When Tony Abbott was pondering the serious business
of being Prime Minister he singled out one country as being centrally important
to the strategic objectives he wanted Australia to pursue. It wasn't super
power America, or its challenger China, but the vast, weakly-governed and
sometimes-chaotic archipelago that forms the heart of Southeast Asia:
Indonesia.
Australia's partnership with the
Republic of Indonesia was "in many respects our most important overall
relationship", Abbott told The Australian newspaper, upon assuming
the top job in September 2013. "Indonesia is a land of promise for us and
we do not want the relationship to be defined by boats."
Our military strategists know that the regional
push back against Chinese territorial aggression lacks ballast and credibility
without deep co-operation from Indonesia, in its role as the non-aligned power
centre of south-east Asia. ... there's little prospect of making progress while
high-level political and military links are in the deep freeze.''
A year earlier, in opposition, he
promised to resist the temptations of the political news cycle and "never
make decisions that impact on Indonesia without discussing them first".
Abbott knows, or at least he knew
back then, that Indonesia's importance extends far beyond its status as a
staging ground in the asylum-seeker trade. His words were not a passing acts of
neighbourly flattery, or charity, but a hard-headed assessment of Australia's
long-term national interests. He was talking about a proud and vibrant young
democracy which is home to a quarter of a billion people, including the world's
largest Muslim population, and an economy growing so fast with such potential
that he even compared it with 1980s China.
In other words, building ties
with Indonesia is a realpolitik investment in Australia's future.
After 20 months in power
it's clear that the Prime Minister runs a professional national security regime
and has kept relationships in Asia in good shape. Except, that is, with
Indonesia, which is becoming a gaping hole in his international program.
President of Indonesia Joko
Widodo and Prime Minister of Australia Tony Abbott. Photo: Pool
This week's nadir with Indonesia,
lower than anything since East Timor's independence, was triggered by a series
of Fairfax reports of Australian officials paying wads of cash to
people-smuggling crews to get them to turn their human cargo back to Indonesia.
Indonesian leaders and officials
were ambushed by these revelations and have lined up to condemn Australia on
legal, diplomatic and moral grounds.
Indonesia's vice-president, Jusuf
Kalla, who some see as the most Australia-friendly senior figure in the Joko
Widodo administration said: "It is wrong for a person to bribe, let alone
a state. Such an act is definitely incorrect in the context of bilateral
relations."
In the world of elite diplomacy
it doesn't get much stronger than that.
Australian cabinet ministers
initially denied the Fairfax claims, presumably because they seemed too
preposterous to be true. But the denials stopped, and domestic point-scoring
began, as the Abbott government realised it had struck the same vein of
electoral gold that had helped bring it to power in 2013.
In stark contrast to his stance
when he became prime minister, Abbott last week said: "There's really only
one thing to say here and that is that we have stopped the boats."
The Jokowi administration is
hardly blameless in the collapse of elite-level bilateral ties and erosion of
public support. This week's Lowy Institute poll shows Indonesia's stocks have
fallen so far that it ranks alongside Russia on Australia's popularity charts,
in the wake of the execution of repentant drug convicts Andrew Chan and Myuran
Sukumaran. Two important neighbours are being reduced to caricatures in each
other's eyes. Ultimately, this undermines the Abbott government's national
security goals.
Unlike the Australian citizens
who have joined ISIS, and the Indonesians who returned from the battlefields of
Afghanistan and planned the Bali bombings of 2003, there is not yet any
evidence that the 300-odd Indonesians who have travelled to join ISIS plan to
bring their intra-Islam fight back home and target Westerners. But Australian
counterterrorism officials are deeply worried that this could quickly change.
Since Bali, the risks have been
mitigated as the Australian Federal Police and Australian Secret Intelligence
Service have shared intelligence with their Indonesian counterparts and helped
them build a far more professional system. While intelligence links have so far
held up, the high-level police ties have been largely frozen since Abbott came
to power.
Australia's other great security
worry is the risks posed by a rising and uncompromising China, as highlighted
in recent months by events in the South China Sea. Our military strategists
know that the regional push back against Chinese territorial aggression
lacks ballast and credibility without deep co-operation from Indonesia, in its
role as the non-aligned power centre of south-east Asia. Again, there's little
prospect of making progress while high-level political and military links are
in the deep freeze.
Abbott's hope is that the
"stop the boats" policy will be so ruthlessly effective that it will
eliminate the primary cause of bilateral irritation. There is logic to this.
However, the risk, exposed over the past week, is that whenever a boat slips
out into the Java Sea the Abbott government will not be able to resist the
domestic political temptation to trumpet its hardline virility at the expense
of Jakarta.
It could push so hard that it breaks
the tight collaboration that has enabled Australian police and ASIS officers to
disrupt people-smuggling syndicates on Indonesian shores.
From the opposition benches in
2012, Abbott said: "The time will come soon enough when Indonesia is far
more significant to Australia than the other way round."
How does Abbott reconcile what
he's doing now with the statesmenly sentiments he expressed back then? With
heroic acts of wishful thinking.
It is in Australia's interest to
do what it can to assist Indonesia to become the prosperous, stable, regional
power it wants to be. The virtues of having 250 million people on our doorstep
consuming Australian beef and working to preserve the regional rules-based
order are as obvious today as they were when Abbott was making the transition
from opposition.
Abbott must return to his earlier
realpolitik commitment to Australia's deeper bilateral interests because he
knows, as he has always known, that these interests will only grow with time.
As he said in opposition: "Our country needs to earn Indonesia's respect
and affection now if we are to have it when we need it."
John Garnaut is Fairfax Media's Asia-Pacific
editor.
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