Opinion

Nothing-to-see-here strategy hides grave crisis

The scale of Indonesia’s pandemic crisis is a failure of leadership, but President Joko Widodo’s government is caught in a cycle of spin.

Liam GammonContributor

Aug 22, 2021 – 3.48pm

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Two genres of viral video encapsulate Indonesia’s devastating wave of COVID-19 infections over the past six weeks.

In the one most familiar to international audiences, the pandemic’s victims struggle to breathe in tents in hospital carparks, or desperate family members go from hospital to hospital looking for somewhere with capacity to treat their loved ones.

Liam Gammon is a research fellow in the East Asian Bureau of Economic Research and an editor at East Asia Forum (www.eastasiaforum.org) in the Crawford School of Public Policy at the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific.