By Krishna Sen
Somehow, the debate on Indonesia-Australia relations has got stuck on Bali, beef and boats.
While there is no point pretending that either beef or boats are about to disappear as issues any time soon, we need to broaden the discussion both to understand what is at stake in the obvious differences between the two nations and to move towards the possibility of resolving them.
On the positive side the current Indonesian Cabinet is highly educated and very familiar with Australia: six of the 24 Cabinet ministers have PhDs as does Vice President Boediono.
The Vice President studied at three Australian universities, UWA, Monash and ANU. Foreign minister Marty Natalegawa and Tourism minister Mari Pangestu both have ANU PhDs. Other ministers in Cabinet have spent long formative periods in USA and Europe. This is a highly educated, internationalised, Australia-literate Cabinet.
By contrast, there is no one in the Abbott Cabinet who can claim substantial knowledge of or experience in any part of Asia, let alone Indonesia. Not only is the Cabinet shamefully devoid of women, it is notably unrepresentative of Asian Australians.
Indonesia too is about to enter a presidential campaign period. Many observers have suggested that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, in the last year of his second and final term of office is already a lame duck.
The shape of Indonesia’s next government is hard to predict.
But as Australia saw in its own recent election campaign good sense often disappears quickly. In the Indonesian campaign, too, one should anticipate that nationalist fervour will rise – it is never far from the surface of Indonesian politics anyway.
Three Presidential candidates, most discussed in the Indonesian national media are: Abu Rizal Bakrie (super rich and mired in New Order and post New Order controversies), Prabowo (Suharto’s son-in-law, who is banned from entering the US because of accusations of human rights violations), and Jokowi (Joko Widodo, the immensely popular governor of Jakarta).
Jokowi is a self-made millionaire who started as a small businessman in the furniture industry. As Mayor of Solo (2005–2012), Jokowi revitalised local businesses and the arts community. As Jakarta governor he has begun the work of fixing up the city’s decrepit transport system. Though less discussed, in both cities Jokowi has also worked to support and regulate the small traders. In Solo, he ran heavily on a brand of local cultural identity. How any of this will translate into his presidential campaign is hard to predict.
Bakrie, everyone suspects, will do more or less what suits his own business and political interests, and it would be easy for him to play the economic nationalist card from time to time. No-one expects him to have a consistent hand on the economic till.
Prabowo’s appeal is a lot like that of Thailand’s Thaksin Shinawatra. He has a huge rural popularity but no support amongst the educated elites. Notably, Prabowo’s hero is Kemal Ataturk of Turkey. We would expect him to jump on the nationalist bandwagon whenever it suits him – and it is quite likely to suit him a lot of the time.
In this context, Australia’s new agriculture minister Barnaby Joyce and his brand of economic nationalism is a perfect foil. One can see escalating nationalism in economic debate on both sides to the detriment of the kind of integration needed for long-term prosperity and stability in the region.
Prabowo is worth looking at a little more closely. He is the son of one of Indonesia’s leading intellectuals and connected both through his own family and that of his ex-wife (Siti Hariyadi, Suharto’s daughter) to a massively influential business and political network. Prabowo is named after an uncle who was a hero of the anti-Dutch nationalist revolution.
Prabowo’s grandfather and father hold a legendary status in Indonesia’s intellectual history and the latter served in senior economic portfolios under Suharto. Despite his impeccable economic and political pedigree, there is enough credible evidence of human rights violations against Prabowo both in Timor and on anti-Suharto activists in Jakarta on the eve of regime change that he is banned from entering the US.
Since being discharged from the army under a cloud, Prabowo has worked closely with his brother Hashim in a variety of businesses. Hashim is a highly successful businessman with links into the US political and business community. Hashim has recently made substantial donations to Republican thinktanks (the best known is the Sumitro Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, named after their father), which could in part see some whitewash of Prabowo’s image in the US. There is little doubt that if he were to be elected, the travel ban to the US would be immediately lifted.
