Calling time on the remaining Bali Nine members

Had they committed their crime in Australia, the so-called Bali Nine would have been out of jail years ago, but the diplomatic deal with the Indonesian government that has secured their release remains unclear, with little indication what both nations promised in return.

Australian and Indonesian officials at the airport before the remaining Bali Nine members were flown home.

Matthew Norman, Michael Czugaj, Scott Rush, Martin Stephens and Si Yi Chen had been serving life sentences in prisons on Bali and Java after being arrested in 2005 for attempting to smuggle heroin from Indonesia to Australia. They were among the group of Australians convicted for attempting to smuggle more than eight kilograms of heroin, valued at $4 million. The ringleaders, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, were executed on April 29, 2015. Another member, Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen, died from cancer in June 2018. Renae Lawrence was released in November 2018 after having her sentence commuted.

Their arrests, just three years after the Bali bombing, became an international political issue, while the mix of politics, drugs, terrorism and capital punishment polarised domestic discourse. When the pair were executed, then prime minister Tony Abbott withdrew Australia’s ambassador to Indonesia, and in more recent years there had been sustained government representations, culminating in Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s approach to the new Indonesian President, Prabowo Subianto, during the APEC summit in Peru last month.

Indonesia’s hard line against drug traffickers appears to have softened. When word got out that the Australians may be on their way home, it was revealed that Indonesia signed an agreement with the Philippines this month for the repatriation of a mother of two, Mary Jane Veloso, arrested in 2010 after the suitcase she was carrying was found to be lined with 2.6kg of heroin. The week before Albanese lobbied Subianto in South America, the French embassy in Jakarta sent a letter requesting the return of one of its citizens, Serge Atslaoui, a welder arrested in 2005 in a drug factory outside Jakarta. He is expected to be released by the month’s end.

Nevertheless, the return home for the Bali Nine remnant is a coup for the Albanese government and comes on top of securing the release of economist Sean Turnell from a jail in Myanmar, journalist Cheng Lei from China, and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from Britain.

However, confusion surrounding the deal took the shine off the diplomatic achievement. During negotiations, the government initially suggested the men would continue to serve their life sentences, but that would have been a hard sell in Australia, and something changed.

Not everybody welcomed their release. Some criticised Albanese for misplaced priorities when Australians were really concerned about cost of living, global security and energy security. When the deal was mooted, the opposition legal affairs spokesperson Michaelia Cash urged the prime minister to “stand up and explain”.

Cash was right to call for details. Now the men have arrived in Australia, and while we welcome them home, we are none the wiser about what may have been traded to secure their freedom.

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