 years of age;5 and which explicitly include building people-to-people links as part of their objectives (but which may include other objectives such as building the capacity and skills of participants). 5  This age bracket is reflective of the approach taken by Australia-Indonesia youth organisations and programs that are the focus of this chapter. This means that our analysis necessarily excludes some people-to-people programs that target school-aged children, such as the BRIDGE programme. While school-aged young people are important threads in the people-to-people fabric, in this chapter we are interested in organisations and programs in which people have volunteered to participate, rather than those where they take part within an institutional context, as in schools.

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More specifically, we have limited the selected organisations to those that facilitate study experiences in either Australia or Indonesia and/or provide opportunities for intercultural dialogue between young Australians and Indonesians.6 We also selected these youth-led and youth-focused organisations and programs because their participants have featured heavily in Australian and Indonesian media reporting, ministerial speeches, academic research and reports and evaluations.7 This profile speaks to their prominence and the recognition they receive for contributing to people-to-people connections between Australia and Indonesia. For example, during a state visit to Australia in 2013, former Indonesian vice president Boediono praised AIYA as a measure to build youth connections between the two countries (AIYA 2013). Similarly, ACICIS founder Professor David Hill was awarded an Order of Australia in 2015 for his contributions to Australia-Indonesia relations. What follows is a short précis of the eight organisations and programs we consider in this chapter.

Australia Awards The Australia Awards are an amalgamation of different scholarships provided by the Australian government for international students to partake in study programs in Australia. Approximately 500 scholarships are offered to Indonesians per year for undergraduate, post-graduate study or professional development at Australian educational institutions. The Awards target ‘the next generation of global leaders’ and aim to increase individual and institutional connections between Australia and other countries.

Darmasiswa Indonesian Scholarship Program Darmasiswa is an Indonesian government scholarship program initially established in 1974 that offers scholarships for foreign students to study in Indonesia. The aim of the program is to increase interest in learning Indonesian and create stronger personal and cultural links between Indonesians and individuals from participating countries, including Australia. Data on how many Australians participate in the program is not publicly available, however, in 2012, there were a total of 587 students from all participating countries.8

6  By ‘intercultural dialogue’ we mean a process through which participants from different cultural backgrounds are able to interact with one another and exchange views openly and respectfully. 7  See, for example, Lane (2011); Ameria (2016); and Puspitasari (2015). 8  Darmasiswa Scholarship Program website, http://darmasiswa.kemdikbud.go.id/about-us-2/.

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Indonesian Students’ Association of Australia (Perhimpunan Pelajar Indonesia di Australia—PPIA) Established in 1981 by Indonesian university students in Canberra, the main aim of the organisation is to provide support for Indonesian students in Australia. It also aims to ‘strengthen dialogue and cooperation between Australian organisations’ and to strengthen the reputation of Indonesia in Australia. PPIA is made up of a network of university chapters, federated under a national body. University-based chapters organise events (social, academic, cultural) mainly for Indonesian students, and provide information and support for Indonesians studying in Australia. PPIA also organises and supports charity work in Indonesia, and there is some promotion of Indonesia and engagement with Australian community organisations. PPIA reported that it has 17,521 members in 2012/13.9

Australia Indonesia Youth Exchange Program (AIYEP) AIYEP was established in 1981 by the Australian government by an agreement between the Indonesian and Australian governments. The aim of the program is to create ‘opportunities for young people to appreciate the culture, development and way of life [and] build groups of young and potentially influential people who have knowledge and personal experience of each other’s countries’. Each year approximately 18 Australians aged between 21 and 25 visit Indonesia for two months, one of which is spent with a group of 18 Indonesians of similar ages. The Indonesian group also spends a month in Australia. Both groups participate in work placements, home stays, cultural performances and visits to local schools and communities.

Australian Consortium for In-Country Indonesian Studies (ACICIS) Founded by Professor David Hill in 1994, ACICIS is a consortium of universities that creates and coordinates study programs in Indonesia and also aims to ‘enhance Australia-Indonesia people-to-people relations.’ ACICIS provides semester-long and short-course study options at Indonesian universities and internships for (mainly) Australian university students, including specialist courses in business and journalism. In 2016, 100 students participated in semester programs and 80 participated in short course and other programs. 9  The membership is reflective of the loose criteria for membership that PPIA has adopted, which includes all Indonesian students in Australia as well as some alumni. To add context to the figure, in June 2013 there were only 11,670 Indonesian student visa holders in the country.

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New Colombo Plan (NCP) The New Colombo plan provides and manages scholarships for Australian university students (under 28 years old) to undertake a one-year or more study program/ internship in selected Asian countries—including Indonesia. The NCP targets high-achieving individuals and aims to ‘lift knowledge of the Indo-Pacific region in Australia and strengthen our people-to-people and institutional relationships’ by increasing the number of Australians spending time in Asia. In 2014, 90 participants travelled to Indonesia as part of the pilot phase.10

Muslim Exchange Program (MEP) The MEP is an Australian government initiative that has been operating since 2002. Its focus is on ‘building a greater understanding for Australians of the nature of mainstream Islam in Indonesia and, for Indonesians, a greater awareness of Australia’s multicultural society.’ MEP targets young Indonesian and Australian Muslim community leaders (writers, bureaucrats, academics, and workers in nongovernmental organisations and religious bodies). It coordinates an exchange program that includes meetings and visits to key Islamic institutions such as Islamic Schools. Approximately five Australians and ten Indonesians participate in MEP each year.

Australia-Indonesia Youth Association (AIYA) AIYA was founded in 2011 by a group of graduates from the Australian National University and aims to connect young Australians and Indonesians to each other. AIYA has chapters in every Australian State and Territory and in Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Bandung and Kupang in Indonesia. AIYA’s activities include running social, professional networking and cultural events, advocating the removal of barriers to greater people-to-people engagement, and providing information and forums for discussion about issues affecting youth in the bilateral relationship (including online forums). AIYA is open to young people (mainly students and young professionals) from Australia and Indonesia aged between 16 and 35. AIYA has approximately 1,000 members11 and 8,600 Facebook followers (2016). AIYA also established an annual conference—the Conference of Australian and Indonesian Youth (CAUSINDY)—where 30 selected, high-achieving youth delegates (15 Australians and 15 Indonesians) meet, listen to high profile speakers, 10  ACICIS received funding under the Colombo Plan. Consequently, some of these 90 students are the same students who completed the ACICIS programme. 11  This is an approximation because AIYA had only recently begun to collect membership statistics at the time of writing.

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and are given the opportunity to consider and develop actionable solutions for a key inhibitor to the Australia-Indonesia relationship.

Four Criteria for Assessing People-to-People Initiatives The eight organisations described above cover a diverse array of activities carried out by different government and non-government actors. In this section, we try to make sense of these diverse organisations and understand how they have sought to build links between young Australians and Indonesians. To do so, we draw on the work of scholars who have studied the effectiveness of activities that seek to bring together groups from different cultural groups for the purpose of peacebuilding. From this literature, we distil a set of four criteria that, if met, increase the likelihood of meaningful ‘intergroup contact’.12 Our four-part criteria draws on the seminal work of Gordon Allport, an American psychologist and sociologist, on intergroup contact theory (Allport 1954). Allport’s thesis is that under the right conditions, intergroup contact is an important way to break down barriers of prejudice between groups. Allport’s original work has been the subject of further empirical and theoretical discussion by scholars who have shown that conditions for intergroup contact are useful not only for breaking down barriers, but also for enhancing positive views and empathy between groups.13 Indeed, meta-analysis of intergroup contact theory shows that Allport’s four conditions continue to be applied by scholars to explain how groups build stronger connections and more positive intergroup perceptions (Pettigrew 2008: 187–99). Distilling the work of intergroup contact theorists, we have set out the following four criteria that explain the role of intergroup contact for building relationships between individuals. Specifically, these four criteria ask whether an initiative: (1) creates the potential for friendship between participant groups in the initiative (Beadle 2013); (2) encourages collaborations between participants that highlight the ways in which the groups are equal (Pettigrew, Tropp, Wagner and Christ 2011: 271–80); (3) fosters the mutual interests of both groups, not just one of the participant groups (Pettigrew 1998: 65–85); and (4) is supported by existing institutions seen as legitimate by participant groups in the initiative (Pettigrew and Tropp 2006: 751–83). These four criteria provide a useful framework for

12  Contemporary scholars of intergroup contact theory have taken more subjective factors into account when assessing organisations and programs. That is, they combine their research on the organisations’ goals and objectives with the subjective views held by participants during the programs. We, however, have focused our analysis on the objective and structural elements of our selected organisations and programs. This is because our intention is not to assess the performance or ‘impact’ of each of the studied organisations and programs—a task which we will leave to others—but rather to assess how these organisations and programs operate in a way that promotes people-to-people links between Australia and Indonesia. 13  See: Pettigrew, Tropp, Wagner and Christ (2011: 271–80); and Walton, Priest and Paradies (2013).

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considering, if, and how, groups build effective people-to-people links, but they are not ‘prerequisites’ for meaningful group contact. As these criteria are not developed from empirical studies, scholars should be cautious about using them to make causal claims. Instead, it is best to consider these criteria as increasing the likelihood that meaningful and positive intergroup contact will develop (Tropp 2006: 751–83).

