🇮🇩🇦🇺 Well, that was a total success right?
And Russia? Everyone's over it except for like six journalists so we have to keep hearing about it endlessly
Hello friends!
Thank you to everyone who has signed up for this new project. This will not be regularly clogging up your inbox, mostly just weeks like this when something happens. I am also expecting irregular blasts for when I find something amazing and cannot stop talking about it. Low stakes, okay!
Albo’s left, Prabowo’s getting on with his day. So what now?
Important! I just wrote 1200 words and was ready to hit send and then received this via WhatsApp. Explaining Prabowo’s cat’s back story is a third newsletter project but Albo seems to have been a good sport about it:
Erin Cook
First, the Instagram posts. Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto has, honest to god, some of the best photographers and videographers working for him. His posts are always spectacular. Take 90 seconds to watch this in full. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese must have been punching the air in his hotel room when it was posted, what a win!
As one friend noted last night, how the heck is Canberra going to top this if and when the visit is reciprocated? A long sweeping shot down Northbourne? A tight zoom on the feral rabbits near the lake? Oh jeeze.
For comparison’s sake, I scrolled back to February when Türkiye President Recep Erdogan swung through. I think of these two as very, genuinely close. They have a lot in common, after all.
Now that is a post! If I were on Albo’s staff, I would chalk this up as a very big win. You didn’t get the full-Erdogan, but you certainly didn’t get far off it.
Still, I’d be making him pronounce ‘Prabowo’ repeatedly until he got it right:
Albo’s out of Jakarta and off to Rome today (I’m rabid with jealousy at these flight itineraries). Not a big trip policy-wise. The substantive defence agreements were done and dusted in Albo’s previous term and under Prabowo’s successor Joko Widodo so this had a more casual, breezy air. That’s nice! Not everything has to be heavy-handed if both sides are serious about cozying up more.
Why neither brought along their defence ministers is ripe for speculation.
There goes Albo and here comes the hand-wringing. Australia doesn’t invest enough in Indonesia and therefore it shows a deep degree of ignorance on the behalf of the Australian business community, says the commentary (I shan’t name names).
Give me a break! Indonesia’s regulatory environment has, infamously, not been conducive to investment. This is not a failing of Australian business; it is prudence, if anything. Indonesia is hyper aware of this — tycoons far bigger than anything Sydney’s got have been in Istana’s ear for decades — and Prabowo says he’s sorting it out, but we’ll see. For now, can we relax with the self-flagellation?
Don’t worry about all that, actually. Prabowo noted he had “invited … Australia to participate more in our economy” during his chat with Albo, the President told media as per ABC. At least we didn’t have to hear endlessly about the bloody wheat in Indomie.
That’s an easier, nebulous thing to discuss, but the Russia rumours were trickier to avoid.
“Indonesia’s answer is no. They have made it very clear. It’s not for me to comment on what occurs between countries that are not Australia. What is important is Australia’s position, our position is clear. Indonesia’s position is clear as well,” Albo said when pushed on Wednesday. And good for him on stressing that commenting on what happens between two others is a bit naff.
His comments have received plenty of coverage in Indonesian media as well. Indonesian Foreign Minister Sugiono said that the whole debacle wasn’t even touched on during the meeting, as per Tempo. “Kabar yang beredar itu tidak benar. Kami juga tidak tahu apakah ini disinformasi, tetapi itu tidak dibahas,” he said yesterday. [“This news that is circulating is not correct. We also do not know if this is disinformation, but it was not discussed.”]
Still.
‘Speculation continues to swirl about Russia’s reported request to establish a military base on Australia’s doorstep,’ AFR’s Ronald Mizen wrote Wednesday. To which I simply must ask, who is doing the swirling? Indonesia has truly moved on, and so has the Australian government.
Prabowo has been explicit in his foreign policy approach. “I have repeatedly stated that Indonesia will implement an active and free foreign policy. We want to be a good neighbour. We want to adhere to the ancient philosophy: a thousand friends are too few, one enemy is too many,” he said in October shortly after his inauguration, as per Kompas. Interestingly, this Kompas story (auto-translated by AI and I can’t find the original, forgive me!) focused on key elements of Indonesia’s foreign policy, which included Australia.
What worries me here is a smaller version of what we see across the region. Western countries have been reminded repeatedly by those in Southeast Asia that it has no intention of ‘choosing’ between the US and China, but if you’re going to force the point, well, you’re kinda annoying us now. A bad friend is one which tries to get you to beef with others.
This isn’t the Australian government’s fault, far from it. Albo seems exasperated by the questioning, stressing over and over that this has been discussed at the highest levels between the two countries and nothing is coming of it.
I genuinely feel bad for him, it must be extremely frustrating. This is a media story — and for what? What is the goal here? A healthy cynicism of what a military hardliner in power for five years means for the region and Australia’s place in it is a great idea. But these sorts of questions don’t appear to take into account much about Prabowo at all. Namely, that he, of all presidents, would allow a foreign government even a hint of sovereignty on Indonesian territory is a truly insane idea.
This does not serve the average Australian audience very well at all. With low Indonesia literacy among Australians (and their newsrooms) it borders on fear-mongering.
Here’s hoping this is the end of it!
Right at the very bottom of the AFR story, Mizen reports Albo had taken with him an Australian-made horse bridle (inspired choice) and a copy of Jan Lingard’s brilliant Refugees and Rebels. It’s a bit tricky to track down now, I believe, but worth the dig online because it is just stunning. I’m pleasantly stunned Australia would gift it to Prabowo.
The book looks at the singularly most fascinating point in Australia-Indonesia’s joint history, when hundreds of Indonesians found themselves stuck in Australia during World War 2 for an amazingly diverse range of reasons. These men and women had just as diverse a range of experiences, but the key one here is the fostering of the Indonesia independence movement from Sydney hotels and work camps across Australia’s east.
The Australian Labor Party especially really leans on this when wooing Indonesia but it never quite lands. It's a slippery one, somehow. The significance is never explained to Australians, it's rarely mentioned in Australia at all. Which is personally lucky because I love to blow minds with it in beer gardens. It's also a tricky one to explain to Indonesians.
It is an essential part of a much larger story — but it's just a part. Plus the political backgrounds of many of these brilliant men and women, especially those with explicit links to the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and its Australian equivalent (CPA), is very unappetising to generations of political leaders. And full credit to the young minds of Indonesia, the revolution is such a sweeping story that the broad strokes alone must be overwhelming to get down in a classroom.
Which is why I’m so impressed! Half the people in that book would’ve been prime targets in the 1965 genocide. But, we’re 80 years on and Australia needs to start getting ready to flex its role as the centenary approaches.
For his part, Prabowo handed over a very cool looking Garuda statue and a Javanese keris, or dagger, which I know from plenty of experience Australian fellas LOVE.
Read that dang book! Get Black Armada too, while you’re at it.
The bummer thing about this project is I’ll have to actually think about policy. I prefer to focus primarily on the vibes of it all, divining tea leaves through televised glances and parsing social media captions. Sadly, this is a skill probably better placed for the halls of long-gone parochial empires and now I must contend with statements from foreign ministries. But that’s for next week.