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Youth action in the bilateral space
Neither Indonesian nor Australian millennials should need to be convinced of the potential in the relationship. However, support is still needed to reap the benefits from self-motivated youth action.
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Aerial view of Canberra city center. (Shutterstock/Yicai)
Y
oung Australians and Indonesians are taking up the bilateral cause and becoming the greatest champions of deeper, more meaningful engagement between our neighboring countries.
Indonesia’s millennial cohort receives far more media attention than any other generation in the archipelago. With a staggering 63.4 million Indonesians aged between 20 and 35 years, that’s hardly surprising.
For youth action in the Indonesia-Australia relationship, it’s a blessing. Australia’s population is far smaller and, amidst the competition for influence in Southeast Asia, Indonesia’s gaze does not often turn south towards Australia.
If we look at the bigger picture, there is also a significant cohort of emerging Indonesian leaders. An estimated 49 million Indonesians are currently aged between 10 and 19-years old. Engaging a portion of this generation to genuinely participate in the bilateral relationship will ensure the long-term robustness of youth action and involvement in this space.
In practice, this means moving beyond tertiary engagement towards high schools, with a focus on people-to-people relations, language skills and cultural engagement.
Programs like the BRIDGE School Partnerships, now in its 11th year, are an extraordinary example. The BRIDGE Program educates and trains teachers, and engages students through a range of online and in person activities.
This program expands beyond Indonesia-Australia into the Asia Pacific and is a model for intercultural education training across the region.
In Australia, we now have the first generation entirely educated following a reorientation of the regional order, with an increased emphasis on the importance of Asia-Australia relations.
For young Australian leaders today, the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) defined the era and forced a new reality.
The “Asian Century” former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating has spruiked for decades has fully matured for today’s young Australians. While this has, thus far, focused on East and occasionally South Asia, the reorientation of Australia’s focus towards Jakarta rather than London or Washington is inherently obvious for young Australians after a period book-ended by the GFC and Brexit.
Young people from both countries today benefit from the hard work of our predecessors. Neither Indonesian nor Australian millennials should need to be convinced of the potential in the relationship. However, support is still needed to reap the benefits from self-motivated youth action.
Government-led initiatives are increasingly important in supporting future young leaders. In this respect, the Australian government leads.
The strength of these programs is that they benefit both Australians and Indonesians: young Australians have a seemingly always-expanding array of options to study or gain professional experience in Indonesia through the New Colombo program, while Indonesia’s best and brightest students are eligible for the Australia Awards, supporting further study in Australia.
These opportunities are not just important at the individual level, but as the years go on and the alumni circle grows it will become even clearer that graduates and participants are far more invested in the bilateral relationship than their nonparticipating peers.
But there is still room for deepening that connection and utilizing these programs — particularly the New Colombo Plan — to secure the most benefits possible.
While the New Colombo Plan mobility program enjoys a sound uptake among undergraduate students in outbound mobility experiences, current restrictions in the mobility grant guidelines prevent students from staying in-country for a second period.
This is a significant gap in the current model as students who are in-country, engaged and seeking to develop their breadth of knowledge on Indonesia are required to return home, just at the “tipping point” where they could delve deeper into the relationship and to forging their own unique youth leadership networks.
For truly transformative youth action, long-term investment is needed over successive generations.
Government-led programs and initiatives shouldn’t be, and aren’t, the only venue for youth action in the bilateral relationship. In many ways, more informal networks — such as the Australia-Indonesia Youth Association or alumni groups through the Australian Consortium for ‘In-Country’ Indonesian Studies (ACICIS) — are the greatest show of strength among young Australians and Indonesians.
Last year’s devastating earthquakes in Lombok and then Palu, Central Sulawesi, demonstrated how quickly these networks can transform into bodies of action and take on leadership roles.
Young Indonesians who created their own social enterprises and foundations were able to lean on their Australian counterparts for emergency funding, by-passing complicated bureaucracy in Indonesia and moving faster than Australian-based organizations.
Another notable grassroots bilateral youth organization is the Conference of Australian and Indonesian Youth (CAUSINDY) which provides a platform for emerging leaders to create stronger bilateral relations. CAUSINDY differentiates itself in the Indonesia-Australia bilateral relations space by delivering an annual conference to bring together young professionals from Australia and Indonesia across a number of industries.
CAUSINDY also provides seed funding to successful CAUSINDY community projects which foster ties between young, emerging Australian and Indonesian leaders. An important, ongoing benefit of CAUSINDY lies in the engagement of its extensive alumni community.
These alumni, many of whom hold influential positions in their respective fields, are equipped with trusted networks which can be leveraged to foster stronger community, business and government cooperation.
These people-to-people connections are often discussed as secondary to traditional diplomacy and trade links, but the elevation of these networks and institutional backing where appropriate is essential to improving the bilateral relationship in the future.
Oft-repeated Lowy Institute survey results show a deep misunderstanding between the broader populations in Australia and Indonesia, but youth action is where the transformation begins.
The promotion of people-to-people links enhances intercultural understanding, and successively encourages diplomatic and trade links to the benefit of both countries.
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The writer is a Jakarta-based freelance journalist. She was part of the Australian delegation to CAUSINDY 2019.
