Let’s just get over it

Mocking this thin document, pock-marked with platitudes, is easy, but detracts from a few fine advances.  Like the BRIDGE inter-school project (backed by private enterprise), and the Australian Consortium for In-Country Indonesian Studies programme, driven by independent academics.

Things the Strategy daringly says needs changing, like easier visa access and tempered travel warnings, could have been done years ago with a quick pen-flick.  The need has long been obvious.

‘Seeking to improve’ and ‘work to ensure’ are just wallpaper words covering a policy of hypocrisy and distrust.

We, the wong kecil, the ordinary folk not involved in trade and security, want closer friendships rooted in mutual understanding, not appeasement and bland talk – what Indonesians call basa-basi.

We treasure being blunt. ‘Just get over it’ and ‘grow up’ are common responses when individuals clash, but know deep-down they have to co-exist.  It’s a trait with merits.

Here are some of the rocks the Strategy avoids, even while saying cultural differences need to be acknowledged.

Australians who don’t appreciate the iron grip on their neighbour’s psyche of the Unitary State, and the pride in a bloody revolution that overthrew a colonial power, will be forever doomed to misunderstand Indonesia.

Likewise Indonesians who don’t know there’s a primal fear in our DNA. It’s of descending Asian hordes, plus guilt over European boat people seizing a continent after violently dispossessing the locals. 

That’s why we let US marines use Darwin – something not mentioned in the Strategy.  Imagine a Chinese base in Kupang – a friendship gesture?

Indonesia is labelled secular, but reality is otherwise. Not all Indonesian Muslims, or Australian Christians, are moderate.  A few will say, and occasionally do, dangerous things, as in Northern Ireland. 

View in proportion and share the outrage.  Have we stopped going to Boston because it harboured mad bombers?

A functioning democracy has a robust media.  Indonesia’s press is the most free in Southeast Asia – check the anaemic Singaporean newspapers to prove the point.