Creating the ‘Potential for Friendship’ Studies suggest that deeper relations between individuals are more likely to reduce prejudice and stereotypes and create positive attitude change than casual superficial contact (Amir 1969: 319–42). The American social psychologist Thomas Pettigrew argues that repeated contact over time under the right conditions of trust are important to create circumstances where ‘friendship potential’ exists. For example, a study of an American student tour of Japan found that the Americans’ interpersonal connections with Japanese students that the tour enabled had the most marked impact on the American students’ attitudes, rather than their casual interactions with other Japanese people. In other words, it was the trust created by the school environment that led to the change in attitude, rather than the contact with Japanese people alone (Kelman 1965). Most of the programs and organisations we studied have created structures that facilitate friendships during the course of their operation. The education-focused programs in this study (ACICIS, Darmasiswa, the NCP and the Australia Awards) are sustained programs of several months or more, which enable interactions between young people to develop into friendships. For instance, the Darmasiswa program allows young Australians to spend up to a year immersed in Indonesia, attending classes and participating in other activities with young Indonesians. Dr Helen Pausacker, Australia’s first participant in the Darmasiswa program, provides a good example of the meaningful interactions that can develop under these circumstances. After spending a year in Solo learning about Javanese performing arts in 1976, Helen has since spent decades collaborating with Indonesian artists and working on Indonesian issues in Australia (Pham 2015). The non-educational programs that we studied (AIYEP, MEP, AIYA and PPIA) have also put in place structures that allow for sustained connections that can lead to attitude change among participants. ACICIS, for instance, matches up Australian students participating in its semesterlong programs with Indonesian ‘buddies’ to help them adjust to life in Indonesia. Students often spend time with their buddies and become friends. There is some risk, however, that programs and organisations that create enclaves of one group can actually diminish ‘friendship potential’. PPIA provides support for thousands of Indonesian students while they are in Australia, including support in finding accommodation, access to professional opportunities and regular social events. While this support is likely to be beneficial for Indonesian students when they first arrive, it reduces the imperative for them to make connections with

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local Australians. Indeed, a 2014 survey by AIYA shows that of the Indonesian respondents, 43% agreed that one of the barriers to living in Australia was spending too much time with other international students, including other Indonesians (AIYA 2015). A similar risk exists for ACICIS or students on the NCP, particularly as its program numbers grow. Again, a large cohort of fellow Australians can be comforting for program participants, especially those who have not yet travelled previously to Indonesia, but it can also create cohorts of Australians who may have less reason to build connections with local Indonesian young people. If, however, these programs encourage students to live in their local community and act only as a support mechanism—as we understand ACICIS does—these risks can be diminished. While the studied programs and initiatives support meaningful intergroup interaction during the period in which they run, they have been less successful at supporting participants to continue relationships after the program is over through structured alumni programs. Alumni programs can help to sustain the friendship built within the initial interpersonal contact, and this is particularly pertinent for organisations that run shorter programs where relationships may not be fully formed by the time they end. AIYA’s CAUSINDY, for instance, creates strong conditions to facilitate friendship potential by giving Indonesian and Australian youth the opportunity to live and carry out structured activities together over a few days (as we show below). However, it does not have an officially-facilitated alumni program. The same could be said, to some degree, of AIYEP and MEP.14 While it is possible that individuals may informally establish ongoing networks following these programs, as Pettigrew argues, without infrastructure to support sustained contact, there is a risk that some participants in people-to-people group activities will simply lose touch with other participants. If that happens, the relationships developed for the other group through that program will be lost. Recognising this, some programs, such as the NCP, the Australia Awards and ACICIS, have explicitly sought to strengthen their alumni programs. AIYA does not run a structured alumni program but uses its strong social media presence to at least allow its participants to continue to interact through online communities.

Collaboration and Equality of Status Collaboration can enhance relationships because, when participants work together towards common goals, changes occur in the way group members see each other (Sherif 1966). For example, in his research into overseas study programs in Israel for American Jewish students, Erling Schild, an Israeli social psychologist and

14  ACICIS runs an active mailing list that allows the organisation to stay in touch with past participants, and intermittently has alumni events—most recently for its 20th anniversary celebrations. At the time of writing the organisation was also scaling up some of its alumni activity. While officially there is an AIYEP alumni programme, we understand that it has not actively engaged past participants.

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education academic, demonstrated that enduring attitude change only occurred in children when both groups participated in different types of activities together, rather than sightseeing activities or similar activities where one group was alone (Schild 1962: 41–54). Two of the youth initiatives studied provide excellent examples of creating conditions for collaboration: AIYEP and AIYA, through its CAUSINDY conference. They bring two groups together to work on shared goals through structured activities as part of their participation in the program. AIYEP participants spend several weeks in a rural part of Indonesia working collaboratively on a community development project with their Indonesian counterparts. Following this experience, AIYEP hosts the Australia-Indonesia Youth Dialogue. The Dialogue provides AIYEP participants a forum to exchange their views and experiences of their recent exchange program. CAUSINDY participants spend several days together listening to experts in business, government and academia and discussing policy issues. Towards the end of the conference they break up into groups around their interests and develop a set of recommendations for how to improve the AustraliaIndonesia relationship. In this way, both programs encourage equal collaboration on a specific project and opportunities to equally deliberate on the process. Many of the studied programs do not encourage collaboration between young Australians and Indonesians, however. The NCP and the Australia Awards, for instance, place students in Indonesian and Australian universities and workplaces. While they do actively encourage students to immerse themselves in an institution and engage in collaborative activities with their counterparts, the level of collaboration that takes place depends on the willingness and ability of the participant to work with Indonesian colleagues. On the other hand, some ACICIS programs do facilitate collaboration by sending Australian students to live in villages with Indonesian students where they engage in community development work as part of a more structured accredited course. Collaboration works most effectively if it involves people of ‘equal status’ (Amir 1976). Equality of status here refers to people being in the same category—such as all being students—rather than socio-economic status specifically. Studies have shown that inequalities in status can hinder the types of contact that shapes perceptions. For example, sociologist Joyce Epstein showed that school students who studied under a curriculum that emphasised the equal status of each child as a student, rather than dividing students on race grounds, were more accepting of mixed race schooling (Epstein 1985: 23–43). Many of the youth initiatives bring together youth of equal status, namely, university-educated young people. CAUSINDY recruits high achieving, university-educated young professionals from both countries who are considered to have knowledge in a field that is important to the bilateral relationship. PPIA, ACICIS and the NCP also facilitate contact between university students. MEP is an exception, as it does not necessarily target university students or graduates but rather young people who are influential in Muslim communities. AIYEP, too, has managed to attract some participants from different backgrounds. While this

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means that the programs and initiatives create strong conditions for collaboration, these youth programs are limited to members of the elite from both countries.

Mutuality Mutuality refers to the extent to which people-to-people organisations and programs reflect the interests of both participating groups. Often non-mutual contact can happen when one group has more power or a stronger interest in the people-to-people contact than the other. In a peacebuilding context this often occurs where the losing party of a conflict is forced to make peace with the victor. Although, as Mohammad Abu-Nimer, a peacebuilding scholar from American University, states, ‘if designed accordingly and, most important, jointly by the two communities, [people-to-people contact] can be a genuine tool to facilitate reconciliation’ (AbuNimer 1999). Therefore, initiatives that are truly bipartisan in design, intent and execution have an increased chance of effectively building people-to-people links. Many of the organisations we studied are, in fact, not mutual by design. ACICIS and the NCP, for example, send Australian students to Indonesia and are not designed to reciprocate. Other studied organisations simply have a tokenistic or underdeveloped element of mutuality. For instance, PPIA’s focus has traditionally been on supporting Indonesians in Australia, and has not actively and systematically engaged with Australian participants. The organisation is, however, currently making efforts to become more bilateral, a move reflected in both its policies and programming. For example, committee positions are now open to Australians and several chapters run successful language exchanges to help Australians learn Indonesian and Indonesians improve their English. Similarly, AIYA, while aiming to build links between Australians and Indonesians, has had stronger representation among Australians. This lack of reciprocity, and, in particular, the Australian focus of these initiatives, is likely driven by the fact that all but two of the studied youth organisations are Australian-funded and run, with PPIA and Darmasiswa being the only exceptions. Some organisations have institutional partners in Indonesia (as discussed below) but the strategic directions are set by Australians. This imbalance is reflective of the landscape of organisations and programs involved in people-to-people relations more broadly—which tends to be dominated by Australian organisations—rather than any selection bias on the part of the authors (Hill 2016: 1–15). The asymmetrical nature of the youth people-to-people relationship is not surprising and echoes the wider relationship dynamic. As Australian political scientist Richard Tanter points out, there are far more Australians with a specialist interest in Indonesia than there are Indonesians with a specialist interest in Australia (Tanter 2012). Several international relations commentators have argued that Australia has long acknowledged the particularly important strategic value of a close relationship with Indonesia and that Indonesia, due to size and geography, will always be more important to Australia than Australia will be to it (Viviani 1973; Hanson 2010; and

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see chapter four). The continued funding by the Australian government of youth people-to-people initiatives, such as the NCP, in the face of limited reciprocation by the Indonesian government, is indicative of the relationship imbalance.15 The peacebuilding literature suggests that one consequence of a lack of mutual intergroup contact is that it can have a negative, rather than positive, impact on perceptions. This may be particularly true in post-conflict peacebuilding efforts, to which the majority of the intergroup contact literature relates, which try to facilitate reconciliation between conflicting groups. While the studied groups in this chapter are not in conflict, there is still a risk that a lack of mutuality means that Australian perspectives on the relationship will be more dominantly represented than Indonesian perspectives in the studied organisations and programs. This could, for instance, lead to a view by Indonesians that such initiatives only benefit Australians, and thus could feed into negative stereotypes about Australia. We do not have data to assess whether this is a view held by the participants of the studied groups, however, concern over a lack of mutuality was an issue that was raised with us in our discussions with some of the studied programs’ administrators.

