RI-Australia relationship

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