🇮🇩🇦🇺DefMins, your time to shine
Richard Marles, Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin get down to business
Hello friends!
The Australian government seems determined to stick to the plan of sending a minister up to Indonesia once a month or every few weeks. Which is good news for both me and this newsletter, and Richard Marles who appears to be having a good time for once.
Let’s crack in.
I did flag briefly in the last dispatch that I thought it was odd Australia’s Defence Minister Richard Marles didn’t make the flight to Jakarta with the rest of the cabinet. I forgot he’s the deputy prime minister, I assume that’s what’s done it.
It’s besides the point now that he and his Indonesian counterpart, Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin, met in Jakarta yesterday. Marles also got some face time with President Prabowo Subianto himself. I’ve always had a theory based on nothing but vibes that Prabowo quite likes Marles on a personal level and the official photos are only proving this to myself.
Marles’ visit comes after his appearance at Singapore’s Shangri La Dialogue, where he spoke on length about Australia shifting away from reliance on the United States to deepening engagement with regional friends, the ABC reports here. Marles was the target of some criticism here for comments he made with US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth and how much of Australia’s budget should be allocated to defence spending.
That’s a bigger conversation not for these pages but I would like to note that some of the coverage and commentary I spotted of this from more progressive arms of the Australian public made some assumptions that this conversation had seriously undermined Australian credibility in the neighbourhood. I’m not sure why they believed that and there was no one to quote — another projection onto Indonesia, I believe! In my view, it’s totally reasonable to have an opinion about Australian defence spending, it does not need to be attributed, groundlessly, to another country. That’s neither here nor there, but one attractive aspect of a newsletter like this means I can sledge things I read elsewhere.
There was not an inkling that any bad blood is brewing. In fact, things couldn’t be better.
“The relationship between Australia and Indonesia is currently at its best,” Marles told state media Antara yesterday. It was the first time the pair had met face to face, with last year’s defence cooperation hatched out with Prabowo while Jokowi’s defence minister. Meeting was the “most exciting” part of the day, he said.
It appears to be reciprocated. Sjafrie gifted Marles with a pistol made by local arms manufacturer Pindad, and much was made by Kompas that Marles called over an aide with his personal phone to take a snap.
Sjafrie was stoked to invite the Australian military to participate in exercises in Morotai, in the Maluku island chain. This is a really fascinating area of the country with an amazing military history, including US General MacArthur running operations out of there. Also, the locale of the Permesta rebellion, which should send you down a Wikipedia-hole if you’re unfamiliar.
A date hasn’t been set, but “preparations are underway,” Sjafrie said as per the Jakarta Globe. He pointed to the area’s military history and said much of the infrastructure, including runways, remains intact and can be utilised. “There are six runways, and we plan to extend them so our fighter jets and transport planes can land there. … Including [the planes] from our friendly nations or even the US,” he said.
The announcement should assuage lingering fears of Russia in Indonesia. The base is done and dusted but military operations did occur last year and have left many in Australia hyper-vigilant.
Marles is happy to confront Australia’s anxieties. Speaking to reporters, he reflected on the shadow of China in the Indonesia-Australia relationship: “We've made no secret of the fact that we have a security anxiety in relation to China. We've made that clear to China itself. It does shape how we think about the strategic landscape that we face. You just need to look at the map to understand how strategically important Indonesia is to Australia. Its geography is profoundly important. That's actually what's driving the increase in the activity between Australia and Indonesia,” he said, as reported by the AFP.
Well, that’s kind of it, isn’t it? From a defence/security perspective, at least.
A note on media
I’ve been thinking a lot about the media’s role in this relationship and how the drumming up of stories that don’t really exist is leaving Australians worse off in understanding Indonesia and our place alongside it. This exchange here from Marles’ official transcript today is revealing to me.
Like, what are you talking about here? DFAT says to keep your wits about you on the ferries in Indonesia? There are horrible ferry incidents constantly across such an enormous archipelago and I’ll wager that DFAT is much more polite in explaining that than the average Indonesian tour operator. Settle down!