Institutional Support/Coordination Existing theories suggest that intergroup contact is more likely to generate positive outcomes when legitimate institutions provide support (Pettigrew1998: 65–85). This can come from a variety of places, including accepted authorities such as governments or spokespeople, as well as laws or social norms (Amir 1969 319–42). In the context of this chapter, institutional support could refer to support from institutions that are recognised as playing a role in international relations such as DFAT or the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (KEMLU). In addition to institutional support, communication and collaboration between different institutions engaged in people-to-people initiatives could also increase their collective impact. Many of the youth initiatives in the Australia-Indonesia relationship have strong institutional support as they are run by government, or have built strong links with government and other educational bodies. For instance, two youth initiatives studied in this chapter, AIYEP and MEP, are managed by DFAT’s Australia-Indonesia Institute (AII), the main government body managing peopleto-people relations between the two countries. While the logistics of AIYEP and MEP are outsourced, they are promoted as AII programs and thus have official institutional support. As well as participating in a government program, AIYEP participants have contact with representatives of government during the program, including the Australian ambassador to Indonesia, through meetings and other events. Similarly, Australian award holders participate in formal ceremonies, 15  The Indonesian government does fund some programs, such as Darmasiswa (which we discuss in this chapter), and some others, including a programme to fund Indonesian language teacher assistants to assist Australian teachers teaching Indonesian.

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which are often attended by diplomats and politicians, to mark the beginning and end of their study programs. These experiences connect them to the key drivers of the bilateral relationships and the larger purpose of the program—deepening relations between Australia and Indonesia. Participants must recognise institutional support if it is to increase the likelihood of positive attitude change. All the youth initiatives studied have solid institutional support, although not all of them have institutional support that is recognised in the country in which they are recruiting participants. For example, Darmasiswa, is managed by the Indonesian Ministry of Education in cooperation with KEMLU, the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and has links with a range of Indonesian universities, where participants are able to study during the program. However, its supporting institutions may not be recognised in Australia. Many Australians may not know, or be convinced, of the program’s benefits without knowledge of the institutions that sit behind it. This may be one of the reasons for the low awareness of the program among young Australians and the small number of Australians taking part. In contrast to Darmasiswa, AIYEP has institutional support in both countries. While AII funds the program, it has an institutional partner in the Indonesian Ministry of Sport and Youth, which facilitates the recruitment of AIYEP’s Indonesian participants and other aspects of the program. The involvement of the Ministry of Youth and Sport, and the opportunity it extends to young Indonesians (many of whom would not otherwise have the means to travel), gives the program legitimacy. It has resulted in a very competitive recruitment process and high-quality, committed participants. Initiatives such as AIYA, PPIA, and ACICIS, although not government-run, have made concerted efforts to develop strong, formalised links to government and universities from which they can derive institutional support. AIYA, for instance, has a strong working relationship with DFAT’s AII, which funds some of AIYA’s activities. These activities align with AII’s mandate and AIYA promotes AII programs and assists in the implementation of some aspects of its programs. Additionally, AIYA’s annual youth conference, CAUSINDY, includes a range of government and other high-profile representatives in its program and submits recommendations from the conference to key government stakeholders. While ACICIS also has links with government bodies, its main institutional support comes from universities. ACICIS is a consortium of 16 leading Australian universities with an advisory board made up of representatives from them. ACICIS students receive university credit for their participation and the ACICIS program is embedded into degree programs at some universities. While the studied youth organisations have robust, and often formalised, relationships with government and universities that can serve as sources of institutional support, the relationships between different youth organisations and programs themselves tend to be weak. There are some examples of these organisations working together. PPIA and AIYA, for example, have a memorandum of understanding under which they collaborate by cross-promoting and attending

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each other’s events. The collaboration that happens between youth organisations is, however, often informal and is often the result of personal relationships of people who have worked together or have participated in each other’s programs, rather than any formal mechanism. For instance, AIYA and ACICIS have worked together in the past, in part because one of AIYA’s directors is a former employee of ACICIS. Outside these individual relationships there is no forum or centralised channel through which these organisations can communicate or make strategic and collaborative plans with each other.

Conclusion Young people have been ever present and important actors in the bilateral relationship between Australia and Indonesia, since almost the very start of relations between the countries. From the 1950s Australian Graduate Volunteer Scheme to the 2011 advent of AIYA, these mainly Australian-driven organisations have helped to facilitate conditions where young people can meaningfully connect across national divides. Scholars and policymakers have accepted that youth-led and youth-focused organisations and programs can facilitate meaningful people-to-people relationships between the countries. As Indonesia’s youth population grows, we think this is something that warrants further research. However, this chapter’s focus has been on how eight Australian and Indonesian youth-focused organisations have created the conditions for people-to-people relationships to flourish. We have shown that the organisational design, structure and method of program implementation matters to achieving meaningful people-to-people links in the context of a ‘new public diplomacy’. It is not sufficient just to have programs that bring young Australians and Indonesians together. It must also be ensured that these programs are structured in a way that creates meaningful and positive intergroup contact. For donors and practitioners, the implications of this study are that it is important to take account the four intergroup contact criteria identified in this chapter in making decisions about how to structure or fund programs. We have made five key findings related to the Australia-Indonesia youth groups we studied in this chapter. First, of the organisations we studied, some, but not all, created conditions for ‘friendship potential’ by embedding young people in-country or otherwise bringing them together. PPIA, for example, was one organisation that limited friendship potential by often excluding Australians from their activities. Although many of the organisations created short term conditions for friendship, overall the organisations should do more to sustain connections by establishing their own structured alumni programs, or partnering with existing communities to create a space for ongoing relationships. Second, we found that the studied organisations and programs have created conditions for collaboration between people of equal status either through in-country immersion or by tasking youth in each country to work towards the

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shared goal of improving the bilateral relationship. The studied organisations have also sought to target youth of equal status, as all the studied programs—except for MEP and occasionally AIYEP—target university-educated young people. Although this focus facilitates better intergroup contact, it also narrows the type of people involved in these programs. Moving beyond only university-educated youth to target other young people, for example, those undertaking vocational education, may be one way of increasing the group of youths able to create meaningful people links between Australia and Indonesia. For example, why not have organisations or programs built around vocational youth exchanges focusing on carpentry, food or music production? Widening the scope of interests may increase the number of participants in the Australia-Indonesia youth programs and initiatives. Of course, any widening of this sort should first be preceded by further research on what factors motivate young people to participate in the Australia-Indonesia relationship. Third, reflecting the university focus of these programs, this chapter has also found that the studied organisations and programs have strong institutional support from universities and governments. Despite this strong support institutionally, the organisations do not always work together as cohesively as they could. As a consequence, there is some duplication of organisations working towards the same end. AIYA and PPIA, for example, both carry out events to engage Australian and Indonesian students in Australia. Similarly, AIYEP and AIYA (through CAUSINDY) hold annual youth dialogues to discuss the issues facing youth in the bilateral relationship. One way of fostering better coordination between existing programs would be to include greater youth-focused representation in the bodies managing the people-to-people relationship for the government. For instance, the AII could appoint a youth-focused board member as a liaison point for all youth-focused initiatives occurring in Australia. Alternatively, the Australian and Indonesian governments could work together to appoint youth representatives for the bilateral relationship who could act as ambassadors and liaison points for existing initiatives in both countries.16 Fourth, this chapter also pointed out that the objectives and activities of the studied organisations and programs do not all mutually serve the interests of Australians and Indonesians. This is not surprising given that the studied programs are, overwhelmingly, run by Australians and funded by Australian institutions. The Indonesian government and other Indonesian organisations could do more to build the people-to-people relationship with Australia, for example, by working with PPIA to better engage Australian student communities or better promoting the Darmasiswa program to Australians. If Indonesian organisations do not take this approach (and this may be the case, given the historically greater importance placed on bilateral people-to-people links by Australians rather than Indonesians),

16  This could be similar to Australia’s annual appointed Youth Representative to the United Nations. For further details see: .

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the studied Australian organisations ought to try and ensure that they are more mutual in their objectives and activities to the extent they are seeking to build people-to-people links. As we discussed in this chapter, this could improve the ability of such organisations to build links. Fifth, considering the small scale of the studied programs and initiatives, it is tempting to argue that the best solution for improving youth ties between Australia and Indonesia is to increase their scale. Of course, we accept that the programs are small—MEP only accepts 15 participants from both sides; AIYEP recruits 36 participants; and CAUSINDY accepts 30 delegates a year. Given that there are 62 million people between the ages of 16 and 30 in Indonesia and 5.4 million Australians aged between 18 and 34, the participant numbers in the studied peopleto-people programmes are miniscule.17 However, despite their size, individuals associated with these activities have significant impact on shaping the relationship. Several participants (including this book’s editors) are influential thought leaders and government and non-government actors in Australia and Indonesia, who regularly write about and advise governments about the relationship. Despite their current size, these programs still appear to be successfully producing individuals who are able to influence perceptions in both countries and, in this way, contribute to the Australia-Indonesia relationship.

