Finding a common ground

In brief, Indonesia is currently on the nose with Australian voters. Any policy decisions taken by Howard at the Batam meeting which are seen to appease Indonesia will get a savage battering when he gets back home.

We Aussies, crow the smug voters, are winners. We’ve got our economy and lifestyle right. Not too rich, not too poor. Taxed heavily and inescapably but with all the services and security: free education and health care from womb to tomb; care for the downtrodden and distressed. The ancient tyrannies of religious bigotry largely banished. A safe land where your faith is your business. A worker’s paradise where anyone who wants to knuckle down will succeed - and the rule of law applies. If we and others can achieve all this, why can’t Indonesia?

Such is Howard’s electorate and he has to be sensitive to its moods and hang-ups. His predecessor Labor PM Paul Keating didn’t - which is why the voters rejected his secret treaty with former president Suharto.

Locating itself in the world has long been an Aussie problem. Keating tried to position Australia as an Asian nation; the rhetoric now is that the country’s interests lie in the Pacific. Many Indonesians think their neighbour is a US state, not to be trusted, its people spoilt and rude.

Yudhoyono, who has studied in America, certainly knows the West better than Howard knows the East. But does SBY understand and appreciate that Australian foreign policy is powered by fear of the “yellow peril” and the “threat from the north” - crude racist emotions equal to Indonesians’ horror of separatism?

In the 19th century it was Chinese coolies coming to undermine Australian workers creating fear. In the 20th it was the Japanese army, then communism. Now it’s refugees.

And every imagined invasion of the great rich and empty continent comes through - or from - the poor and overpopulated archipelago to the north.

Of equal import is the question: Does Howard really know that the residues of Suharto’s New Order regime still have muscle? Is he conscious that two generations have had their minds, prejudices and understanding of history and the world warped by an authoritarian government? These facts are probably in his briefing papers, but they’re not immediately obvious.

However well advised, the Australian PM is unlikely to fully comprehend the grip on the Indonesian psyche of the principal of the Unitary State - or the power and importance of religion in everything. Few Australians can adequately wrap their minds around these facts.

Australia made a seamless negotiated transition from colony to independent state 105 years ago. Indonesia had to fight a long and brutal war to win nationhood - a fact that’s shaped the nation’s politics.

In Australia the army is a defence force - in Indonesia its prime role is keeping the hard-won country together. Yudhoyono’s background is embedded in this policy that has the authority of sacred writ.

Although some claim Howard’s term has seen the rise of the religious Right, in common with most voters his tradition is the clear separation of faith and state and total belief in the rightness of that philosophy.