In considering Indonesia-Australia relations, we need to take into account the likely election of one of these three men and how the Coalition policy of turning back or buying back asylum seeker boats might provide a fertile ground for an ultra-nationalist discourse in an election campaign in Indonesia.
Pitted against the Indonesian need to provide food for its burgeoning population, the whipping up of a mass protest by Australian Cabinet minister Barnaby Joyce to protect Australian agricultural land provides fertile ground for nationalist electioneering in Indonesia.
During the Australian election campaign, Indonesia’s Australia-literate Cabinet was able to distinguish between election rhetoric for domestic consumption and what the real policies of a new government might shape up to be.
But is it likely or even possible that the Abbott Cabinet will have similar depth of knowledge of Indonesia to navigate its way through the complexities of Indonesian domestic politics to distinguish between rhetoric and reality? It certainly does not have on its frontbench the kind of knowledge of Indonesia that the Indonesian government has of Australia.
However, it is to the great credit of the Abbott government that in broad terms it has recognised the deficit in Australia’s knowledge of and embedding in the Asia-Pacific region. Its New Colombo Plan aims to devise a long-term solution to this problem by supporting a generation of undergraduate students to experience Asia as a rite of passage.
But the immediate challenge of contradictions between the rhetoric of our recent election and the imminent Indonesian election campaign remains an impediment to improvement in the relationship in the short-term.
Watch this space.
Krishna Sen
Winthrop Professor/Dean at the University of Western Australia
September 2013
I feel you as Academia you epitomise the very issue confronting Australia’s approach to Indonesia – it is your lack of depth of knowledge. One cannot attempt to understand or more importantly form a rational view of Indonesia from the position of merely reciting academic literature. In fact some of your observations are fundamentally flawed.
ReplyDeleteIndonesia is on the cusp of disaster – do you know that? Economically, socially, environmentally. The Why, you are not interested in, and the consequences for Australia, you are also not interested in, yet focus on Australia’s seemly inability to understand Asia. I think you do not understand the real Asia, or choose not to.
Indonesia presents itself to the world as one of the most corrupt, immoral, unethical and elitist countries in the world. It has staggering pollution that would that would make a member of the Australia Greens actually turn green, huge malutrican and food distribution issues, outrageous and frantic bureaucratic and political graft issues, and is considered a joke by other Asian countries. Of course it always had massive potential, but as they say in Indonesia where there is chaos there is opportunity.
So what has all these people with PhD’s in the Indonesian Cabinet actually been doing. Apparently nothing of any great consequence because they cannot change the system, or indeed add any value to Indonesia. Why, because they do not influence the political direction of Indonesia. The elitist do.
Your observations on political candidates is also straight from the so called expert literature. Do you really know anything about Prabowo and his brother, what they have done to get where they are now. The average Indonesian does not trust them and certainly it is impossible for Bakrie to become President given the Indonesian people inherent hatred for them and what they stand for.
Do you really understand what triggered the live beef export issues, and which politicians and family members in Indonesia were behind this.
Why do asylum seekers come to Indonesia – easy, because one can pay off a bureaucrat – in simple terms it is a business.
The issue for many so called Australian commentators on Indonesia is that you do not understand the underlying forces at work in Indonesia, and that is the real issue confronting Australia holding hands with Indonesia in the world today.
It is not pleasant, in fact sickening for a country with so much potential yet their own systems are falling down and destroying their country. Understand the cold hard unpleasant facts, the reality of the situation, and what that means to Australia, then lets see what informed commentary academia in Australia can produce.
The lights are on, but are you home?
This is a well considered and articulate article by Professor Sen. The above comment was written by someone without the courage to put their name as the author, so it is completely discredited from the start.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, this person, if they live in Indonesia, should walk out of the bar at which they are sitting and get on a plane back to where they came from originally.
There ARE many things "wrong" with Indoneisa. It is no different from any other country. By considered and balanced exchange of views we can all help. Not by bitter and angry words by the writer above.
Rob Johnston