References Abu-Nimer, M (1999) Dialogue, Conflict Resolution, and Change: Arab-Jewish Encounters in Israel (New York, State University of New York Press). AIYA (Australia-Indonesia Youth Association) (2013) ‘Young People the “Backbone” of Australia-Indonesia Relationship’, AIYA Blog, 13 November, . AIYA (2015) ‘Member Survey 2014’, . Allport, GW (1954) The Nature of Prejudice (Cambridge Mass, Addison-Wesley). Ameria, Dylan (2016) ‘Indonesian Students Run 10th IFF Melbourne’, The Jakarta Post, 16 February, . Amir, Yehuda (1969) ‘Contact Hypothesis in Ethnic Relations’ 71(5) Psychological Bulletin 319. Amir, Yehuda (1976) ‘The Role of Intergroup Contact in Change of Prejudice and Race Relations’ in P Katz and DA Taylor (eds), Towards the Elimination of ­Racism (New York, Pergamon Press).

17  There have been some recent signs of growth: AIYA now has representatives chapters in 11 cities across Australia and Indonesia; ACICIS accepted around 150 students in 2015, the largest number in its history; and the NCP intends to ‘make it a rite of passage’ for Australian students to study in Asia. The numbers nonetheless remain tiny compared to the total youth population.

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Atkinson, Carol (2010) ‘Does Soft Power Matter? A Comparative Analysis of ­Student Exchange Programs 1980—2006’ 6 Foreign Policy Analysis 1. Australia. Foreign Affairs Sub Committee, Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia (2004) Near Neighbours—Good Neighbours: An Inquiry into Australia’s Relationship with Indonesia, May (Canberra, Commonwealth of Australia). Australian Bureau of Statistics (2016) ‘3401.0—Overseas Arrivals and Departures, Australia, June 2016’, Australian Government (2013) ‘Australian Attitudes towards Indonesia: A DFATcommissioned Newspoll Report’ (Canberra, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade), . Beadle, S (2013) ‘“People there Pick-pocket and Stuff ”, I Read It in the Paper: Challenging Students’ Perceptions across Cultures’ in A Wierenga and R G ­ uevara (eds), Educating for Global Citizenship: a Youth-led Approach to Learning through Partnership (Melbourne, Melbourne University Press). Cottle, Draw and Keys, Angela (2008) ‘Transnational Struggle: Asian Seafarers and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence in Australia’, paper presented to the 17th Biennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, ­Melbourne 1-3 July, . Epstein, Joyce L (1985) ‘After the Bus Arrives: Resegregation in Desegregated Schools’ 41(3) Journal of Social Issues 23, Fall. Gamson, William A and Modigliani, Andrea (1963) ‘Tensions and Concessions : The Empirical Confirmation of Belief Systems about Soviet Behavior’ 11(1) Social Problems 34. Gawerc, Michelle (2006) ‘Peacebuilding: Theoretical and Concrete Perspectives’ 31(4) Peace & Change 435. Hanson, Fergus (2010) ‘Indonesia and Australia: Time for a Step Change’, Lowy Institute for International Policy. Hill, David T (2016) ‘Language as “Soft Power” in Bilateral Relations: The Case of Indonesian Language in Australia’ 36(3) Asia Pacific Journal of Education 364, September. Kelman, HC (1965) ‘Social-psychological Approaches to the Study of I­ nternational Relations: Definition of Scope’ in HC Kelman (ed), International Behaviour: A Social- psychological Analysis (New York, Rinehart and Winston). Lane, Bernard (2011) ‘Finding a Place in the Asian Century’, The Australian, 30 November, . Lima, Antônio F De (2007) ‘The Role of International Educational Exchanges in Public Diplomacy’ 3 Place Branding and Public Diplomacy 234. Lowe, David (2013) ‘Journalists and the Stirring of Australian Public Diplomacy: The Colombo Plan towards the 1960s’ 48 Journal of Contemporary History 175.

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Melissen, Jan (2005) The New Public Diplomacy: Soft Power in International ­Relations. Palgrave Macmillan. Pettigrew, Thomas F (1998) ‘Intergroup Contact Theory’ 49 Annual Review of ­Psychology 65. Pettigrew, Thomas F (2008) ‘Future Directions for Intergroup Contact Theory and Research’ 32 International Journal of Intercultural Relations 187. Pettigrew, Thomas F and Tropp, Linda R (2006) ‘A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory’ 90(5) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 751. Pettigrew, Thomas F; Tropp, Linda R; Wagner, Ulrich; and Christ, Oliver (2011) ‘Recent Advances in Intergroup Contact Theory’ 35(3) International Journal of Intercultural Relations 271. Pham, Sheila (2015) ‘Puppetry is Helen’s Passion without a Shadow of a Doubt’, Radio Australia, 29 September. Purdey, Jemma (2012) Knowing Indonesia from Australia (Clayton Vic, Monash University Publishing). Puspitasari, Siska Nirmala (2015) ‘542 Mahasiswa Asing Ikuti Darmasiswa RI’, Pikiran Rakyat, 31 August, . Schild, Erling (1962) ‘The Foreign Student, as Stranger, Learning the Norms of the Host Culture’. 18(1) Journal of Social Issues 41. Sherif, M (1966) Group Conflict and Cooperation. (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul). Tanter, Richard (2012) ‘Shared Problems, Shared Interests: Reframing AustraliaIndonesia Security Relations’ in Jemma Purdey (ed), Knowing Indonesia from Australia (Clayton, Monash University). Tanu, Danau (2014) ‘Engaging Indonesia’s Youth’ in New Perspectives on Indonesia: Understanding Australia’s Closest Asian Neighbour (Perth, US-Asia Centre). Tourism Research Australia (2013) ‘Marketing Matters—Indonesia’, October, . Viviani, N (1973) Australian Attitudes and Policies towards Indonesia, 1950 to 1960 (Canberra, Australian National University, Department of International ­Relations, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies). Walton, Jessica; Priest, Naomi; and Paradies, Yin (2013) ‘Identifying and Developing Effective Approaches to Foster Intercultural Understanding in Schools’ 24(3) Intercultural Education 181. Yudhoyono, Susilo Bambang (2010) ‘Address by the President of the Republic of Indonesia’, to Joint Sitting of the Australian Parliament, Canberra, 10 March, in Parliamentary Debates: House of Representatives: Official Hansard: 2136.

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TERMINOLOGY

Non-English Terms Because individual chapters in this book will be read separately from others, a translation of non-English terms used is provided in parentheses or a note the first time each term appears in a chapter. The term is also italicised on first use in that chapter. Most non-English terms also appear in the glossary and list of abbreviations. Indonesian Usage Different authors in this book have sometimes used slightly different, but ­accurate, translations of some Indonesian terms. Because these usages reflect their ­stylistic preferences and their interpretation of the original Indonesian we have not sought to achieve complete standardisation. The modern Indonesian standard orthography—determined by the Indonesian Ministry of Education since 17 August 1972—is used for all Indonesian words except where ejaan lama (old spelling) is used in quotation. Indonesian Names In the case of names, the spelling used by the person named has been preferred where it is known, thus ‘Soeharto’ rather than ‘Suharto’. Although the first president’s name is often spelled ‘Sukarno’ he would always sign his name as ‘Soekarno’, the version also preferred by his children, so we have used this spelling.

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GLOSSARY, ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

AAC ABC ABRI ACARA ACCI ACFOA ACICIS ACT ACU ADF ADFIS AFP AFS AFTA AIAA AIBC AIBEP AIC AICC AII AIIB AILDF AIPEG AIPJ AIPMNH AIPRD AIYA AIYEP ALP AMM ANU ANZAC ANZUS

Australia-ASEAN Council Australian Broadcasting Commission Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia, Indonesian Armed Forces Australian Curriculum Authority Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry Australian Council for Overseas Aid Australian Consortium for In-Country Indonesian Studies Australian Capital Territory Australian Catholic University Australian Defence Force Australian Defence Force Investigative Service Australian Federal Police American Field Service Intercultural Programs ASEAN Free Trade Area Australia Indonesia Arts Alliance Australia Indonesia Business Council Australia-Indonesia Basic Education Program Australia-Indonesia Centre Australia International Cultural Council Australia-Indonesia Institute Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank Australia Indonesia Legal Development Facility Australia Indonesia Partnership for Economic Governance Australia Indonesia Partnership for Justice Australia Indonesia Partnership for Maternal and Neonatal Health Australia-Indonesia Partnership for Reconstruction and Development Australia-Indonesia Youth Association Australia Indonesia Youth Exchange Program Australian Labor Party Annual Ministerial Meeting (ASEAN) Australian National University Australian and New Zealand Army Corps Australia, New Zealand and the United States Treaty

