Australia-Indonesia relations: Ken Ward on avoiding confrontation

Ken Ward’s Condemned to Crisis is a provocative analysis of the relationship between Australia and Indonesia.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo says the Bali Two executions were an expression of the nation’s ‘legal sovereignty’.

In this short and provoking book, which originated as a Lowy Institute paper, Ken Ward analyses the Australia-Indonesia political relationship in terms of its recent crises, having abundant material to hand.

Squabbles and froideurs between Canberra and Jakarta are now so commonplace, indeed, it seems no longer remarkable we may have ­several on the go at the same time.

Ambassador Paul Grigson returned to ­Jakarta in June after a five-week withdrawal to protest against the execution of drug mules Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran in circumstances not only tragic but, for many Australians, offensive. Indonesia remains off-limits for visits for Tony Abbott’s ministers.

Immediately on the ambassador’s return, Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi confronted him at a conference, demanding an explanation of the latest, strangest turn-back of an asylum-seeker boat, with Vice-President Jusuf Kalla describing the Australians’ apparent payment of $US30,000 to crew as “a form of bribery”.

As during the row over our electronic spy agency’s eavesdropping on previous president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his wife, during which SBY called back his envoy, the Abbott government still refuses the Indonesians a clarification of the matter.

Critics in Australia and Indonesia say mistrust and antagonism in political relations are at their highest since the aftermath of East Timor’s 1999 vote for independence. That’s probably accurate, but misleading as to effect.

On other levels, bilateral matters are normal, more or less. There appears to be no Indonesian hesitancy about, for instance, academic contacts, as there was during the spying row. Even over boats Australia and Indonesia don’t risk outright confrontation, let alone a new Konfrontasi, as Kevin Rudd mischievously suggested while limbering up for the 2013 election campaign.

But Abbott’s prognosis post-election — “the relationship will once more be one of no surprises, based on mutual trust, dependability and absolute respect for each other’s sovereignty” — now seems as laughable.

Ward, a former diplomat whose last government job was senior Indonesia analyst at the Office of National Assessments, occupies most of his book examining three bilateral crises arising during Abbott’s term: “turning back the boats”, eavesdropping and the Bali Two executions. He considers the historical problems underlying these episodes and particularly the political-cultural disparities that aggravate them.

The executions were in significant respects the least “typical” of our recent rows but, Ward suggests, a precursor of future disputes. He infers that partly from Joko Widodo’s persistent encouragement of a form of popular nationalism that SBY and even Suharto, mostly, sought to restrain. You may call it Sukarnoist, though Ward doesn’t quite.

Probably the most atypical aspect of the executions blow-up was that there was no Australian hand in lighting the fuse. That was done by the President with his December 9 announcement that none of the 64 drug criminals on ­Indonesia’s death row would receive mercy from him and the consequent swift scheduling of executions.

If he wasn’t aware from the outset that other governments with doomed citizens would react badly, and that Australia’s response would be the most difficult for Indo­nesia, the new leader was very poorly advised or saw no need to consider foreign relations ramifications, or most likely both.

Once he did begin engaging on that level, Joko invariably insisted the executions were an expression of Indonesia’s “legal sovereignty”. Indonesian sovereignty and “firmness” in its assertion have become a steady refrain in his responses to issues with foreign dimensions. Domestically, Joko deploys them as evidence of Indonesia’s imminent emergence as a major nation in world affairs.

Ward points out Yudhoyono was no less determined his country should sit at top tables but adds that “defending Indonesia’s sovereignty was not his main priority because he did not see it as constantly under threat”.

And though Ward liberally documents ­Abbott’s own aggravations to problems that become confrontations, he doesn’t directly suggest, as others may, that interaction between these two neighbouring populist-nationalist leaders is, of itself, likely to be habitually scratchy.

What Ward argues is that the train of recent crises should impel Australian policymakers — and engaged academics and media commentators — towards more realistic approaches to the relationship.

For sure, Australian government politicians need to curb their deep-grained habit of directing their first and foremost responses to Indonesia problems to domestic constituencies and critics at home. They need to prioritise direct and culturally appropriate communication with Jakarta counterparts.

And, for sure, Indonesian leaders should take more responsibility for managing bilateral political fallouts before they go critical and should respond with “greater maturity” to neighbours with whom relations have been persistently problematic; so Malaysia and Singapore as well.

But under a Joko presidency that isn’t likely to happen, Ward argues. So since Canberra for at least the past 25 years has invested far more heavily in the relationship than Jakarta — even in SBY’s time, though he reached out with more conviction than his predecessors or successor — it falls inevitably on Australians to consolidate the gains and prevent further crisis erosion.

At the same time, however, Ward argues, Australian policymakers and policy thinkers need to adjust significantly the foreign policy vector running through Jakarta which, in a ­calmer moment, had Abbott telling SBY “no other relationship, not one, is more important than our friendship with Indonesia due to its size, proximity and potential to be a global leader”.

This is an effusive expression of prevalent elite-level Australian regard and intent for the relationship, which often falters in crisis situations when public opinion shoulders its way into the discussion.

And Indonesian public opinion, Ward points out, these days also plays a bigger, more volatile and complicating role when insults to national sovereignty are perceived.

All that was evident during the espionage quarrel when demonstrators outside the Australian embassy were encouraged to round on SBY for his claimed weakness responding to the Australian affront.

In any case, the official Australian relationship priority generally is not reciprocated by Indonesian policymakers who do not, openly at least, rank foreign policy precedence by ­country and clearly do not rate strategic engagement as highly as Canberra does.

This then is a controversial argument, running against the grain of established Australian thinking, but I suspect it is not entirely friendless, for instance, in Ward’s former workplace, the Department of Foreign Affairs.

On the other hand, some people whose views I respect and heed will be considerably annoyed by this book, as Ward intended.

But this feels like a sensible moment to ­direct inwards some of the Australian frankness our Indonesian friends experience, unappreciatively, at times of relationship stress. This is an informed, deliberately provocative, but not shrill, starting point.

Peter Alford has been The Australian’s Jakarta correspondent since mid-2010.

Condemned to Crisis: Will the Relationship Between Australia and Indonesia Always be Volatile?

By Ken Ward

Penguin Special, 152pp, $9.99