Gary Brown has thoughtfully fleshed out the argument I set out a few weeks ago in my opinion piece in Tne Australian republished in OLO. Diplomacy is about getting the balance right: as Gsry says, the Indonesians fel off the tightrope into a stance of arrogance, and the Australian government fell off it into a stance of subservience. What Gary says about the DFAT Indonesia lobby , as he expresses it here, is true. Bruce Haigh has written a lot of good stuff on this over the years.

I hope this correspondence does not degenerate into a polarised exchange of extremist views. That gets us nowhere, with respect to 'PTBI'. The trick is to get to the right and honourable policy setting around the middle. Most DFAT people don't recognise where that is. OLO correspondents can help here.

Sending future West Papuan asylum seekers - and they will come - to hellhouse jail in Nauru, kids included, would simply be criminal, as well as cowardly grovelling to Jakarta.

The real issue now is what wll our MPs and Senators of conscience - from all parties - do when Howard's servile legislation to send all boatpeople to offshore detention comes up? It has got to be thrown out of our parliament, if we have any national selfrespect left. What about it, OLO correspondents ? Please focus your energies on this.

BTW,I am off on a pilgrimage to Spain for 10 weeks, washing John Howard out of my system. My website tonykevin.com will remain open Hasta luego !

Tony Kevin

I agree, Tony. After 10 years in office, Howard has finally succumbed to the Keating Kow Tow.

To seriously believe that one can base a relationship with the kind of personalities that make it to the top of confucian style politics on a grovel is a potentially dangerous miscalculation.

Perhaps the legislation should be correctly titled, "The Kow Tow (ammendment) Bill 2006".

How has “Howard ignored his domestic constituency.”? The “public opinion”, to which Gary refers, comes only from the usual open-border advocates. And, surely, it’s not arrogant of a government to believe that it has the support of a majority of Australians by the very fact that it does have control of both Houses.

Of course Australia should not “grovel” to anyone but, if we must call a further strengthening of our borders and an apology to Indonesia for the insult of agreeing with 42 West Papuans that they were being persecuted by Indonesia grovelling, then so be it.

The granting of TPVs to the 42 illegal entrants was the most stupid, un- diplomatic and downright insulting act perpetrated by the Australian Government, ever. The shrugging off of responsibility for it by Alexander Downer and Amanda Vanstone was even worse.

Eating humble pie was the only option

Gary Brown, Tony Kevin and Perseus,

I am in total agreement. I lived in Indonesia nine years, speak Indonesian at home as my first language and love Indonesia and its people. But the Jakarta Lobby does enormous damage not just to Australian national interests, but to the interests of ordinary Indonesians, Timorese and other people who might happen not to have the same interests as the Jakarta elite, or more correctly, what the Australian Jakarta Lobby perceives to be the interests of the Jakarta elite (and even on that they're often wrong). I remember Indonesian trade union and human rights activists - now in positions of authority in Indonesia - describing the Australian Government at the April 1998 meeting of the UN Human Rights body in Geneva as "Soeharto's PR company". Dick Woolcott and his Jakarta Lobby learnt their Indonesian skills in 1974.

Leigh,
How does apologising to Jakarta for us applying internationally recognised legal obligations to refugees help ordinary Australian and Indonesian citizens?

I also agree with Gary Brown, and I have grown tired of assorted Australian governments sucking up to Indonesia. It makes us look like wimps, dating back to agreeing to their takover of West Papua and acquiesing to the slaughter in East Timor.

Once again, Leigh is heavily into the Kow Tow. Must be a Canberra DFAT bureaucrat.

Talk about walking the impossible tightrope. Australia rightly listened to Indonesia’s concerns and modified its policy accordingly, which by the way was and win-win-win situation for Australia, Indonesia and Papua (please ask me for more info if you don’t understand this). Then President Yudhoyono gave Australia a tongue-lashing…. right on top of our conciliatory move to Indonesia’s desires.

Perhaps his comments were reflecting that Australia had stepped outside of Indonesia’s wishes before our conciliatory policy adjustment and were not a further testing to see how far we are prepared to ‘kow tow’. The intent and tone of such comments is always open to interpretation and can be presented very differently by different reporters. I therefore question whether Gary Brown is correct in his interpretation or expression.

It just goes to show how fickle the whole business is and how virtually impossible it is to stay on that tightrope.

“This pervasive, self-perpetuating pro-Jakarta mindset in our international relations bureaucracy - and even some parts of academia - has become a canker on the Australian body politic.”

I think this overstating the situation. Some people in government, international relations and academia have a view that is strongly pro-Jakarta. There is some merit in that. Many others don’t, and try to grapple with the best balance between sticking to Australia’s policies and maintaining good relations with our huge northern neighbour. In this extremely difficult situation, there are wide-ranging views as to what the best balance is.

“We have to face the fact that in the key area of Australian-Indonesian relations our own Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade cannot be trusted to protect our real national interests.”

I don’t think this is a fair and reasonable conclusion. Given the extreme difficulty of the situation, it is practically impossible to strike the right balance. Whatever our government comes up with, there will many people who strongly denounce it. Because the balance is so fickle, the majority of people concerned would criticise any decision, and very few would fully agree, in all probability