536  APEC APT ARF ASA ASEAN ASEM Asia TOPA ASIO ASX AusAID AUSIT AVID Bakamla Bappenas Barsarnas BCNA BIN BKPM Blusukan BRIDGE BRIMOB Burqa CAUSINDY CAVR CENKIM CIB CLASP CLMV CoC CSEAS CSO DFAT DIFF DOC DPD DPR EAS EEZ EFTSL EU

Glossary, Acronyms and Abbreviations Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Asia-Pacific Triennial ASEAN Regional Forum Association of Southeast Asia Association of Southeast Asian Nations ASEAN-Europe Meeting Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Australia Securities Exchange Australian Agency for International Development Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators Australian Volunteers for International Development Badan Keamanan Laut, Indonesian Coast Guard Badan Perencanaan Pembangunan Nasional, National Development Planning Agency Badan SAR Nasional, National Search and Rescue Agency Breast Cancer Network Australia Badan Intelijen Negara, State Intelligence Agency Badan Koordinasi Penanaman Modal, Investment Coordinating Board ‘drop in’ visit Building Relationships through Intercultural Dialogue and Growing Engagement Korps Brigade Mobil, Police Mobile Brigade a long, loose garment covering the whole body from head to feet, worn in public by some Muslim women Conference of Australian and Indonesian Youth Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (Timor-Leste) Central Komite Indonesia Merdeka, Independent Indonesia Central Committee Commonwealth Investigation Branch Culture, Language and Arts in Schools Project Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam Code of Conduct Center for Southeast Asian Studies civil society organisation Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Development Import Finance Facility Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea Dewan Perwakilan Daerah, Regional Representative Assembly Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, People’s Representative Assembly East Asia Summit exclusive economic zone Equivalent Full Time Student Load European Union

Glossary, Acronyms and Abbreviations FAO FCIs FESR FISIPOL FTA GAM GANEFO GDP GNI GRANAT IA-CEPA IABC IABW IAIN II IKAHAN IKAWIRIA IMF INDII INS INTERFET IOM IRIP ISELP ITB IUP JCLEC JI JIL Jilbab JOC Jokowi KADIN Kapolri KEMLU Koin untuk Abbott Koin untuk Australia Komnas HAM konfrontasi

 537

Food and Agriculture Organisation Foundations, Councils and Institutes (in DFAT) Far East Strategic Reserve Faculty of Social and Political Sciences free trade agreement Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, Free Aceh Movement Games of the New Emerging Forces gross domestic product gross national income ‘Grenade’: Gerakan Nasional Anti-Narkotika, National Anti-Narcotics Movement Indonesia-Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement Indonesia Australia Business Council Indonesia Australia Business Week State Islamic Institution ‘Inside Indonesia’ (magazine) Ikatan Alumni Pertahanan Indonesia Australia, Indonesia Australia Defence Alumni Association Indonesian Community Association of Victoria International Monetary Fund Indonesia Infrastructure Initiative Indonesian News Service International Force for East Timor International Organization for Migration Indonesian Resources and Information Programme Islamic Schools English Language Program Institut Teknologi Bandung, Bandung Institute of Technology International Undergraduate Program Jakarta Centre for Law Enforcement Cooperation Jemaah Islamiyah Jaringan Islam Liberal, Liberal Islamic Network headscarf worn in public by some Muslim women Jakarta Operations Centre Joko Widodo Kamar Dagang dan Industri, Chamber of Trade and Industry Kepala Polisi Republik Indonesia, Indonesian police chief Kementerian Luar Negeri, Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Coins for Abbott Coins for Australia Komisi Nasional Hak Asasi Manusia, National Human Rights Commission confrontation

538  Kopassus Kostrad KPK LAFIA LAPIS LBH LNG Madrasah Menang tanpa ngasorake MEP MIKTA MLA MoRA MSG Mufakat Musyawarah NALSAS NALSSP NATO NCP NEAT NEI NGO NLA NTT NU ODA OECD Operasaun Tasi Diak OPV OSB PDI-P Perpu Pesantren PETRII PIES PIF PKI

Glossary, Acronyms and Abbreviations Komando Pasukan Khusus, Special Forces Command Komando Strategis Angkatan Darat, Army Strategic Reserve Command Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi, Corruption Eradication Commission Leading Australia’s Future in Asia Learning Assistance Program for Islamic Schools Lembaga Bantuan Hukum, Legal Aid Institute liquefied natural gas Islamic school winning without defeating Muslim Exchange Program Mexico, Indonesia, Republic of Korea, Turkey and Australia Member of the Legislative Assembly Ministry of Religious Affairs Melanesian Spearhead Group consensus community or group consultation National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools National Asian Languages and Studies in Schools Program North Atlantic Treaty Organisation New Colombo Plan Network of East Asian Think Tanks Netherlands East Indies non-government organisation National Library of Australia Nusa Tenggara Timur, East Nusa Tenggara Nahdlatul Ulama, awakening of the Ulama overseas development assistance Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Operation Good Ocean Offshore Patrol Vessels Operation Sovereign Borders Partai Demokrasi Indonesia–Perjuangan, Indonesia Democracy Party–Struggle Government Regulation in Lieu of Law, a form of emergency land issued by the president Islamic boarding school (private) Partnership in Education and Training of Regional Islamic Institutions Partnership in Islamic Education Scholarships Pacific Islands Forum Partai Komunis Indonesia, Indonesian Communist Party

Glossary, Acronyms and Abbreviations PM PMI PNG Polri PPIA PPP PTUN RAAF RCF Rechtsstaat Reformasi RMCP Satgas Bom SBY SEATO SIUPP SLORC SME SOAS SPAK STAIN TAC TNI TNI-AU Tut wuri handayani UGM UIN UK Ulama ULMWP UN UNAMET UNCAC UNCI UNESCO UNHCR UNICEF UNIDCP UNODC

 539

Prime Minister Palang Merah Indonesia, Indonesian Red Cross Papua New Guinea Polisi Republik Indonesia, Indonesian police force Perhimpunan Pelajar Indonesia di Australia, Indonesian ­Students’ Association of Australia, Public Private Partnership Pengadilan Tata Usaha Negara, State Administrative Court Royal Australian Air Force Regional Cooperation Framework Law state, rule of law Reformation (period since President Soeharto’s fall in 1998) Red Meat and Cattle Partnership Satuan Tugas Bom, Bomb Taskforce Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation Surat Izin Usaha Penerbitan Pers, Press Publication Enterprise Permit State Law and Order Restoration Council (Burma/Myanmar) small and medium enterprise School of Oriental and African Studies Saya Perempuan Anti Korupsi, I am a Woman Against Corruption State Islamic Teachers College Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (ASEAN) Tentara Nasional Indonesia, Indonesian National Army Tentara Nasional Indonesia—Angkatan Udara, Indonesian Air Force to lead from behind Universitas Gadjah Mada State Islamic University United Kingdom Muslim religious scholars United Liberation Movement for West Papua United Nations United Nations Mission to East Timor United Nations Convention against Corruption United Nations Commission on Indonesia United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization United Nations High Commission on Refugees United Nations Children’s Fund United Nations Office International Drug Control Programme United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

540  UNTAET US USAID VGBO VGS YouSure

Glossary, Acronyms and Abbreviations United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor United States United States Agency for International Development Victorian Government Business Office Volunteer Graduate Scheme Youth Studies Centre

INDEX

AAC (Australia-ASEAN Council), 326 Abbott, Tony, Prime Minister, 8, 36, 38, 43–45, 48, 92, 111, 137–43, 301, 486 asylum seekers, and, 137–43 Operation Sovereign Borders (OSB), 42–43 commitment to relationship, 291 fallout from ‘Freedom Flotilla’, 265, 266 link between aid and fate of Sukumaran and Chan remark, 92, 316, 441, 443 tsunami aid and clemency comment and backlash, 44, 92, 318, 443 ACARA (Australian Curriculum Authority), 411, 427 ACCI (Australian Chamber of Commerce), 501 ACFOA (Australian Council for Overseas Aid), 348 ACICIS (Australian Consortium for In-Country Indonesian Studies), 6, 400–02, 419–20, 424, 437, 518, 521–27 Professor David Hill, 517, 518 address to joint sitting of parliament (Yudhoyono 2010), 1, 3, 55, 134, 267, 513 AIAA (Australia Indonesia Arts Alliance), 386 Judy Shelley, 385–86 AIBC (Australia Indonesia Business Council), 402–03, 501 AIBEP (Australia-Indonesia Basic Education Program), 160, 162, 165 AIC (Australia-Indonesia Centre), 57–58 Perceptions Study, 56, 69, 76, 362 AICC (Australia International Cultural Council), 333 aid, see Australian aid AIG (Australian Industry Group), 501 AII (Australia-Indonesia Institute), 326, 381–82, 384–85, 401–02, 525–26 AILDF (Australia Indonesia Legal Development Facility), 251 AIPEG (Australia Indonesia Partnership for Economic Governance), 490 AIPJ (Australia-Indonesia Partnership for Justice), 163, 249, 251–52 anti-corruption programmes, 253–56 legal aid, 252–53 LBH (Legal Aid Foundation or Lembaga Bantuan Hukum), 252

