Look what happened to us in Bali at the hands of a handful, literally a handful, of Islamic fundamentalists. Imagine the turmoil for Australia if the whole 230 million of Indonesia had a fundamentalist objection to us.

But this jaded bunch of Australian journalists could only report how Soeharto was corrupt because his son Tommy, might have elbowed his way into some carried equity with an American telephone company or his daughter something with a road builder.

True as those generalizations might have been, in terms of the weight of Australia's interests, the deeds of Soeharto's public life massively outweigh anything in his private affairs.

I got to know Soeharto quite well. He was clever and utterly decisive and had a kind view of Australia. The peace and order of his country, its religious and ethnic tolerance and the peace and the order of Southeast Asia came from his goodwill towards neighboring states and from his wisdom. He was self effacing and shy to a fault. One had to tease him out of himself to get him going, but once got going, his intellectualism took over.

Soeharto lived in what we would call in Australia a rather old and shabby McMansion in Jakarta. I have been there on a number of occasions. He lived as simply as anyone of his high standing could live.

But Time magazine claimed that Soeharto has stashed away US$30 billion-odd, as if those ning nongs would know, presumably so he could race off to live it up in Miami or in the Bahamas. Errant nonsense. Soeharto was an Indonesian who was always going to remain an Indonesian. He lived a simple life and could never have changed that.

I do not doubt that his rapacious family had the better of him and got away with lumps of capital that they had not earned. Soeharto was a disciplined leader, but not a disciplined father. But to compare him with the likes of Marcos is nothing short of dastardly.

The descriptions of Soeharto as a brutal dictator living a corrupt high life at the expense of his people and running an expansionist military regime, are untrue. Even Soeharto's annexation of Timor was not expansionist. It had everything to do with national security and nothing to do with territory.

Like all leaders, Soeharto had his failings. His greatest failing was to underestimate the nature of the society he had nurtured. As his economic stewardship had led to food sufficiency, education, health and declines in infant mortality, so too those changes had given rise to a middle class as incomes rose. Soeharto should have let political representation grow as incomes grew. But he distrusted the political classes.

He believed that they would not put the national interest first, had no administrative ability and were utterly indecisive, if not corrupt. He told me this on a number of occasions. He would not let the reins go. Partly because he did not want to lose them, partly because he really had no one to give them to.

Soeharto's problem was he had too little faith in his own people, the very people he cared for most.

Whatever political transition he may have wished to have had, it all blew up on him with the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998. He had no democratic transition in place and in the economic chaos, political forces wanted him to go.

In January 1998, nearly two years after I had left the Prime Ministership of Australia, at my own initiative and my own expense, I flew to Jakarta to see him the day he signed the IMF agreement with the IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus.

The IMF had tragically overplayed its hand the previous November and Soeharto was giving it a chance to dig itself out of a hole. He had a small window of opportunity. I thought that as a former head of government who was on friendly terms with him, I at least owed him advice of a kind I knew he would never get inside Indonesia: To take the opportunity of the IMF interregnum to say that he, Soeharto, would contest the next election but that he would not complete the term. That he would stay long enough to see the IMF reforms into place and then hand the presidency over to his vice president.

Had he taken this advice, the process of political transformation would have been completely orderly. And a new administration could set up the organs of democracy.

I discussed this issue with Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore and Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, both of whom had Soeharto's and Indonesia's best interests at heart. Both gentlemen believed that I was in a better position to broach this subject with President Soeharto than either of them.

For two hours I had President Soeharto in his house with his State Secretary, Moerdiono and his interpreter Widodo. Fifteen minutes into the conversation when I was making the case why he should step down, he stopped Widodo's translation and took my advice in English directly. Moerdiono said to me in an aside at the door, "I think you have got him".

Soeharto followed me to the door, put his arms around my shoulders and said "God bless you" as I left. As it turned out, I didn't quite have him, and he hung on thinking he could slip through one more time.

But the crisis and the behavior of the IMF with the American Treasury had marooned him. Completely determined to act constitutionally, he turned over his singular power, at his own initiative, to his Vice President to avoid any upheaval of the kind Indonesia had experienced during earlier transitions.

The new president, Habibie then, by all due process, picked up the reins of government to deal with the ongoing financial reconstruction and the long process of democratization.

When the Attorney General Robert McClelland and I arrived in Indonesia for his funeral last Monday, we drove the 30 odd kilometers from the airport at Solo to the mausoleum where he would be buried along side his wife. For not one meter of those 30 odd kilometers, was there no person present.

In some places they would be six and eight deep, all holding their baskets of petals to throw at his courtage. They all knew they were burying the builder of their society and all felt the moment.

How many Australian leaders would have a million or so people to grieve for them beside the roadway? Soeharto's funeral was a tribute to what his life truly meant. I felt honored to have been there but more than that, to have known him.

The writer is former Australian Prime Minister.

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