More than any figure in the post World War II period, including any American president, President Soeharto, by his judgment, goodwill and good sense, had the greatest positive impact on Australia's strategic environment and, hence, on its history.

In the 40 years since he came to power in 1965, Indonesia has been the ballast in Southeast Asian stability and the foundation stone upon which ASEAN was built.

Soeharto took a nation of 120 million people, racked by political turmoil and poverty from near disintegration to the orderly, ordered and prosperous state that it is today.

In 1965, countries like Nigeria and Zimbabwe were in the same position as Indonesia then. Today, those countries are economic and social wrecks. By contrast, Indonesia is a model of harmony, cohesion and progress. And the principal reason for that is Soeharto.

We can only imagine what Australia's strategic position would be like if Indonesia's 230 million people degenerated into a fractured lawless state reminiscent of Nigeria or Zimbabwe.

For the last 40 years, we have been spending roughly 2 percent of GDP on defense -- about A$20 billion a year in today's dollars. That figure would be more like seven to eight times that, about A$150 billion today, if Indonesia had become a fractured, politically stricken state.

Had General Soeharto's New Order Government not displaced the Sukarno Government and the massive PKI communist party, the post War history of Australia would have been completely different. A communist-dominated Indonesia would have destabilized Australia and all of Southeast Asia.

So why have Australians regarded Indonesia so suspiciously, especially over the last quarter century, when it is evident that Indonesia has been at the fulcrum of our strategic stability.

Unfortunately, I think the answer is Timor and the willful reporting of Indonesian affairs in Australia by the Australian press.

That press has, in the main, been the Fairfax press and the ABC. Most particularly and especially The Sydney Morning Herald and to a lesser extent The Age.

This rancor and the misrepresentation of the true state of Indonesian social and economic life, can be attributed to the "get square" policy of the media in Australia for the deaths of the Balibo Five. The five Australian journalists who were encouraged to report from a war zone by their irresponsible proprietors and who were shot and killed by the Indonesian military in Timor.

This event was sheeted back to Soeharto by journalists of the broadsheet press. From that moment, in their eyes, Soeharto became a cruel and intolerant repressor whosework in saving Indonesia from destruction was to be viewed, and only viewed, through the prism of Timor.

Rarely did journalists ever mention that Soeharto was President for 10 years before he did anything about Timor. He was happy to leave the poverty stricken and neglected enclave in his archipelago to Portugal, with its 300 year history of hopeless colonization. Soeharto had enough trouble dragging Indonesia from poverty without needing to tack on another backward province.

But in mid 1975, Communist-allied military officers took control in Portugal and its colonies abroad were taken over by avowedly Marxist regimes. In Timor, a leftist group calling itself the Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of East Timor, or Fretilin, staged a coup igniting a civil war.

When Fretilin overran the colony by force, Soeharto's government became alarmed. This happened at the height of the Cold War. Saigon had fallen in April of that year. Fretilin then appealed to China and Vietnam for help. Fearing a "Cuba on his doorstep", Soeharto reluctantly decided on military intervention.

In his 33 years as President, he embarked upon no other "foreign" exploit. And he would not have bothered with Timor, had Fretilin not made the going too rough. Indeed, Ramos Horta told The Sydney Morning Herald in 1996 that "the immaturity, irresponsibility and bad judgment of the East Timorese provoked Indonesia into doing what it did". Xanana Gusmao also told anyone who would listen that it had been a "bad mistake" for Fretilin to present itself as a "Marxist" outfit in 1975.

But none of this stopped a phalanx of Australian journalists, mostly from the Fairfax stable and the ABC's Four Corners, from reporting Indonesian affairs from that time, such that Australians could only view the great economic transformation of Indonesia and the alleviation of its poverty and its tolerance primarily through the warped and shattered prism of Timor.

The Sydney Morning Herald even editorialized in favor of an Australian invasion of Timor, then Indonesian territory. That is, right up front about it, The Sydney Morning Herald, urged the Australian government to invade Indonesia. So rabid has Fairfax been about Indonesia and so recreant of Australia's national interest has it been.

Even as late as this week, The Herald claimed the achievements of Soeharto's New Order government "were built on sand", nominating Indonesia reeling from crisis to crisis after 1998 when The Herald knows that Soeharto did precisely the right thing in calling the IMF in to help and that the IMF, operating under U.S. Treasury prescriptions, kicked the country and Soeharto to pieces.

The decline in Indonesia after 30 years of 7 percent compound growth under Soeharto, had little to do with Soeharto and everything to do with the Asian financial crisis and the short sighted and ill informed IMF.

But more than that, Australian journalists knew but failed to effectively communicate, that not only did Soeharto hold his country together, he insisted that Indonesia be a secular state; that is, a Muslim country but not an Islamic or fundamentalist one. In other words, not an Iran.

Wouldn't you imagine that such an issue would be matter of high and primary importance to communicate to the Australian community? That on our doorstep, there is a secular Indonesian state and not a religious one, run by Sharia law. And wouldn't you, in all reasonableness, give Soeharto full marks for keeping that vast archipelago as a civil society unrepressed by fundamentalism?

The writer is former Australian Prime Minister.

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