Traveling together

Looking at Indonesia on Google Maps, it would be hard to miss Australia. The top of the neighboring nation looms as a vast plain with just one major city in sight. Yet while modern maps reveal all corners of the globe, for many Indonesians and Australians, the two neighbors are still largely undiscovered countries.

Few Indonesians would know that Google Maps was designed and developed by Australians from an office in Sydney, not Silicon Valley. And most Australians would be equally unaware that Indonesia has the second-largest Facebook community — or that Indonesians tweet on Twitter more than anyone else in the world.

Just as the Internet has changed the way we view and interact with the world, it is time for Australians and Indonesians to take another look at each other and see old stereotypical images as clichés from the past.

Australia’s partnership with Indonesia is unique. For most of our histories no two neighboring nations have been more unlike. We differ in language, religion, population size, culture and legal systems. But we’ve been partners in many fields in the years since independence, and our paths are converging.

We share democracy as a political value — Indonesia was the only Southeast Asian country to rank as “free” in Freedom House’s global survey last year. And we work together in the Bali Democracy Forum to promote democracy because it is an ideal and a practice worth advancing.

We are members of the G20, the East Asia Summit and APEC — where leaders can together address the full suite of political, economic and security challenges.

And yet President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono rightly told the Australian Parliament last year of “the persistence of age-old stereotypes — misleading, simplistic mental caricatures that depicts the other side in a bad light”.

The President and our Prime Minister agreed to create a people to people dialogue to come up with concrete ways to overcome those stereotypes. That’s why for the first time ever, citizens from both countries are meeting in Jakarta today under the banner of “The Indonesia-Australia Dialogue” to look at ways we can take relations further.

Having been an Australian ambassador to Indonesia, I can safely say that diplomacy should not just be left to diplomats. The Australians at today’s Indonesia-Australia Dialogue come from business, science, government, academia and the media — a delegation of “citizen diplomats” who recognize Indonesia’s importance.

There are several areas ripe for collaboration between citizens of both countries.

For example, when Indonesia hosts the Southeast Asian Games next month, many expect Merah Putih to dominate the medal tally. It reflects a fresh focus on sports in Indonesia and the country’s emerging ranks of talented young sports people.

Many Indonesian athletes and teams already regard Australia, a global sporting power, as an accessible place to play and train — the Indonesian national basketball team is competing in Broome this weekend. And Australian soccer players are these days at home playing for clubs from Bintang Medan FC to Cendrawasih FC.

Much of this sporting collaboration has developed from nothing more than youthful, athletic energy and the support of a few sporting bodies. Much more should be done.

Indonesians are not just avid Facebook and Twitter users. They are also creators of business applications, games and new media. So are Australians. Over a quarter of the latest list of our 100 self-made millionaires aged under 40 have earned their way from IT or telecommunications businesses.

These entrepreneurs are taking advantage of Australia’s digital economy and infrastructure. Australia’s proximity as a market, with a cluster of smart companies with savvy people, can open up new channels for Indonesians wanting to do business.

It would help bottom lines immeasurably if more young Australians could do business with Indonesia in its own language. For the next generation of Australian business people to prosper in Indonesia and elsewhere in Asia, it will need a drastic re-investment by the Australian system in Asia literacy — including languages.

The return on this investment would be a deeper fund of mutual trust — the true foundation of any friendship. And as we map our way together through this Asian Century, it will be reassuring to know we are navigating with a friend.

The writer is one of the most accomplished Australian diplomats of his generation including as ambassador to Indonesia.