Skip to main content

Postscript: Indonesia's presidential election

Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world and be Australia's nearest neighbour.....but what happens in the country, save for this or that piece about Bali, rarely gets any real, in-depth, coverage.

Welcome then to a piece "Jokowi's victory is a decisive break with Indonesia's old order" in The Guardian dealing with the recent presidential election.   The piece is written from an Australian perspective and since being published the losing presidential contender intends contesting the result.

"With last night’s official announcement of Jokowi’s win, Abbott and other global leaders may be breathing sighs of relief at having narrowly avoided an awkward diplomatic predicament. However, a Jokowi presidency comes with its own challenges. Emerging from an election in which he was characterised in opposition to the strong, nationalistic Prabowo, Jokowi may also seek to prove himself a formidable leader and challenge the notion that former president Megawati Sukarnoputri may be pulling the strings behind the scenes.

It is expected that Jokowi will prioritise domestic issues at least in the short to medium term: revitalising Indonesia's stalling economy, lifting millions out of poverty, improving education and health and implementing ambitious public transport infrastructure programs as promised in the election.

Jokowi will need to choose his foreign policy priorities carefully. It seems likely he will focus attention on foreign issues with a strong domestic dimension – he has already highlighted the issue of improving protections for Indonesian migrant workers. As such, Australia is unlikely to factor highly in Indonesia’s foreign policy mix.

The Australian government has hardly helped itself in this regard. During a decade of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s (SBY) outward-facing leadership, Australia had plenty of opportunities to forge deep and abiding ties with Indonesia, which it did with varying degrees of success. Yet due to a number of high-profile blunders by its leaders, Australia has repeatedly failed to capitalise on these opportunities and seems blissfully unaware that we need Indonesia far more than Indonesia needs us."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...
Post a Comment
Read more

What does a no-fly zone actually mean?

As some countries consider imposing a no-fly zone in relation to Libya, the pertinent question must be what does that mean and entail? FP provides the answers: "It depends on the circumstances. There are two primary types of no-fly zones imposed by air forces. The first is imposed by one military over another, while the two sides are at war. In practice, this type of no-fly zone amounts to a warning from one side that it will engage the other's aircraft if they are spotted in a given territory. The second type, more applicable to the situation in Libya, is when an outside power possessing overwhelming air superiority restricts flights over a given country in order to discourage an internal conflict or humanitarian crisis. This is a relatively recent tactic, which was used most famously in Bosnia and Iraq during the 1990s. No-fly zones are often a compromise in situations where the international community is demanding a response to ongoing violence, but full military interven...
6 comments
Read more