The 'new' relationship
In the wake of Labor leader Kim Beazley's meeting last week in Jakarta with Indonesia's President Abdurrahman Wahid and PM John Howard's response to Wahid's announcement on April 27 that he was postponing his May visit to Australia, media commentators have claimed that there is a major policy difference between Beazley and Howard over Australia's "relationship" with Indonesia.
Asked by journalists to comment on Wahid's announcement, Howard responded that after Australia's military involvement in East Timor, the relationship between Jakarta and Canberra "will never be the same and that's not necessarily a bad thing".
According to the Australian Financial Review's Louise Dodson, Howard "made it clear that the relationship with Indonesia in the past had been too accommodating, especially over the brutal annexation of East Timor". Dodson interpreted Howard's comments as setting a "radical new direction for Australia's relationship with Indonesia".
Other commentators, however, criticised Howard for allowing Canberra's relationship with Jakarta to "drift", particularly after his May 1 comment that, "I have been keen to see the relationship rebuild, but it can't be rebuilt overnight". The AFR's Jakarta correspondent, Tim Dodd, for example, complained in an article in the paper's May 1 issue, "We don't yet know what Howard's vision for the relationship is, assuming that he has one".
By contrast, Dodd was glowing in his response to Beazley's statements during his May 2-3 visit to Jakarta. "In Jakarta this week, Opposition Leader Kim Beazley has managed to do what John Howard finds too difficult", Dodd claimed in a May 3 article run under the headline "Neighbourly Beazley gets line right on Indonesia".
According to Dodd, "[Beazley] set out a new blueprint for relations between Australia and Jakarta based on the fact that our northern neighbour is now a nation struggling to entrench democracy and human rights after decades of Soeharto autocracy ...
"Beazley calls his new approach 'neighbourliness', a term carefully chosen to avoid any resemblance to 'engagement' or 'regionalism', words that would revive unpleasant memories of [former Labor PM] Paul Keating's enthusiastic embrace of Soeharto's Indonesia ...
"Beazley believes Australia should push forward with building relations with newly democratic Indonesia and give all the assistance it can to Indonesia evolve into a stable democracy."
However, apart from the new rhetoric about Australia and Indonesia being "neighbours in democracy", the only substantive proposal in Beazley's "new approach" was that Canberra invited Wahid to visit Australia and immediately resume cooperation with the Indonesian military — the chief obstacle to a genuine transition to democracy in Indonesia! Just as with all his predecessors — from Whitlam to Keating — the stability of Indonesia's military is of more concern to Beazley than any evolution to democracy.
Nevertheless, Dodd claimed, "Although the Beazley blueprint is sketchy, it is far more than Howard has put forward as his vision for a new relationship between the two countries".
For 24 years, Australian governments — both Liberal and Labor — sought to gain an advantage for Australian corporate plunderers of Indonesia's natural and human resources over their Japanese, European and US rivals by being the West's most outspoken defenders of the Indonesian military dictatorship's annexation of East Timor.
When Howard was forced by the pressure of public opinion in Australia to abandon this policy and send Australian troops to end the Indonesian military's attempt to physically exterminate the East Timorese independence movement after the August 1999 referendum, Australian imperialism lost the key instrument for its "special relationship" with Jakarta. Howard's comment that Canberra's relationship with Jakarta " will never be the same and that's not necessarily a bad thing" was simply an attempt to put this loss in a rosy light.
Beazley's "new approach" is as "sketchy" as Howard's "radical new direction" is "lacking in vision", because neither of them is able to formulate a new foreign policy approach toward Indonesia that would enable Australian imperialism to gain more favourable treatment in Jakarta than its imperialist rivals.