Former US president Barack Obama arrives back at Mechanics Bay after two day of golf in Northland.

OPINION: I've had the pleasure of sitting in a room with Barack Obama three times in my career. As someone who has an interest in the power of speeches and speechmakers, I can attest that he's one of the best you'll ever see.

He has enormous charisma and I can understand the excitement that his New Zealand visit whipped up.

But my focus is on Asia, and I couldn't help but be struck by the fact of the amazing amount of coverage given to someone who is an ex-president compared to a current president who visited New Zealand in the same week. That coverage speaks volumes about the real level of interest that New Zealand has in Asia.

That current president was Indonesia's Joko "Jokowi" Widodo, the leader of some 260 million people. He's the first Indonesian president to come from outside the political elite and the military, a heavy metal fan and a passionate vlogger. A recent episode features him boxing. He's a leader not short of interest.

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And for the purely economically focused, Indonesia is the only Southeast Asian country that belongs to the G20. It is projected by some to be the world's seventh largest economy by 2030 and by others to be the fourth biggest by 2050.

STUFF Indonesian President Joko Widodo gets an official welcome by Governor-General Dame Patsy Reddy at Government House, Wellington.

Even more striking a contrast to the Obama visit was the coverage received by Vietnam's Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc when he stopped by for a couple of days.

Phuc attended a business forum in Auckland with more than 300 business leaders and investors from the two countries, but did you read or hear anything about that?

Jokowi's visit did end up with a splash of media coverage, but this has mostly focused on the fact he didn't hold a press conference, and who was responsible for that oversight.

Other coverage focused on human rights issues in West Papua, a topic of controversy since the province formally became part of Indonesia in the 1960s.

It's understandable that the Papua region continues to be highlighted, but Indonesia is more than Papua. We didn't, for instance, hear much about the work Jokowi has been doing protecting secular principles in the constitution of the world's largest Muslim country.

SUPPLIED Executive director of the Asia New Zealand Foundation Simon Draper said the difference in media interest in the visits of a former US president and a current Indonesian president spoke volumes about New Zealand's attitude to Asia.

The Asia New Zealand Foundation knows from our Perceptions of Asia tracking research that Indonesia is one of the most poorly understood of any Asian countries.

In fact, the early results of our latest survey, to be fully released in May, show that fewer than one in five New Zealanders could correctly identify it as having a democratic political system.

New Zealanders don't have an understanding of Indonesia that allows them to put tricky issues into a wider context, in the same way as they can with the United States.

In the twittersphere, the odd person queried why New Zealand would even welcome the leader of a country that has the death penalty.

To which I'd reply that if New Zealand applied this standard to all countries that allowed the death penalty, we wouldn't be welcoming leaders from China, Japan, Singapore and the United States to name a few.

Let's be realistic about the reasons behind the visits of the leaders of Vietnam and Indonesia.

ELEANOR WENMAN/STUFF Indonesian president Joko Widodo arrived in Wellington on March 18 to a muted welcome compared to the razzmatazz surroundign the visit of former US president Barack Obama.

They stopped by New Zealand in the margins of the first Asean-Australia Special Summit. It's an event that shows Australia places increased importance on Southeast Asia. Australia achieved a new enhanced strategic partnership with Vietnam, and got support from Jokowi to join the Asean community.

What did we get out of these visits?

A couple of years back, I visited Indonesia as part of then-prime minister Sir John Key's business delegation.

Key was greeted by thousands of cheering children and media coverage from newspapers with readership in the millions. You would have thought that Key was the leader of 260 million people, rather than the other way around.

Here in New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern stopped en route to her state lunch with Jokowi to collect a Greenpeace petition calling for an end to oil and gas exploration, saying she was delaying her journey because it was important to accept the petition in person.

In a funny way, as a politician Jokowi probably completely understood the domestic politics of this. But what of his accompanying senior officials? You know, the ones who actually make the decisions over New Zealand beef access or our halal certifications? What would it have signalled to them – from a culture where the concept of "face" is significant?

My real question though is, are we a future-focused country or would we rather look back to the past and countries that we feel a bit more comfy with? Did New Zealand value the opportunity for better interactions that these relatively rare high-level visits presented?

I mean, who knows, maybe Jokowi or Phuc would have liked a round of golf too. And Jokowi did tweet about New Zealand to his 10 million followers, free of charge.

Simon Draper is the executive director of the Asia New Zealand Foundation.

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