In
the final four months of his decade in power, Indonesia's President has given
Australia a big, last gift.
Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono invited Prime Minister Tony Abbott to a meeting, and then to a dinner
of Aussie beef, last week on one of Indonesia's many resort islands.
It was the strongest
possible sign that he had forgiven Australia its transgressions and wanted to
restore full co-operation.
"Australia
should be very happy about that," says an Indonesia expert, Greg Fealy of
the Australian National University. "Because if Prabowo were elected, it
could be very unpredictable."
Prabowo Subianto is
one of the two leading candidates for next month's election to replace SBY.
The short-tempered
Prabowo is a retired general, the former head of Indonesia's Kopassus special
forces and son-in-law to the late dictator Suharto.
He is prone to
inflammatory words and deeds. He said in a recent campaign speech that he
didn't want to see "Indonesians being slaves to foreigners".
Says Fealy:
"He’s a highly temperamental politician. If I were Tony Abbott, I would be
quite worried about the prospect of a Prabowo presidency.
"It's good for
Australia that SBY leave the relationship in good shape."
The alternative
president and frontrunner in the polls is a more stable quantity, Joko Widodo.
The can-do Governor of Jakarta is known universally by the nickname
"Jokowi".
Prabowo today has a
40 per cent chance of winning, against Jokowi's 60 per cent, Fealy estimates.
Jokowi seems a clean
and well-meaning politician. But he carries risks for Australia. The former
furniture exporter has no policy experience beyond metropolitan governorships.
And some of the
policies that he has started to announce in the approach to the July 9
presidential election are troubling.
He has said, for
instance, that he wants Indonesia to phase out its agriculture imports.
This is not very
practical. Yet any attempt to implement such an idea still represents a threat
to Indonesia's status as a member of the open international system and a threat
to billions of dollars a year in Australian farm exports.
But this sort of
ham-fisted autarky is exactly what can happen when competitive nationalism is
in play in an election campaign.
In short, Indonesia
is entering a much riskier phase and Australia is losing its best tool of risk
management – SBY.
The outgoing
President had no political incentive to close the rift with Australia.
No Indonesian
politician wins popularity points for warm dealings with the country's
much-resented southern neighbour.
And Abbott hasn't
done much to deserve the gift. So why did SBY do it?
"It was about
his legacy," a senior Australian official says. "He's invested too
much in the relationship to leave it in a mess."
Fealy adds: "SBY
is well and truly into lame duck territory. Half his cabinet ministers don't
bother to turn up for cabinet meetings any more and he's complained about it in
public. It's kind of pathetic.
"Foreign policy
is one area where he can still make a difference and that includes fixing
things with Australia."
An Australian
official also points out that Indonesia's authorities have discovered pressing
new needs to do business with Canberra.
One stands out – the
newest incarnation of the terrorist threat.
Like Australia,
Indonesia has found that it has citizens who are drawn to take sides and fight
in Syria's civil war. On return, they are considered potential terrorists.
Jakarta, like
Canberra, is anxious to get the best possible intelligence on the flow of
fighters.
In their meeting last
week, SBY and Abbott "agreed that it was imperative to strengthen intelligence
and to create greater and deeper relations of trust, especially because of
terrorism and Syria", according to an official present at the meeting.
In fact, Jakarta
considers it so imperative that Indonesia's government is already co-operating
with Australia's on this. It turns out it has been all this year, according to
well-placed officials.
But hold on – didn't
SBY specifically freeze intelligence co-operation last November?
Didn't he impose a
ban in his indignation over the revelation that Canberra had tapped the
personal mobile phones of him, his wife and his inner circle?
Yes, he did. And he
had said that Australia had to complete a six-step process to restore ties. One
of the steps was to sign a code of conduct on intelligence activities.
The code has not yet
been signed. And Indonesia's Foreign Affairs Minister, Marty Natalegawa,
specifically said last week that he was waiting for Australia to respond to the
draft he had sent Canberra.
Yet Australia's
Foreign Affairs Minister, Julie Bishop, tells me: "There's a high level of
co-operation between Australia and Indonesia across about 60 different areas.
"Co-operation is
continuing in the intelligence area, particularly as we both face challenges
from our citizens travelling to Syria and running the risk of them returning to
Australia and Indonesia with terrorist capabilities."
So the so-called code
of conduct, which Bishop prefers to call an instrument of understanding, isn't
the big deal we had been told it was.
In the six-step
process, a summit meeting between SBY and Abbott was supposed to be the
culminating step. Yet it's happened regardless of the absence of the code of
conduct.
It looks suspiciously
as if the six-step process and the code of conduct were invented as mechanisms
to hold Australia.
Bishop says she
expects the formal document to be agreed and signed when she and Natalegawa
meet, probably in early July, as part of a joint meeting with their defence
counterparts in a so-called two-plus-two ministerial meeting.
Fealy says:
"SBY's intervention was exactly what was needed to stop this from turning
into a complicated game played by Marty Natalegawa."
For Australia
post-SBY, many more complications lie ahead.
Peter Hartcher is the SMH international editor. Illustration:
Simon Letch.
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