Two hundred and forty thousand dollars will build a school for 150 primary school kids in the tsunami-devastated city of Banda Aceh, Indonesia. When I visited in September, parents and teachers glowed with pride at their simple, clean new school, built with Australian aid money. Girls and boys have separate toilets for the first time.
After listening to the principal, who has gathered together the 40 survivors of his previous school, some of whom lost all their families in the tsunami, it’s hard not to squirm at the talking heads of tabloid television who swagger into Indonesia looking for “cannibals” to prove that the Indonesians are barbarians.
Indonesia has changed a lot over the past decade. Once a corrupt military dictatorship, it is now on the way to becoming a healthy democracy. Many Australians don’t seem to have absorbed this fact, as shown by pathetic stereotypes about Indonesian judges being monkeys, (a claim made by a Sydney shock-jock when “our Schappelle” was first jailed) or agit-prop by professional anti-Indonesian academics who tilt at straw men such as the “born again Jakarta lobby”.
Australian opinion has barely registered the important survey by the Jakarta-based Indonesia Survey Institute, which showed that only 11 per cent of Indonesians thought that the country should adopt an “Islamic form of government”. The great majority supported Indonesia’s moderate official ideology, Pancasila.
Institute Director Denny J.A. told the Jakarta Post: “This corroborates the old belief that Muslims here are mostly moderate.” Another more recent poll showed that only 9 per cent of Indonesians would vote for an Islamist party, a big drop from a few years ago. Over 80 per cent of Indonesians said they supported democracy.
It can’t be denied, however, that there are still difficulties in the Australia-Indonesia relationship. There are forces on both sides trying to whip up hostility for their own political reasons.
In Indonesia, the minority of radical Islamists see Australia as a source of western and liberal ideas, which undermine their own efforts to subvert and supplant Indonesian Islam, which is traditionally tolerant and pluralistic, with imported Salafist or Wahhabist ideologies.
Unfortunately, these negative trends in Indonesia, unrepresentative though they are, do influence opinion in Australia. The Lowy poll suggested that many Australians continue to be hostile to Indonesia. There are several obvious reasons for this. The behaviour of the Indonesian Army in East Timor is still remembered, even though those