It has been barely two months since we thought we’d seen the worst of the rigmarole that is the diplomatic relationship between Indonesia and Australia. Two months ago, it was the Indonesian president, Joko Widodo, who was getting most of the flak for his refusal to spare the lives of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, two Australian drug traffickers on death row.

Now it’s once again the Australian prime minister’s turn to test the limits of public morality, with his bull-headed rhetoric of “turning back the boats and saving lives” at all costs while downplaying allegations that Australian border officials paid wads of cash to people smugglers to return a boat and its passengers to Indonesia.

Labor says Abbott must address people smuggler pay claim to placate Indonesia Read more

The images that come out of this saga are so jarring as to be a study in irony. To wit: an Indonesian chief of police triumphantly holding a mobile phone with a picture of the money that was allegedly paid to the people smugglers. Indonesian vice president Jusuf Kalla saying that if the claim made against Australian officials was proven, it would amount to “bribery”, and that “it is wrong for a person to bribe, let alone a state”. This is the same vice-president, mind you, who in the documentary The Act of Killing was chillingly shown to have had no qualms in admitting that Indonesia needed “thugs” to run the country.

In other words, here are the very symbols of what sceptics often consider Indonesia’s chronic, if “culturally ingrained” affliction – the culture of underhandedness – suddenly gaining the moral upper hand on what is right and what is wrong, what is above board and what is plainly unethical. This perceived notion is an unfair and troubling one for Indonesians, sure, because it constitutes a cultural essentialism and often makes light of serious efforts at home to eradicate corruption.

The whole thing becomes doubly ironic when a layer of snigger is overheard among “unenlightened” Indonesians and hardened foreign expatriates, as they agree, in their own ways, that disdain of bribery is such a “western” concept, that paying people off is “a fact of life”.

“So what?” someone said to me over the phone just two days ago. “If that’s what it takes to make things work. Here, we pay people off all the time to get things done.” Many Indonesians, preoccupied with issues closer to home, think too much is being made over the latest incident when border security is clearly a serious threat and has proven a constant challenge for the Australian government.

Many Indonesians, preoccupied with issues closer to home, think too much is being made over the latest incident.

Meanwhile, the words that have come out of Tony Abbott’s mouth – the latest being how “incredibly creative” he found the border officials in responding to people-smuggling – could have come from any number of Indonesian news reports citing a typically insensitive state official on an otherwise grave matter. So could his rather shabby blaming of the Australian media for “promoting discord” just because they refuse to be his mouthpiece.

That the Australian prime minister has, rightly or wrongly, effectively closed the doors to boat people is evident. That he has, once again, outperformed himself in diplomatic finesse and headed towards where all superfluity inevitably ends up – in the “whatever” bin of our memory – should no longer surprise us. And anyway, should we care?

But that’s precisely the question: should we? We don’t have to agree with the Australian government’s handling of the crisis – let alone Abbott’s stomach-turning verbal flourish. But we have to remember that the issue is a highly muddled one to begin with. As global concern rises on the issue of migrant smuggling, not just off the coast of Australia but also in the Mediterranean and the southern US border, confusion still reins over definitions – the distinction between smuggling and trafficking, for instance.

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM)’s 1994 definition of human trafficking as including an illegal crossing of an international border, voluntary movement and financial gain for the trafficker, sounds a lot like the modern definition of migrant smuggling. The constant overlap makes awareness of the legal differences all the more pertinent as policies affecting one will affect the other.

As for asylum seeking: in terms of numbers, we are talking of a global crisis involving at least 50 million displaced people all seeking new homes and the number is growing at an alarming rate each year. The death toll of those lost at sea, as was recently reported by the Economist, should also give us pause. Then there are the harrowing individual stories.

Bribery is as much a display of a flawed, ineffective system as it is of a skewed morality.

Indonesians need only to turn to last week’s special edition of the news magazine Tempo to learn of the plight of the Rohingya of Myanmar – a people so heinously persecuted and cast out – to be haunted by the images of their suffering. That the Rohingya were welcomed and looked after in Aceh when countries like Malaysia refused to let them in gave real cause for pride and relief among many Indonesians I know. Yet governments remain in a fix regarding thousands still at sea, each with their own story: to let them in or to keep them out. As in the EU zone, reaching an equitable distribution of the share of refugees and migrants in our region is still a huge problem.

Indonesia and Australia, for all their bitter squabbling, need each other: not only are they linked by billions of dollars worth of trade and tourism, they also rely on each other in counter-terrorism and intelligence, criminal justice and border security. Like it or not, there will be no shortage of hiccups along the way, whether caused by policy flaws, policy inconsistency or sheer human error.

Those in Indonesia who have decried Abbott’s belligerence are one of two things: they are either on the side of compassion, as anyone should be, or they are jingoes. There is nothing new in this, particularly with regard to the latter. They are likely the same people, you’ll find, who bayed for blood – of Chan and Sukumaran, as well as the Australian government’s – during the whole death penalty ordeal. They likely threw their lot behind the childish coin-collecting movement to pay back the “debt” Indonesia supposedly owed Australia.

Yet in this case their displeasure is understandable. Uncurbed immigration feeds the growth of xenophobia, but so does aggressive and quarrelsome language. Especially, to put not too fine a point on it, if used by the leader of a neighbouring country who had, not so long ago, hounded the Indonesian leader and people to show compassion and humanity as if the lack of those very things were also part of the Indonesian national DNA.

Pay the boats: a cartoon about nothing at all | First Dog on the Moon Read more

But for all this lurid lapse into infantile posturing, there is something very sad and dangerous in allowing the bilateral spat to dominate what is already a very complex discourse. Bribery is as much a display of a flawed, ineffective system as it is of a skewed morality. As David Manne said on the BBC: the Australian government, like any government, owes its people an explanation of whether paying people smugglers is now policy.

It also owes international communities, in this particular case Indonesia, the same courtesy. It also has to acknowledge that paying people smugglers will most likely expose more vulnerable people – be they economic migrants who have no legal right to refuge, or, worse, those genuinely qualified for refugee status – to more danger.

Last but not least, what good would come of any of it if bribery brings more unwanted boats into Australian waters, their crew members all clamouring for their $5,000 share?