AIPMNH (Australia Indonesia Partnership for Maternal and Neonatal Health), 393 AIPRD (Australia-Indonesia Partnership for Reconstruction and Development), 459 AIYA (Australia-Indonesia Youth Association), 511, 517, 519–20, 522–24, 526–28 2014 survey, 515, 522 Conference of Australian and Indonesian Youth (CAUSINDY), 519, 522–23, 526, 528, 529 AIYEP (Australia Indonesia Youth Exchange Program), 518, 523, 525–29 Alatas, Ali, Foreign Minister, 9, 12, 127, 202, 238, 289, 414–15 American Field Service (AFS), 419 Dr Kirrilee Hughes, 402–03 anti-corruption programmes: Australia-Indonesia Partnership for Justice (AIPJ), 253–56 APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation), 20, 171, 294, 491 artistic and cultural collaboration, 5, 323–24 Australian cultural centre, 339–43 Australian cultural engagement in Asian century, 324–27 Australia International Cultural Council (AICC), 333 Indonesian arts in post-New Order era, 328–38 other significant programs, 338–39 shifting perceptions, 330–31 soft diplomacy, 331–34 case study—2015 OzAsia Festival, 334–38 see also women’s contribution to bilateral relationship ASEAN, see Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), 20, 171, 294, 491 ASIO (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation), 219, 222 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 7, 41, 169–76, 199, 292–94, 296 affiliated regional organisations, associations, groupings and forums, 171

542 

Index

‘ASEAN way’, 177–79 Myanmar, and, 179–82 State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), 173, 182 South China Sea, and, 182–86 Association of Southeast Asia (ASA), 170 Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC), 173, 176 asylum seekers, 7, 16, 125–27 Abbott regime, 137–43 human rights, 204, 248 International Organization for Migration (IOM), 126, 139 Regional Cooperation Agreement, 128 Labor government’s search for ‘solutions’, 132–37 media reportage, 311–14 Pacific Solution II, 136 Papuan, 38, 125–43, 262–66, 278 crisis over, 46 human rights, 204 independence impacting on, see Papuan independence temporary protection visas, 225–26 political exploitation, 46 political situation between countries in Howard years, 127–32 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 126, 142–43, 248 see also people smuggling attitudes, see public opinion polling on Indonesia AusAID (Australian Agency for International Development), 157–59, 162–64, 251, 392–93, 458 AUSIT (Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators), 380 Australia-ASEAN Council (AAC), 326 Australia Awards, 517 Australia Indonesia Arts Alliance (AIAA), 386 Judy Shelley, 385–86 Australia-Indonesia Basic Education Program (AIBEP), 160, 162, 165 Australia Indonesia Business Council (AIBC), 402–03, 501 Australia-Indonesia Centre (AIC), 57–58 Perceptions Study, 56, 69, 76, 362 Australia-Indonesia Institute (AII), 326, 381–82, 384–85, 401–02, 525–26 Australia Indonesia Legal Development Facility (AILDF), 251 Australia Indonesia Partnership for Economic Governance (AIPEG), 490 Australia-Indonesia Partnership for Justice (AIPJ), 163, 249, 251–52 anti-corruption programmes, 253–56 legal aid, 252–53 LBH (Legal Aid Foundation or Lembaga Bantuan Hukum), 252

Australia Indonesia Partnership for Maternal and Neonatal Health (AIPMNH), 393 Australia-Indonesia Partnership for Reconstruction and Development (AIPRD), 459 Australia-Indonesia Youth Association (AIYA), 511, 517, 519–20, 522–24, 526–28 2014 survey, 515, 522 Conference of Australian and Indonesian Youth (CAUSINDY), 519, 522–23, 526, 528, 529 Australia Indonesia Youth Exchange Program (AIYEP), 518, 523, 525–29 Australia International Cultural Council (AICC), 333 Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID), 157–59, 162–64, 251, 392–93, 458 Australian aid, 4, 37–38, 45, 443–45 allocation in 2014, 465 Australian perspective, 449–52 conditionality, 92 contextual shifts, 445–49 cuts in, 443–45 examining the gift and where next, 463–67 extravagant gesture, 455–60 historical receipts, 446 increased education aid, 159–63 inevitable correction, 460–62 Indonesian perspective, 452–55 moderating, 157–59 community attitudes, 163–64 increased education aid, 159–63 statistics, see Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Australian Chamber of Commerce (ACCI), 501 Australian Consortium for In-Country Indonesian Studies (ACICIS), 6, 400–02, 419–20, 424, 437, 518, 521–27 Professor David Hill, 517, 518 Australian Council for Overseas Aid (ACFOA), 348 Australian Curriculum Authority (ACARA), 411, 427 Australian Industry Group (AIG), 501 Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators (AUSIT), 380 Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), 219, 222 Australian Volunteers for International Development (AVID), 410 ‘Australiaphobia’, 3 AVID (Australian Volunteers for International Development), 410 Bachtiar, Da’i, Police Chief, 215, 219, 221–22 Bali, 8, 81 bombings, see Bali bombings bucks night extortion case, 92–93

Index crime and bilateral relationship, conclusion, 100–02 drugs and drugs smuggling: ‘Bali Boy’, 88–89 Bali Nine, see Bali Nine Jamie Murphy, 93 Michelle Leslie, 87–88 Nicholas Langan, 89–90 Schapelle Corby, 35, 83–86, 90, 99, 241–42, 249, 396 GRANAT ‘Grenade’ (Gerakan Nasional Anti-Narkotika), 85, 316 media reportage, 308–09, 314–18 Shaun Davidson, 94 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), 97 United Nations Office International Drug Control Programme (UNIDCP), 97 zero tolerance or harm reduction, 96–98 high-risk destination, 95–96 killings and murders: ‘Ape’ Richardson, 94 ‘Black Widow’ (Noor Ellis), 89 Wayan Sudarsa, 93 media reportage, see media reportage numbers and experience of those visiting island, 98–100 tourist casualties and as victims, 94–95 traffic accidents, 94 Bali bombings, 2, 5, 35, 38, 82–83, 88, 153–54, 156, 165, 290, 315, 360, 396, 397, 419 aid and educational programs following, 157, 159–60, 162, 164 Australian visitors following, figures, 99–100 execution of perpetrators, 91 human rights, 45 police cooperation, 153, 219–24, 229, 231 intensification, 131 ‘Bali Boy’, 88–89 Bali Nine: arrest and trial, 86–87 justice sector cooperation, 250 Sukumaran and Chan: clemency applications, 87, 90–92, 243, 315, 317–19, 485 executions, including impact on relationship, 14, 23, 60, 90–91, 100, 102, 111, 206, 225, 235, 244, 249–50, 253, 255, 288–92, 298, 301, 443, 455, 462, 467 Bali Process, 130, 134 Bappenas (Badan Perencanaan Pembangunan Nasional) (National Development Planning Agency), 447, 450, 461 Bishop, Julie, Foreign Minister, 27, 43, 137–38, 139, 142, 240, 266, 298, 424 Bowen, Chris, Immigration Minister, 135, 472 Breast Cancer Network Australia (BCNA), 391 business perspective, 4, 499–509 Asosiasi Pengusaha Indonesia (APINDO), 501

 543 Australian Chamber of Commerce (ACCI), 501 Australian Industry Group (AIG), 501 Indonesia-Australia Business Partnership Group (IA-BPG), 501 Indonesia-Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (IA-CEPA), 501

Carr, Bob, Foreign Minister, 264, 267, 278 Chifley, Ben, Prime Minister, 33, 34, 194 China, 7, 8, 15–16, 49, 296, 302, 447, 501 ASEAN, and, 182 attitudes towards, 15, 76–77, 110 economic relations, 66 mistrust, 61–66 South China Sea: 7, 40, 49, 295–96, 501 ‘ASEAN way’, and, 182–86 exclusive economic zone (EEZ), 7 Coins for Abbott, 44, 92, 318, 443 Coins for Australia, 44, 92, 318, 443 Corby, Schapelle, 35, 83–86, 90, 99, 241–42, 249, 396 GRANAT ‘Grenade’ (Gerakan Nasional Anti-Narkotika), 85, 316 media reportage, 308–09, 314–18 Cotan, Imron, Ambassador, 3, 222, cultural collaboration, see artistic and cultural collaboration Darmasiswa Indonesian Scholarship Program, 517 Davidson, Shaun, 94 defence and security cooperation, see security issues defining and managing future bilateral ties, 7, 287–304 diplomacy: President Widodo’s foreign policy, 8, 31–36, 39–48 public, 4, 29–30 perceptions and importance of youth links, 512–13 security and diplomatic relations, 14–15 soft, see soft power see also perceptions and capacity to persuade Downer, Alexander, Foreign Minister, 129, 132, 154–57, 159–62, 203, 211, 220, 222, 226, 262, 264, 450, 456 drugs and drugs smuggling: executions, 14, 23, 43–46, 49, 60, 86, 90–91, 100, 102, 111, 206, 225, 235, 244, 249–50, 253, 255, 288, 298, 301, 443, 455, 462, 467 Joint Declaration 2005, 131 see also Bali; narcotics trafficking East Timor, see Timor-Leste economic development and trade, 13–14

