{"id":16487,"date":"2014-10-22T06:00:49","date_gmt":"2014-10-21T19:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=16487"},"modified":"2014-10-23T08:26:54","modified_gmt":"2014-10-22T21:26:54","slug":"the-australia-indonesia-bilateral-relationship-strategic-design-or-muddling-through","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-australia-indonesia-bilateral-relationship-strategic-design-or-muddling-through\/","title":{"rendered":"The Australia\u2013Indonesia bilateral relationship: strategic design or muddling through?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Le<\/a>Late last year, as the bilateral relationship between Australia and Indonesia struggled with the revelations of the spying scandal, Colin Brown, an adjunct professor at the Griffith Asia Institute, described<\/a> the history of the relationship in a carnival metaphor:<\/p>\n

For anyone interested in Australia\u2013Indonesia relations, nothing so characterises the phenomenon as a car on a roller-coaster. Any rise is followed inevitably by a fall. The ride is never boring, and in a bizarre kind of way it is quite predictable. But sometimes you might hope for a little more stability, a few more moments of calm.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That image of the roller-coaster is an old one\u2014Brown himself has used it before. Indeed, it\u2019s been around long enough (and been true long enough) to induce a weariness in even the most determined optimist. But in this post I\u2019m hoping to convince readers that, strategically, there\u2019s still much to play for here.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start by looking at Southeast Asia. The table below, constructed from the publicly-available data in the CIA World Factbook<\/a>, provides a quick economic snapshot of the ASEAN countries based on 2013 estimates. I\u2019ve appended Australia at the bottom of the list just to give a sense of relative economic size.<\/p>\n

If we look at the ASEAN figures first, it\u2019s obvious that ASEAN isn\u2019t a collection of evenly-sized economies. If we focus on the purchasing-power-parity measurement of GDP, we see in ASEAN one large economy (Indonesia), five middle-sized economies (Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam), and four dwarves (Myanmar, Cambodia, Brunei and Laos).<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
<\/td>\nGDP (US$)(PPP)<\/strong><\/td>\nGDP (US$)(Official Exchange Rate)<\/strong><\/td>\nReal growth rate<\/strong><\/td>\nPer capita (US$)(PPP)<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Brunei <\/strong><\/td>\n$22.25bn<\/td>\n$16.56bn<\/td>\n1.4%<\/td>\n$54,800<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Cambodia<\/strong><\/td>\n$39.64bn<\/td>\n$15.64bn<\/td>\n7%<\/td>\n$2,600<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Indonesia<\/strong><\/td>\n$1,285bn<\/td>\n$867.5bn<\/td>\n5.3%<\/td>\n$5,200<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Laos<\/strong><\/td>\n$20.78bn<\/td>\n$10.1bn<\/td>\n8.3%<\/td>\n$3,100<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Malaysia<\/strong><\/td>\n$525bn<\/td>\n$312.4bn<\/td>\n4.7%<\/td>\n$17,500<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Myanmar\/Burma<\/strong><\/td>\n$111.1bn<\/td>\n$59.43bn<\/td>\n6.8%<\/td>\n$1,700<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Philippines<\/strong><\/td>\n$454.3bn<\/td>\n$272.2bn<\/td>\n6.8%<\/td>\n$4,700<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Singapore<\/strong><\/td>\n$339bn<\/td>\n$295.7bn<\/td>\n4.1%<\/td>\n$62,400<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Thailand <\/strong><\/td>\n$673bn<\/td>\n$400.9bn<\/td>\n2.9%<\/td>\n$9,900<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Vietnam <\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/td>\n$358.9bn<\/td>\n$170bn<\/td>\n5.3%<\/td>\n$4,000<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Australia<\/strong><\/td>\n$998.3bn<\/td>\n$1,488bn<\/td>\n2.5%<\/td>\n$43,000<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Compared with the ASEAN countries, Australia\u2019s economy is poised between Indonesia\u2019s and Thailand\u2019s. It\u2019s not really like Thailand\u2019s, though, and we can see that by looking at the GDP estimates based on official exchange rates, where\u2019s Australia\u2019s economy is three-and-a-half times the size of Thailand\u2019s. So the two dominant economies in Southeast Asia are Indonesia\u2019s and ours. Between us, we have the first requirement for a meaningful partnership: shared economic strength.<\/p>\n

