The outcome of the recent Australio-Indonesian fracas is very favourable for both countries:

>Australia's border protection from entry of violent separatists is enhanced.

>Indonesia's security is improved since Australia will no longer be a base of barbaric Papuan separatist assaults on Indonesia. PNG, a failed state, was a security threat for Indonesia as separatist rebels made camps in that country from where they launched violent murderous assaults on Indonesia, killing many defenceless transmigrant women and children. As result, our military was forced to do infiltration attacks into PNG soil throughout 1980s-1990s that stopped the separatist raids.

I think Mr Brown should not be so sensitive on President SBY's justified criticisms. Considering the multitude amounts of gratituous insults on Indonesia all these years in Australian media, to complain of a legitimate rebuke from our president is infantile and hypocrite to the extreme. You must be insane to expect Indonesians to express love towards Australia after all your Indonesia-bashing in recent years.

For all the past vicious insults done by Australia on Indonesia's dignity, Australia deserved to be insulted every day every second by Indonesians to make it even. Only by the infliction of good amount of corporal punishment, can Australians learn to improve its behaviour towards Indonesia.

Ludwig, please elaborate on how we have a win-win-win solution.

I thought Vanuatu saw West Papua as their ancestral homeland. Can't we send the refugees over there? Perhaps we can move the camp from Nauru. I have to admit that I am not that familiar with the rules on dealing with refugees.

IMHO Australia's problem is how to get the Indonesians to respect the human rights of their citizens without the country falling apart. After 5 decades of transmigration a split would be very messy (remember Yugoslavia) and we'd find no doubt more than 42 refugees on our shores.

Our current relationship with Indonesia is based on the Hawke/Keating model. Both of those gentlemen had their names written on the soles of their shoes because they spent so much time kissing the feet of Soeharto it was the only way of identifying them. Isn't Keating on record calling Soeharto 'father'. We even awarded Ali Alitas some type of medal. And how can we be critical of the Indonesian security forces when we've had a hand in training some of them.

Howard has been happy to continue with a policy based on servile acquiescence apart from backing the Jesuit-inspired uprising in E Timor. His billion dollar gift was another sign of impuissance from the Canberra camorra. Indonesia did need assistance but would it have been so offensive to suggest that the Indonesian authorities conduct a raid on the Swiss banks to recover the $15 billion that the Soeharto family has squirreled away?

In spite of the behaviour of the Indonesians it seems that the paradigmatic axiom of DFAT dictates a relationship with Indonesia even if it is based on anopsia on our part.

If the standards set by our politicians are an exemplar Mr Alfonce Capone should have sued his careers advisor. Mr Capone would have been a great Australian politician.

I was ringside for two decades whilst the lobby Gary identifies held sway over foreign policy thinking. Our neglect of South Asia and Indo-China, our paternalistic approach to Melanesia, our obsequious collaboration with repressive regimes in the Phillipines, Indonesia, China and elsewhere has seen Australia compromise its core values in thrall to confused notions of what is in our national interest.

For decades we dealt with India on a piecemeal, tokenistic basis, whilst bending over backwards for repressive governments in Jakarta.

A stable, democratic Indonesia is in our interest, but ongoing appeasement of and collaboration with policies designed to prop up the economic interests of powerful players with TNI backing will not facilitate this outcome. West Papuans and ordinary Indonesians are the victims of these policies. Australia should encourage Indonesia toward further strengthening of its democratic institutions and regional autonomy for areas of political conflict such as Aceh and West Papua.

The pandering to repressive tendencies in the Indonesian body politic, in return for grubby trade-offs, is a Canberra mindset harmful to our longer term security interests.

Just a few words on "Australian policy" and "kowtowing".

On the matter of illegal entrants/asylum seekers, there is no Australian policy. The policy comes from the UN, and if our government is kowtowing to anyone, it is to the UN, whose policy it is to dump as many Third World people on the West it can to alleviate 'inequality' throughout the world. There is to be a UN talkfest soon on it's latest baby, "Borderless Immigration" which deals with the 'rights' of people to move to wherever they choose, and to hell with the countries targetted by the UN.

All of you demanding that our Government stand up to one country, Indonesia, need to do some serious thinking about the need for our Government to stand up to the unelected, largely third world despots, of the United Nations.

What we do in Australia should come from individual governments as they are elected - not the wonky policies of governments gone, such as those of Malcolm Fraser and Paul Keating. Times change, and so do attitudes.

If the Howard Government had any backbone, it would tell the United Nations where to go, and what to do with its policies. The Australian Government, like all others, has a duty to its own country and its own people. The United Nations and international "law" is a boil on the backside of democracy and sovereignty

Leigh, you were mounting a plausible, if not credible argument right up to the point where you suggested that rules, such as the UN Declaration of Human Rights, were the work of third world despots. You are dead wrong and completely ignorant of history.

Covenants like the one on Economic, Social and Political Rights were all drafted, promoted and passed by the core democracies. They were specifically aimed at second world (Communist Block)and third world dictatorships that had demonstrated a callous disregard for the rights and liberties of ordinary people.

And these covenants sprang from our core religious and social beliefs. Not least of which was the notion that to ignore the suffering of another was to not only condone the actions that produced that suffering but to also drag us down to the same level as the persecutor.

Our problem, when we comply with our duty of first assylum, is that in the past we have foolishly assumed that this offer of assylum included a duty to offer all the benefits and privileges of Australian residence. And this has made it very difficult to distinguish between economic and political refugees.

But there are more just and equitable solutions than incarceration. If we simply directed them to locations and specifically allocated jobs that pay essentially the same as they would earn in their former homeland (plus medicare levy based on average weekly earnings) then we would very quickly sort out the purely economic refugees. And the country would benefit from jobs (like weed control in national parks) that simply do not exist under Australian pay scales.

And PTBI has continued to demonstrate that whether we like it or not, we have an "enemy en retarde" in Indonesia.