544 

Index

economic policy, 9, 471–73 binding economic ties, 297–300 challenges and opportunities, 474–80 economic relations and attitudes to Indonesia, 66–67 future of, 492–94 Indonesia-Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (IA-CEPA), 471–72, 475, 487, 489–90, 492 Indonesia Infrastructure Initiative (INDII), 491 President Widodo’s 2017 visit to Australia and impact on relationship, 486–90 Public Private Partnership (PPP), 491 reform, 482–85 relevant statistics, 473–74 resolving, 490–92 uncertainty, 480–82 education, 5–6, 409, 433–35 alumni engagement, 436–37 International Undergraduate Programs (IUP), 437 Youth Studies Centre (YouSure), 437 BRIDGE (Building Relationships through Intercultural Dialogue and Growing Engagement), 419 increased aid, 159–63 Indonesian language studies: introducing, 411–13 rise and fall, 413–18 ‘linguistic diplomacy’, 425–27 place in bilateral relations, 418–21 politics of studying abroad, 421–23 recent Australian Government policy, 424–25 turbulent history, 409–11 UGM (Universities Gadjah Mada), 435–36, 438–40 Evans, Gareth, Foreign Minister, 20, 127, 238, 319, 371, 414, 451 extradition, 101 justice sector collaboration, 245–47, 256 Farmer, Bill, Ambassador, 486 Feith, Herb, 346, 349, 372, 373, 376, 408, 435–36, 512 food security, 303 Indonesia-Australia Partnership on Food Security, 454 Gillard, Julia, Prime Minister, 134 ‘Bali Boy’ case, and, 88–89 Grigson, Paul, Ambassador, 244, 288, 409 Habibie, BJ, President, 128, 175, 202–03, 215, 216, 238, 389, 394 Hardjono, Ratih, 387–88

Hatta, Mohammad, Vice President, 196, 381 Hawke, Bob, Prime Minister, 14, 32, 34, 201 acknowledgement of Indonesian sovereignty over East Timor, 238 first overseas trip and ALP’s policy on East Timor, 349 Holt, Harold, Prime Minister, 199 Howard, John, Prime Minister, 33, 83, 87, 111, 126, 176 aid following Indian Ocean tsunami and Bali bombings, 455–56 East Timor communication, 216 execution of Bali bombers, 91 on President Soeharto, 199 political situation between countries, 127–32 pre-emptive action against terrorists overseas, 222 reservations about signing TAC, 176 visit to Indonesia in 2002, 220 human rights, 7, 193–94, 346 asylum seekers and refugees, 248 challenges after East Timor, 204–07 early years of bilateral relationship, 194–98 executions, 43–45 Indonesia’s ‘New Order’, 198–203 moving forward, 207–09 Papuan independence, 9, 196–97, 268–79 multilateral issue, 259–61 Papuan diplomacy in the Pacific, 267–78 Papuan international activism in Australia, 261–67 Timor-Leste Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR), 201 universality, 353 IABC (Indonesia Australia Business Council), 501 IA-BPG (Indonesia-Australia Business Partnership Group), 501 IA-CEPA (Indonesia-Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement), 471–72, 475, 487, 489–90, 492, 501 Indonesia Australia Business Council (IABC), 501 Indonesia-Australia Business Partnership Group (IA-BPG), 501 Indonesia-Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (IA-CEPA), 471–72, 475, 487, 489–90, 492, 501 Indonesian Resources and Information Programme (IRIP), 345, 348–50, 353, 363 Indonesian Students’ Association of Australia (Perhimpunan Pelajar Indonesia di Australia (PPIA)), 518, 521, 523–24, 526–28 Inside Indonesia (II), 345–46 Bali bombing of 2002, 360

Index bilateral relationship: issues and people, 355–57 nature of, 360 content and form, 352–53 independent East Timor, 359–60 Indonesian Resources and Information Programme (IRIP), see IRIP new online format, 361–63 observing and reporting Indonesia from Australia, 1974–1983, 348–50 origins, 346–48 people and processes, 353–55 post-New Order, 359 transitions, 357–59 unlocking potential of Australia’s Indonesia expertise, 352 working outside mainstream media, 350–52 IRIP (Indonesian Resources and Information Programme), 345, 348–50, 353, 363 Islam, 2, 149–51 Australia-Indonesia Basic Education Program (AIBEP), 160, 162, 165 death penalty, 250 historical attitudes, 150–52 Islamic School Accreditation Program, 165 Islamic Schools English Language Program (ISELP), 159 Michelle Leslie, and, 87–88 moderate friends, radical enemies, 154–57 moderating aid, 157–59 community attitudes, 163–64 increased education aid, 159–63 Learning Assistance Program for Islamic Schools (LAPIS), 160, 162–63, 165 Liberal Islamic Network (JIL), 163–64 Muslim Exchange Program (MEP), 164, 519 Partnership in Education and Training of Regional Islamic Institutions (PETRII), 162 Partnership in Islamic Education Scholarships (PIES), 162 State Islamic Institutions (IAIN), 158 State Islamic Teachers’ Colleges (STAIN), 158 terrorism and reframing Islam as a threat, 152–53 Jakarta Centre for Law Enforcement Cooperation (JCLEC), 131, 224 Jokowi, see Widodo, Joko (Jokowi), President justice sector collaboration, 235–36, 245 Australia Indonesia Legal Development Facility (AILDF), 251 Australia-Indonesia Partnership for Justice (AIPJ), 163, 249, 251–52 anti-corruption programmes, 253–56 legal aid, 252–53 LBH (Legal Aid Foundation or Lembaga Bantuan Hukum), 252

 545 bilateral relationship: overview, 236–39 United Nations Commission on Indonesia (UNCI), 237 Yudhoyono era, in, 239–45 extradition, 245–47 KPK (Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi or Corruption Eradication Commission), 247, 254–55 narcotics trafficking, 249–51 people smuggling, 247–49

Kalla, Jusuf, Vice President, 36, 143, 443, 457 Kamar Dagang dan Industri (KADIN), 501 Keating, Paul, Prime Minister, 8, 33, 48, 199 relationship with President Soeharto, 33, 48, 199, 238, 356–57 Keelty, Mick, Australian Federal Police Commissioner, 211–12, 214–21, 223, 225 Kesoema, Nadjib Riphat, Ambassador, 38, 107, 138, 141, 409 knowledge of Indonesia, 6, 58, 67–69, 376, 380, 400, 427, 475 in context, 70–72 lack of, 55–56 consequential negative attitudes, 74–77 Langan, Nicholas, 89–90 legal aid: Australia-Indonesia Partnership for Justice (AIPJ), 252–53 Leslie, Michelle, 87–88 Lombok Treaty, 131, 239–40 Joint Understanding on a Code of Conduct, 112, 142, 320 Papua clause (article 2.3), 263–64 signing of, 20, 37, 111, 132, 239–40, 290–91 testing of Australia’s commitments under, 264 Mahendra, Yusril Ihza, Minister for Justice, 131, 243 Marsudi, Retno, Foreign Minister, 12, 206, 207, 277 media reportage, 7, 22, 27, 35–36, 45–46, 56, 132, 152, 305–07 asylum seekers, 311–14 Bali, 81, 84–86, 94–96, 98–101, 314–17 ‘Bali Boy’, 88–89 Bali Nine case, 86 Jamie Murphy, 93 killing of Wayan Sudarsa, 93 Michelle Leslie, 87–88 Nicholas Langan, 90 Noor Ellis, 89 budget cuts, 307–08 Chan and Sukumaran, 317–19 execution of, 43–44

546 

Index

defence cooperation, 110–12, 114, 120 focus on Australian preoccupations, 307–08 Indonesian presidential election of 2014, 39–40 lessons for journalists, 319–21 new technology and techniques, 308–10 parachute journalism, 307 Menzies, Robert, Prime Minister, 34, 197, 374 money laundering: Joint Declaration 2005, 131 Moriarty, Greg, Ambassador, 6, 401 Murphy, Jamie, 93 Muslim Exchange Program (MEP), 519, 523, 528 Myanmar: ASEAN: admission to, 173–74 ‘ASEAN way’, 179–82 chairmanship, 185 The New Light of Myanmar, 182 Nadjib Riphat Kesoema, see Kesoema narcotics trafficking: justice sector collaboration, 249–51 see also Bali Natalegawa, Marty, Foreign Minister, 36, 39, 46, 115, 125, 136, 138, 139, 141–42, 184, 222, 240, 265–66, 320, 421, 463 New Colombo Plan (NCP), 519, 523–24 Nurmantyo, Gatot, General, 3, 112, 117, 277 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD): comparative statistics on aid flows, 445–46 aid to Indonesia from major donors, 462 allocation of Australian aid to Indonesia, 2014, 465 annual aid receipts of Indonesia, 446 Indonesia—GNI per capita vs ODA as a proportion of GNI, 447 donor countries and role of aid in middle-income countries, 447–48 Operation Sovereign Borders (OSB), 42, 137, 139, 313–14 Papua, 3, 9, 13, 22, 33, 34, 38, 42, 46, 60, 120, 132, 151, 182, 196–97, 260–79 human rights, 9, 196–97, 268–79 independence movement, 3, 260–79 multilateral issue, 259–61 Papuan diplomacy in the Pacific, 267–78 Papuan international activism in Australia, 261–67 Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG), 269–71, 274–75, 277–79 Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), 268–69, 271–79

