Author: Shiro Armstrong

Yesterday Foreign Minister Stephen Smith launched Andrew MacIntyre and Doug Ramage’s Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) study on Indonesia. The study examines Australia’s strategic positioning on Indonesia and makes the point that we are not where we ought to be – Australian policy makers need to update their thinking and approach. Getting it right is of mutual interest to both countries and the region more broadly.

Andrew MacIntyre and Doug Ramage do a better job at summarising the significance of the study in an op ed for The Age. Excerpts:

Australia needs to update the way it thinks about Indonesia. Almost 10 years to the day since the fall of Suharto, it is time to start thinking of Indonesia as a normal country, grappling with many of the same challenges as other large, stable, middle-income developing democracies such as India, Mexico or Brazil. And Canberra needs to adjust ways in which it engages with it.

To see Indonesia as a normal country is to take the suspicion, fear and mystery out of the picture. Too few Australians realise that Indonesia today is a stable, competitive democracy, playing a constructive role in world affairs. It is no longer in a state of profound flux and turmoil. . .

. . .The highest priority for Australia is that Indonesia’s economic progress and consolidation as a viable democracy should not lag. Indonesia’s economy has recovered from the Asian financial crisis and is making reasonable, if unspectacular, headway. But poverty is a much deeper problem than it should be. And while Indonesia has made remarkable progress in fashioning a workable framework of democratic government, there is a long way to go with bureaucratic and local-level political reform. These have to be serious concerns for Australia. Appropriately crafted Australian development assistance investments can provide real help to Indonesia on this front.

Here’s the full study (76 pages).