RI-Australia relationship

The proposed new treaty between Australia and Indonesia is grand, but essentially decorative, and ultimately nugatory. Like any bilateral arrangement it can be unilaterally canceled, as was the last one.

As our relationship is on a new high, let us now jointly strive for bilateral underpinnings which will survive a mercurial, knee-jerk political reaction and serve the longer term regional desires of ASEAN -- a zone of peace, freedom, neutrality and stability (a grouping of which Australian wishes to be and should be a fully paid up member). The currently proposed security treaty is not going to provide this.

To a better and more enduring end, to quote the Australian aid agency AusAid's litany, the center piece of Australian aid policy is "capacity building": capacity means education and the skills to do so. Thus it would serve Australia and Indonesia far better in the longer term if there was an active Australian initiative to implement a comprehensive treaty on education rather than this proposed security treaty.

Indonesia's education system is, in short, inadequate right across the board, but there is one glaring gap: technical education. To be fair, Indonesia is not alone in this deficiency. Today, Australia itself is staring at the reality of declining technical skills and well may in years to come have to accept guest workers from Indonesia.

Present Australian education policy for overseas students favors only tertiary education. Graduates returning from Australia to their home countries in Southeast Asia only serve to sharpen the gap between the "haves" and the "have nots" in their home country.

In broad generic terms, the "have nots" are a fertile source of regional instability. They obviously make for high unemployment figures; thus make for unhappy industrial relations; thus make unattractive locations for foreign investment upon which much of the regions' economic growth depends, and ultimately make happy recruiting grounds for terrorists.

Now, with this recent sea change in the bilateral relationship, Australia could do far better by endowing a number of technical education centers right across Indonesia: technical schools, night schools and apprenticeships programs. Sure, sign the new security treaty, but at the same time implement a more enduring bilateral arrangement which would serve the interests of the region and more importantly the interests of Australia and Indonesia for generations to come: an arrangement which would survive and attenuate inevitable occasional bilateral frictions, but to the mutual advantage on one another in every possible way.

Aceh may be a timely and appropriate place to start such a program.

T.C. SCOTT, Jakarta