Presidium Dewan Papua (Papua Presidium Council), 268 United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), 270–71, 274–76, 279 partnerships, see women’s contribution to bilateral relationship Pastika, I Made Mangku, 214, 216, 220–22, 298 people smuggling: agreement aimed at disrupting, 128–29 Bali Process, 130, 134 Joint Declaration 2005, 131 justice sector collaboration, 247–49 multilateral summit, 136–37 People Smuggling Disruption Program, 130 police cooperation, see police cooperation refugees managing operations from Australia, 136 see also asylum seekers people-to-people relations, 15–16, 48, 117, 352 see also youth programs and organisations perceptions and capacity to persuade, 4, 19–20 Australia’s diplomatic challenge, 20–21 Indonesian issues, 21–22 ‘persuasion’, 19 political culture, 26–28 power of perceptions, 22–24 public diplomacy, 4, 29–30 soft power, 24–26 Australian domestic dimension, 28 persuasion, see perceptions and capacity to persuade police cooperation, 5, 101, 211–12 Bali bombings, 219–22 intensification of collaboration following, 131 breach of trust, 225–27 State Intelligence Agency (Badan Intelijen Negara, BIN), 226 bureaucratic subcultures, 230–32 high profile joint investigations and impact on relationship, 222–25 identity issues, 212–16 Jakarta Centre for Law Enforcement Cooperation (JCLEC), 131, 224–25 Jakarta Operations Centre (JOC), 223 new opportunities and challenges, 227–30 people smuggling protocol, 218 police union, 216–19 PPIA (Perhimpunan Pelajar Indonesia di Australia (Indonesian Students’ Association of Australia)), 518, 521, 523–24, 526–28 prospects for defence relationship, see security issues public diplomacy, 4, 29–30 perceptions and importance of youth links, 512–13 public opinion polling on Indonesia, 2, 55–56 attitudes to Indonesia, 58 economic relations, 66–67 Lowry Institute poll of 2015, 23

Index mistrust, 61–66 unfavourable feelings, 58–61 wilful ignorance, 72–74 evolution, 57–58 knowledge of Indonesia, 6, 58, 67–69, 376, 380, 400, 427, 475 in context, 70–72 lack of, 55–56 consequential negative attitudes, 74–77 refugees, see asylum seekers rising regional neighbour of increasing importance, 7, 11 economic development and trade, 13–14 Indonesia in a changing world, 12–13 people-to-people relations, 15–16 security and diplomatic relations, 14–15 Rudd, Kevin, Prime Minister, 15, 132–33, 161 ‘Bali Boy’ case, and, 88–89 execution of Bali bombers, 91 fallout from ‘Freedom Flotilla’, 266 people smuggling, and, 134, 136 security issues, 21–22, 34, 38, 57 Australia’s decision to maintain/strengthen old arrangements with US, 302 Australia-Indonesia Agreement on Maintaining Security, 128 defence and security cooperation, 110, 117, 121, 290 Australia DFAT 1987, 278 Defence Cooperation Agreement, 113 Defence White Paper 2013, 63, 113 Joint Understanding, 112 return to, 238 ‘war on terror’, 239 Jakarta’s cooperation with range of individual countries, 296 Lombok Treaty, see Lombok Treaty preoccupations with Islam, see Islam prospects for defence relationship, 8, 107–08 agenda for future defence cooperation, 117–19 initiatives coming to fruition, 119–21 positive and negative factors in relationship, 110–12 recent defence cooperation, 113–17 Indonesia-Australia Defence Alumni Association (IKAHAN), 116–17 transformation in Australian strategic thinking, 108–09 public opinion polling on Indonesia, see public opinion polling on Indonesia security and diplomatic relations, 14–15 Soeharto, President, 412 ascendance to power, 198–99 ASEAN, and, 173, 178 ‘New Order’, 199–200, 379

 547

relationship with Prime Minister Paul Keating, 33, 48, 199, 238, 356–57 Soekarno, President, 237, 294, 374 domestic and foreign policies, 375–76 human rights view, 195 independence proclamation, 194 Soekarnoputri, Megawati, President, 83, 130, 131, 155, 182, 204–05, 211, 239, 389 soft power, 19, 24–26, 295, 329, 332 Australian domestic dimension, 28 education, 433 public diplomacy, 29 soft diplomacy, 326, 331–34, 343 case study—2015 OzAsia Festival, 334–38 study of Indonesian/studying in Indonesia, 426 South China Sea, see China South East Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO), 35, 170 strategic plans: medium-term, 326 white papers, 1 Defence White Paper 2013, 63, 113 Subianto, Prabowo, 39, 141, 444 Syahrir, Sutan, Prime Minister, 152 Thayeb, Hamzah. Ambassador, 38, 132 Timor-Leste, 44, 94, 110, 111, 121, 136, 174, 175, 201, 203, 259, 261, 278, 296, 302, 450, 455, 460 trade and investment, see economic development and trade; economic policy Turnbull, Malcolm, Prime Minister, 11, 46–48, 50, 107, 111, 121, 503 decision to return majority of arts funds back to Australia Council, 326 support for the IA-CEPA (IndonesiaAustralia Comprehensive Economic Partnership), 500–01 visit to Indonesia in 2015, 193, 291, 486 Volunteer Graduate Scheme (VGS), 374–75, 389, 514 Wahid, Abdurrahman, President, 130, 204, 217, 388, 389 White Australia policy, 3, 13, 29, 370 Widodo, Joko (Jokowi), President, 1, 11, 55, 62–63, 70, 75, 87, 141–42, 275, 277, 291, 301, 305, 329, 504 commitment to relationship, 291 drug traffickers, and, 288, 318 clemency applications, 243, 249 economic nationalism, 444 economic reform, 482–85 foreign policy, 8, 31–36, 39–50, 292–93, 295–96 ‘global maritime fulcrum’ policy, 40, 46, 49, 118, 207, 290, 294, 489

548 

Index

graduates of Australian universities in cabinet of, 422 Malcolm Turnbull’s meetings with, 107, 193, 291 police chief nomination, 254 support for the IA-CEPA (Indonesia-Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership), 500–01 visit to Australia in 2017 and impact on relationship, 486–90 Wirajuda, Hassan, Foreign Minister, 140, 204, 218, 264 Wiranto, General, 112, 128 women’s contribution to bilateral relationship, 2, 369–71 building nationhood (phase two, 1950–1966), 374 volunteering, 374–76 Volunteer Graduate Scheme (VGS), 374–75 developing Indonesia and knowledge of (phase three, 1970–1980s), 376–80 from now on (phase six, 2016), 399–405 CLASP (Culture, Language and Arts in Schools Project), 404 initial contacts (phase one, WWII–1950), 371–73 making commitments through funding and linkages (phase four, 1990–1998), 381–82 arts, 382–85 Asia-Pacific Triennial (APT), 383–84 Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), 384 IKAWIRIA (Indonesian Community Association of Victoria), 382 culture exchange networks, 385–86 doing business, 386–87 more than making news, 387–88 partnership (phase five, 1998–2015), 389 capacity building and Australian International Ltd, 392 communication—translating and interpreting, 396–98 Green Turtle Dreaming community arts project, 398 medical partnerships, 389–90 women’s health and knowledge sharing, 390–92 Wong, Penny, 422 youth programs and organisations, 2, 511–12 criteria for assessing people-to-people initiatives, 520–21 collaboration and equality of status, 522–24 creating ‘potential for friendship’, 521–22 institutional support/coordination, 525–27 mutuality, 524–25

people-to-people ties: understanding how links facilitated, 515–16 youth an important group in building, 513–15 prominent programs, 516–17 Australia Awards, 517 Australia-Indonesia Youth Association (AIYA), 511, 517, 519–20, 522–24, 526–28 2014 survey, 515, 522 Conference of Australian and Indonesian Youth (CAUSINDY), 519, 522–23, 526, 528, 529 Australia Indonesia Youth Exchange Program (AIYEP), 518, 523, 525–29 Australian Consortium for In-Country Indonesian Studies (ACICIS), 518, 523–24, 526–27 Darmasiswa Indonesian Scholarship Program, 517 Indonesian Students’ Association of Australia (Perhimpunan Pelajar Indonesia di Australia (PPIA)), 518, 521, 523–24, 526–28 Muslim Exchange Program (MEP), 519, 523, 528 New Colombo Plan (NCP), 519, 523–24 public diplomacy and perceptions and importance of youth links, 512–13 Yudhoyono, Susilo Bambang, President, 1, 14, 49, 62, 141, 155–57, 176, 236, 251, 254, 277, 293, 451, 483 address to joint sitting of parliament (2010), 1, 3, 55, 134, 267, 428, 513 asylum seekers, and, 132–133, 138, 228, 312 ‘Australia’s best friend’, 36–39, 48, 62 Australian knowledge of, 67, 70 bilateral relations in era of, 111, 239–45, 291, 302 downgrading of, 288–89 improved, 131 bugging of, 22, 27, 138, 141, 229, 288, 302, 333 clemency applications, 243 climate change mitigation pledge, 449 Corby’s sentence reduction under, 85, 309, 316 Defence White Paper of 2016, comment, 117 diplomatic initiatives under, 295 economic development in era of, 460–61 education ties, and, 433 graduates of Australian universities in cabinet of, 421–22 human rights, and, 205 legal aid, and, 252 Papua, and, 260, 262, 266–67, 273 people smuggling, and, 134, 136, 226 police cooperation, and, 226, 229–30 reaction to Australian aid announcement, 459 White Australia policy, reference to, 3