Jakarta rift wont deter Tony Abbott on boats GREG SHERIDAN THE AUSTRALIAN JANUARY 25, 2014 12:00AM THE Abbott government is absolutely determined to stop illegal immigrant boats coming to Australia, even if this means enduring significant damage to the relationship with Indonesia. This damage is playing out in a series of bellicose statements by senior Indonesian military sources, although these statements were substantially wound back by Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa yesterday, when he said that increased Indonesian navy patrols were not an unfriendly act towards any nation. Although strains in the relationship have become apparent over the past few days, there does not appear to have been any significant redeployment of Indonesian military assets to the archipelago nations southern coast. The Indonesian government and many Australian commentators have failed to grasp Tony Abbotts determination to stop the boats, even if this causes short-term pain with Jakarta. This is not a miscalculation by the Abbott government, nor does it represent any diplomatic clumsiness. It is, rather, a deliberate act of policy. If the Abbott government succeeds in stopping the boats, there will not be any significant difficulty in repairing the relationship with Jakarta. On the other hand, if the boats keep coming, or begin to accelerate again as they did under Labor, this will form an increasingly big problem in the long term in the relationship. The Immigration Minister, Scott Morrison, yesterday issued his weekly statement, indicating no boats had made it through the Border Protection Command cordon to Australian waters in the past five weeks. That was the longest period without boat arrivals since March 2009, he added. Mr Morrison said the number of asylum-seekers detained on Christmas Island was now below 2000. The statement did not deal with the question of whether boats had been intercepted and towed or turned back to Indonesia. Perhaps one parallel to the current trouble with Indonesia, though vastly different in order of magnitude, was East Timor. At the time, it looked as though relations would be damaged for decades, but once the East Timor irritant was gone, the relationship moved remarkably quickly to a better footing than it had ever known. The Indonesian government response to the boats issue is overwhelmingly reactive, but it is reactive not so much to Australian policy as to Indonesias own domestic politics and media. Nonetheless, there is a real clash of policy: the Abbott government is determined to keep turning boats around if they keep coming; the Indonesian government wants this to stop. The revelation that Australian navy vessels had accidentally breached Indonesian territorial waters was bound to cause a nationalist reaction in Indonesia. The political purpose of these Indonesian military statements seems to be to reassure Indonesians that the Jakarta government will jealously guard the sovereignty of its own waters. So far, there have been no significant Indonesian military moves. Nor are there likely to be. Similarly, the Australian navy will certainly make sure it stays well out of the way of any Indonesian navy presence. The Prime Ministers statement in Davos that repelling the boats is a matter of national sovereignty is in part designed to send a clear message to Indonesia about how seriously Canberra views the boats issue. Indonesians, as Mr Abbott remarked, understand all about sovereignty. The ironies of the present difficulties are endless. The Australian navy for the past five years has routinely operated in Indonesian sovereign waters to rescue asylum-seeker boats precisely because Jakarta declined to place any of its naval resources to the south of its archipelago. Similarly, the last time the Indonesian ambassador was recalled from Canberra it was because Jakarta was demanding that Australia send back boat-people to Indonesia - in that case Papuan asylum-seekers who were allowed to stay in Australia. The Indonesian government system at the moment is somewhat incoherent. The administration of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is at its weakest point as it enters its last days. Everyone within the administration is jockeying to influence their future after it. With national elections looming, all the political actors in Indonesia are demonstrating their nationalism. The Edward Snowden revelations that Australia spied on Dr Yudhoyono, his wife and political associates in 2009 caused an inevitable nationalist backlash in Indonesia. This was going to play out over several weeks no matter what the Australian government did or said. One dynamic that the Abbott government has no control over is the role of the Australian media and the former Labor government. Although Indonesia is a much bigger country than Australia, it is one of the few nations where the Australian media casts a shadow. Those elements of the Australian media that hysterically demonised the Abbott policies, in combination with Kevin Rudds pronouncements that Mr Abbotts policies would lead to naval confrontation with Jakarta, played significantly into Indonesian reactions. They substantially raised the bar of what a politically respectable nationalist reaction to Australian policies would be in Indonesia. Even here, however, it is easy to overestimate the actual reaction of the Indonesian system. From the moment the Abbott government turned back its first boat, the Indonesian government knew precisely what was happening, where it was happening and when. Yet the Indonesian government system did not make any reaction to this at all until it was forced to do so by its own media and parliamentarians, who were in part reacting to the Australian media. This is part of the reason Mr Abbott, Mr Morrison and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop - the government troika that handles this issue - have declined to specifically confirm the boat turn-arounds. This public reticence, though difficult for the Abbott government domestically, helps the Indonesian government limit its own reaction. If the Abbott government stops the boats, Indonesia will be a huge beneficiary because that specific cohort of people who go to Indonesia purely in order to come to Australia will stop going to Indonesia in the first place. This is an outcome the Indonesians very much want. While the Abbott government is right to tolerate a degree of damage to that relationship in order to stop the boats, this is a very complex, and inherently somewhat unpredictable, calculation. If stopping the boats meant the relationship with Jakarta totally crashed and burned, that would indeed be a serious national interest cost to Australia. If the relationship endures some significant strain, that is much more manageable. And the Abbott government is doing everything it can to limit damage while it implements the necessary policies on boats.
Posted on: Fri, 24 Jan 2014 13:34:04 +0000
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