By Pip Hinman
As international pressure mounts against the Suharto regime, spurred on by the growing protest movement inside Indonesia, the Australian Coalition government and Labor opposition have gone in to bat for Indonesia's corrupt ruling elite.
Last month, foreign minister Alexander Downer made an unscheduled visit to Washington to urge the US administration to release the second instalment of the IMF's US$43 billion rescue package. Prime Minister John Howard and the governor of the Reserve Bank, Ian Macfarlane, have called on the IMF to separate economic and political policy issues.
The government's position is clear: while Suharto may be unpopular at home, he remains key to the success of the Australia's business interests in Indonesia and elsewhere in south-east Asia.
Former Labor PM Paul Keating fully agrees. In a public speech on March 25, he slammed the IMF, saying, "Indonesia was disproportionately punished because a grossly inaccurate view had taken hold in some quarters ... that it was some sort of rogue state, to be talked about in the same breath as Mobutu's Zaire or Marcos' Philippines".
"Australian policy", he added, "has to be based on this one fundamental: we stand with Indonesia".
Of course, by "Indonesia", Keating means Suharto and his cronies. This policy was first put in place under Gough Whitlam and continued by successive Labor and Coalition governments.
The argument about delivery of the IMF loans is of concern to the government, because Australian business interests in Indonesia stand to lose if the bailout package isn't immediately forthcoming. For instance BHP, which has significant investments in Kalimantan coal mines, lost $22 million when the rupiah was suddenly devalued.
More importantly, the bipartisan support for the Suharto regime aims to secure Australian business's future prospects in a country with extensive raw materials and 205 million people.
This is why the Howard government has stepped up its defence of Suharto. As an imperialist power which has to compete with much larger imperialist powers such as the US and Japan, the Australian government hopes its political support will make up for its lack of economic muscle.
So while US analysts, such as the president of the Asia-Pacific Policy Centre in Washington, Doulas Paal, call the IMF package for Indonesia "a waste of taxpayer money", the Australian government's media mouthpieces have bent over backwards to sell its economic nationalist agenda.
Ross Gittins, columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald, argued on March 18 that despite Indonesia's "crony capitalism" and need for economic reform, the IMF should not be allowed to dictate the pace at which Indonesia must implement the fund's restructuring agenda. The IMF's conditions, he said, go far beyond what is needed.
Hamish McDonald, the SMH's foreign editor, tried to argue in the March 20 edition that Suharto is not a Mobutu. (According to CIA figures, Suharto is the third richest man in the world, after the sultan of Brunei and Bill Gates.)
"He has lived in the same big Dutch-built house in Jakarta since the early 1960s", McDonald wrote, "and his indulgences are a 600-hectare cattle farm in the nearby hills and a family mausoleum in Central Java. He has never travelled abroad for pleasure ..." McDonald omitted to mention the similarity in Mobutu and Suharto's treatment of political opponents.
Other establishment commentators, such as Peter Hartcher in the March 28-29 Financial Review, have stressed that it is in "Australia's" interests, and those of Japan and the US, to help Suharto stay in power.
"What if the post-Suharto era brings an unfriendly new regime to power? This is a strategic nightmare. Indonesia sits astride one of the world's strategic maritime choke points. Forty per cent of all world shipping passes through the archipelago. It is one of the lifelines of the world economy. Eighty per cent of Japan's oil is shipped through the Indonesian straits and 70 per cent of South Korea's. A sixth of all Australian trade — A$25.3 billion in the year to March 1997 — passes through Indonesian straits", Hartcher worried.
All the imperialist powers, and Australia in particular, have an interest in helping Suharto to repress social unrest. The debate about the timing of IMF loans reflects only marginal differences of emphasis, not any fundamental disagreement on the relationship with Suharto.
As an imperialist economy — in which a few massive corporations dominate the local economy and seek to exploit underdeveloped countries — Australia as always "engaged" in the region. For some 30 years, under the guise of promoting "stability", Australia has helped crush any threat to capitalist rule.
When Suharto wiped out 1 to 2 million communists and leftists in his 1965 coup, Harold Holt described the massacre as a "reorientation". Meeting with Suharto in 1974, Gough Whitlam described an independent East Timor as "unviable" and "a threat", giving the green light to the 1975 invasion.
In 1978, Australia became the only country in the world to extend formal recognition to Indonesia's illegal annexation of East Timor. This was reaffirmed by the Labor government in 1985. The Timor Gap Treaty, signed in 1989, allows Australian oil companies to profit from oil that properly belongs to the East Timorese.
In 1991, foreign minister Gareth Evans described the Dili massacre, in which up to 500 people were killed, as an "aberration". Soon afterwards, Indonesian generals linked to the massacre were welcomed in Australia, and joint military training was increased. Indonesia also took part for the first time in the Kangaroo '95 regional military exercise. This close military collaboration is still going on.
With some 130 Australian companies operating in Indonesia and some $2.5 billion of investment, Australia is not about to let human rights take precedence over profits. Its opposition last year to the inclusion of human rights provisions in a European Union-sponsored trade and cooperation treaty made this clear.