What Jakarta’s saying
Imron Cotan, who came to Canberra as ambassador in the very heady days of 2003, took to the Jakarta Post commentary pages to reflect on the state of things recently. He noted that once, a decade or so ago, he’d written for the paper that the relationship suffered from a ‘trust deficit.’ He quickly identified the cause from the Indonesian perspective: Australia was ‘too quick to judge and too slow to understand’ Indonesia and saw the country through a prism of outdated stereotypes. That feels right. Now, ‘something is changing.’
He credits Albanese’s shift in framing. By being explicit that Indonesia is Australia’s most important relationship, Albo ‘has positioned himself as a personal friend of President Prabowo and by extension, a friend of Indonesia,’ Cotan writes. Still, the relationship underperforms in trade and that’s coming back to bite both sides of the sea as overreliance on the US and China markets shakes the region.
‘Building resilient, rules-based trade relations with regional partners like Indonesia helps Australia avoid the pitfalls of overdependence on any one market. Likewise, for Indonesia, deepening commercial links with Australia offers access to stable markets for exports, investment and high-quality education and services,’ Cotan adds.
Jakarta’s premier think tank CSIS took a clear-eyed look at the relationship last week. There’s a lot swirling around in the background, write researchers Lina Alexandra and Pieter Pandie, and big, confident steps have been taken. Jakarta ‘should approach this moment with clear expectations — not only of symbolic gestures, but of substantive policy commitments from Canberra across strategic, security, and humanitarian domains.’
The pair note that the return of the Albanese government in last month’s federal elections gives a bit of breathing room with a solid three years of continued policy. It’s a welcome reversal of the same period in former president Joko Widodo’s tenure, when domestic upheaval in Australia — but the continued prioritisation of the Indonesia bilateral relationship — meant Jokowi was meeting new Australian prime ministers at regular intervals.
Jakarta ought to embrace the momentum, the pair write. Australia has been loud, proud and bloody consistent in its commitment to Indonesia and it’s ‘a pivot that Jakarta should fully utilise to mitigate the impact of the geopolitical rivalry and more importantly shape the new regional architecture.’
This piece brushes on the strategic and defence priorities within the relationship but the food security really jumped out to me. This is less a feature in Australian reporting so I found it very illuminating: ‘A recent CSIS Indonesia study on Strategic Dependencies highlights Indonesia’s vulnerability to external supply shocks, particularly in areas like energy imports and food staples. Australia, with its stable export capacity and complementary economic structure, is well-placed to become a reliable partner in helping Indonesia reduce these dependencies on certain food commodities. In that regard, Indonesia should propose deeper collaboration in agricultural technology, food logistics, and supply diversification to enhance national food resilience.’
A quick one!
Last newsletter, I took a brief detour to talk about Rebels and Refugees, a great book Albanese gifted to Prabowo that covers the Australian involvement in the Independence movement. I noted it’s sad that so few Australians know this history. A couple of days later, I was finishing off the Molly Bondan memoir (legend) and losing that history and connection was something she was worried about in the 1980s! Here’s what she had to say in In Love With a Nation, musing on how generations passing means we soon would not be able to rely on that historical friendliness:
There is, however, to this day a backlog of good will and of friendly feeling to the Australian people because of what happened in 1945, 1946 and later, up to the time of the international recognition of Indonesia. There has always been a perception that Australia did indeed play quite a major role and was both very helpful and extremely friendly. Indonesians who know about those days always remember it, in spite of anything that may have happened since. But as I have said, opinions change partly because people who have personal recollections of that time are steadily passing on, just as many of the people in Australia who had experience at that time are likewise no longer around.
I understand that at a strategic level Indonesia is strategic for Australia’s defence and economic posture. But … I cannot help it is at the cost of the freedom of the population of Irian Jaya.