We also have something else that might empower a strategic partnership\u2014a set of complementarities. Analysts often say the relationship has no \u2018ballast\u2019; that it\u2019s all sail and no rudder, regularly blown off course by the winds of public opinion. Turning the issue around, though, we have an opportunity to nurture a set of complementarities with Jakarta: we\u2019re a developed economy with a small population and good contacts in the Western world; they\u2019re a developing economy with a large population and good contacts in the Islamic and non-aligned worlds. Those complementarities could form the basis for a genuine partnership\u2014if will exists in both capitals to pursue one.<\/p>\n

A third driver of a strategic partnership is a shared sense of strategic transformation: we both live in a region that\u2019s having strategic significance thrust upon it. That\u2019s important. Previously we\u2019ve had plenty of scope to rehearse our differences at the regional level. But with more great powers wanting to play in Southeast Asia\u2019s space these days, we share an interest in nurturing what the Indonesians would call \u2018regional resilience\u2019 and what we might call \u2018a Southeast Asian power core\u2019.<\/p>\n

So far, I\u2019ve put a positive spin on a future partnership. So why don\u2019t we have one? Three reasons. First, the drivers I\u2019ve pointed to above are all abstract. In the reality of everyday events\u2014like boat people, live cattle exports, spying scandals, and drug trafficking incidents\u2014abstract similarities get lost. Second, the complementarities that I identify arise because we\u2019re so different. As Gareth Evans and Bruce Grant observed in their work Australia\u2019s Foreign Relations<\/em>, \u2018No two neighbours anywhere in the world are as comprehensively unalike as Australia and Indonesia\u2019. And third, there\u2019s the issue of priorities. Neither of us prizes a partnership highly enough to make it work. That might be changing. In 2013 we had a conservative political leader campaigning on the slogan of \u2018more Jakarta, less Geneva\u2019\u2014but then again Geneva\u2019s never ranked that highly in Australian strategic policy.<\/p>\n

So where does that leave us? It means we\u2019ll have a stronger strategic partnership in the future, but it\u2019s as likely to grow from a policy of muddling through as it is from a policy of strategic design. If we want to push a particular design of a partnership, we\u2019re going to have to put heavyweight political muscle behind it. On occasion, the Abbott government does signal that it\u2019s prepared to do that. Still, others have been here before. Paul Keating made a serious effort to improve a relationship he saw as \u2018a thin foreign policy crust covering a disappointingly hollow core\u2019. The important difference this time round is Asian transformation: if that doesn\u2019t drive us to work more closely together, I suspect nothing will. It\u2019s do-or-die time for the Australian\u2013Indonesian strategic partnership.<\/p>\n

Rod Lyon<\/em><\/a> is a fellow at ASPI and executive editor of\u00a0<\/em>The Strategist. Image courtesy of Flickr user Alexis Gravel<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Late last year, as the bilateral relationship between Australia and Indonesia struggled with the revelations of the spying scandal, Colin Brown, an adjunct professor at the Griffith Asia Institute, described the history of the relationship …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":16499,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[118],"tags":[17,8,377,931,277,132],"class_list":["post-16487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-australia-and-its-region","tag-australia","tag-indonesia","tag-joko-widodo","tag-jokowi","tag-strategic-partnership","tag-tony-abbott"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Australia\u2013Indonesia bilateral relationship: strategic design or muddling through? | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-australia-indonesia-bilateral-relationship-strategic-design-or-muddling-through\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Australia\u2013Indonesia bilateral relationship: strategic design or muddling through? 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