“We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances under which they come” perfectly encapsulates one of the privileges of sovereignty. Bad things happen when nations fail to observe the rights and responsibilities of their own sovereignty and that of others.

‘Sovereign’ is a hugely complex thing to stuff into a slogan like Operation Sovereign Borders - but such is the quality of our domestic politics.

Listen: Chief political correspondent Karen Middleton says asylum policy is expected to dominate Jakarta talks

Sovereignty came relatively easily to Australia. All we really had to do was declare terra nullius, nut out a few rules, and hey presto, we’ve been a nation since 1901. We did have a spot of bother with the Japanese during WWII and we do have an unfortunate tendency to invest a bit too much trust in the United States, but by and large we haven’t been kept awake at night with anxiety over our sovereignty.



Indonesia’s experience couldn’t be more different. It’s been more like Aboriginal Australia’s experience than white Australia’s - and is just as sensitive to paternalism and threats to its autonomy.



Historical context

The Netherlands and Dutch East India Company had been doing business in and around the Indonesian archipelago since the 16th Century, but by the 18th everybody was in on the act and the Dutch decided to claim some island territory and build permanent settlements. That was formalised over the next hundred years and Indonesia became known as the Dutch East Indies. Portugal got Timor but didn’t take its territorial stake as seriously.



Up until that point the people of the archipelago had never understood themselves to be one people, or one anything. They were a series of independent islands, each with its own set of fiefdoms and inter-tribal squabbles, but nevertheless trading, having babies and the usual things human beings in close proximity do. The Dutch launched a series of cruel and brutal invasions of individual islands followed by cruel and brutal rule. They also introduced the notion of singularity, so for the first time the Indonesian people understood themselves and their archipelago as one entity. That new understanding inevitably fed into the various pockets of resistance becoming a unified fight against occupation.



Meanwhile, millions died of starvation and deliberate slaughter.



The Japanese invasion during WWII was even worse for the locals who have their own stories of Japanese brutality. Japanese propaganda hammered the empire message, but for the Indonesians that further entrenched their unified identity so that after the war, when the Dutch thought to reclaim the territory, Indonesians were culturally prepared for independent nationhood. Geography, unity and sovereignty had as much to do with the invasion of East Timor and West Papua (Irian Jaya) as anything else from an Indonesian point of view.



Millions died on the way to Indonesian sovereignty. Millions of those died within living memory. While we squabble over whether $100,000 means rich, significant chunks of the Indonesian population live in poverty. Love or loathe an Australian Prime Minister of your choice, but we have never lived under anything like Suharto. And the arrival on our shores of a few damp asylum seekers does not compare with invasion and occupation in Indonesian experience.



Our current, popular understanding of sovereignty in relation to asylum seekers was largely dreamt up by John Howard in response to Pauline Hanson and One Nation.

The Abbott government’s current diplomatic difficulties with Indonesia are the result of this confection and its rabbit-out-of-a-hat embrace of sovereignty, with a failure to appreciate the hard earned and culturally embedded meaning of sovereignty for Indonesia. All for the sake of pure politics.

That difference alone might constitute a “passing irritant” but Indonesia has cause for further concern of a more pragmatic nature.



Diplomacy

Only a decade ago John Howard mused about pre-emptive strikes in neighbouring countries, and last year we learned Darwin would host a new US Marine base. What this could mean for our new Jakarta-centred foreign policy is anybody’s guess. I daresay Indonesia would like to know, along with the rest of the Asia Pacific. In that context, Australia has now relocated the asylum seeker issue from the Immigration arena to a Defence one.



Last year Australia allocated around $540 million to various aid programs in Indonesia in health, education and infrastructure projects. That’s aside of trade and the various private and government investments made in things like tourism, live cattle export and programs revolving around policing, military training and terrorism. The disappearing of AusAID into the DFAT labyrinth is an unfriendly shift away from the concrete and observable actions involved with the interests of the Indonesian nation and its people, to the shadowy activities of a notoriously secretive department beholden to nobody.



In this context Julie Bishop is trying to argue that Indonesia has misunderstood the Abbott Government’s asylum seeker policies, Indonesia’s powerful foreign minister accidentally made details of their meeting public, and Alexander Downer has helpfully chipped in with his “pious rhetoric” remark.



A new prime minister making Jakarta his first international visit may be an important symbolic gesture, but at this point it’s a necessity rather than a choice, and all a bit awkward and embarrassing. The Abbott government seems to be pretending that this is a continuation of the Howard Golden Era, erasing all traces of events between 2007 and now, but it’s not 2006, Tony Abbott is not John Howard, and Julie Bishop is not Alexander Downer. Where Howard was able to manufacture the ‘threat’ of boat arrivals from nothing, the Abbott government has inherited an issue with a long, tragic and difficult history.



Welcome to your new reality, Prime Minister.

Lyn Calcutt doesn’t have a blog and didn’t quite finish her PhD. Politically, she knee jerks to the left but usually ends up in the centre once she calms down. This piece was orginally published on AusOpinion.com.

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