BEWARE THE TIDES OF MARCH

Murray Hunter


BEWARE THE TIDES OF MARCH

Duncan Graham
Mar 06, 2025





WATCHING WASHINGTON - IGNORING JAKARTA

As Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto steers his giant nation closer to China it’s worth recalling Paul Keating three decades ago: 'No country is more important to Australia than Indonesia'.

His successors nod and offer warm words, but no longer hear their prophet. Caught up in domestic policies and trying to dodge the Trump Martian machine we’re ignoring the neighbour.

We’re in Asia geographically, but not there culturally or politically. Their harbours are close; we want their shelter but they’re indifferent. Updating the chart is urgent.

The US President trashes international alliances like Aussie bogans beat up Bali bars. We now fear Big Bro won’t rush to sort out bullies on a faraway playground with fewer folk than Texas.

An SOS might be triggered by real or imagined Beijing threats – like those this month involving the reported shooting of flares near an Australian surveillance jet over the South China Sea, and Chinese naval live-fire exercises in the east Indian Ocean.

The warships were 280 nautical miles from Tassie, but close enough to churn paranoia and a rush to check the ANZUS Treaty text.

The Cold War alliance “binds Australia, (NZ) and the US to consult on mutual threats, and, in accordance with our respective constitutional processes, to act to meet common dangers.”

It was signed when Trump was a pre-schooler. Now a septuagenarian he’s showing no respect for last-century deals done for a different time and world.

In 1952 when ANZUS was born, Indonesia was run by the mercurial Soekarno dabbling with democracy but settling for autocracy. Its population of 72 million was three years into formal independence after more than three centuries of Duch colonialism.

It threatened to go Communist; the three Western nations panicked and knocked-up ANZUS.

Since then, the Republic’s numbers have quadrupled; it’s the world's fourth-largest state with more Muslims than anywhere else and is destroying democracy. Last year its economic growth rate topped five per cent against our 1.1 per cent.

Although just next door we can’t bother to learn their culture and language and understand their beliefs and values – all essential if we hope to get close.

It also has a new right-wing President. Prabowo Subianto, 73, a disgraced former general, is turning his nation into a military fantasy, parading his ministers in fatigues, forcing them to sleep under canvas. If this demeaning wasn’t real, it would be hilarious.

Prabowo is rubbishing ballots for wasting time and money; better select than elect. He’s told local journos to “prioritize the interests of the nation … a responsible press should know what constitutes the national interest.”

Opposition is stirring. Though so far poorly organised the potential for mass strife is ever present, largely ignored by the Australian media though not by Pearls & Irritations. Water-cannons have already hosed Indonesia Gelap (Dark Indonesia) demos in Surabaya.

Prabowo’s popular policy of free lunches for schoolkids has funding and admin hassles. About 32,000 extra workers are needed to cook and deliver. They won’t be trained at the nation’s many hospitality colleges but at Universitas Pertahanan, the Defence University, where military staff can teach the loading of woks and the arming of trays.

The corruption curse terrifying investors still froths and bubbles. This month seven suspects were arrested in an alleged $19 billion graft case at the government’s oil company Pertamina.

Prabowo has said he wants to forgive convicted corruptors provided who secretly return the money – an idea that’s probably illegal.

Back to Keating last century; his bromance with Soeharto was consummated with the Australia–Indonesia Agreement for Maintaining Security laid in 1995. The plan was fine but Keating’s partner was already losing control after almost 30 years of despotic rule.

One report claimed Soeharto was impressed by the PM, “telling his advisers he admired the Australian's patriotism and praising his readiness to promote an Australia more engaged with its region.”

Though not engaged with the wong cilik – the ordinary folk whose multitudes can destroy the elite. Keating and his crew high in their five-star hotels and embassy briefings couldn’t sniff the winds of change billowing through the crowded kampongs far below.

Your correspondent and other Westerners were regularly cornered by intense youth and wrung dry for fresh news. The Oz motorcade howled through the intersections where masked students sold smudged photocopies of banned international magazines exposing Soeharto’s kleptocracy and brutality.

Keating must have known the pact was one-sided, his counterpart rotten. Why did he ignore this villainy? He’s been contacted for comment but hasn’t replied.

The document was shredded in 1999 after Soeharto fell and Australia helped East Timor through the referendum. A shamed nation lost its pride; trust in Down Under has never recovered – and vicky-verky.

A 2021 Lowy Institute poll showed only 13 per cent of Indonesians want Australia as a “preferred partner”. The figure for Japan, a brutal occupying force in the 1940s, was backed by 46 per cent.

Now Prabowo has put Indonesia into BRICS, "the China-backed bloc of emerging economies” - Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa plus Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the UAE.

It’s in opposition to the G7, France, the US, the UK, Germany, Japan, Italy and the EU.

Australia is in neither club though ranking the twelfth largest economy in the world ahead of Canada which is in G7. We’re not even in ASEAN the impotent ten-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Indonesian wags call it NATO – No Action Talk Only.

The latest paperwork is the Australia‑Indonesia Defence Cooperation Agreement driven and signed last August by Deputy PM Richard Marles who saw a happy marriage. Prabowo doused arousal with cold water saying Indonesia would not “be involved in any geopolitical or military alliances or groupings” begging the question: Why did he sign?

We also have the Indonesia-Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a 2020 pact that promised much but has delivered little in trade and less in influence. Its track to success has been potholed as predicted with no one keen to repair except with platitudes.

Some know our grains make noodles, our forests burn, koalas are cute and many shops close early. That’s about it. Korean pop is fun.

James Curran, professor of modern history at Sydney University, wrote that Keating “not only wanted to bury the old fears of Indonesia; he was looking ahead to the possibility of a new threat, in the form of a potentially more aggressive China.

“He was doing what any prudent leader should do – thinking broadly about the nation’s geopolitical future and preparing for any worst-case scenario.”

That scenario is here and now - engineered by Trump. If Canberra has a Plan B it's secret.

Three years ago the Lowy Institute’s Dr Stephen Grenville – formerly with the International Monetary Fund in Jakarta - wrote:

“Indonesia is more important to us than we are to them, and this will become truer as their relative economic weight increases. It's hard to imagine an Indonesian president reciprocating Keating's 'no country is more important to Australia than Indonesia'.”

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First published in Pearls & Irritations 6 Narch 2025 https://johnmenadue.com/the-creeping-crisis-were-ignoring/