Rod Brazier presented his credentials as Australia’s ambassador to Indonesia to President Prabowo Subianto in Jakarta on May 6 last year.
In terms of the Australia-Indonesia relationship, the event was sandwiched perfectly between the signing of the Australia Indonesia Defence Cooperation Agreement in August 2024 and the Treaty on Common Security in December last year.
Announcing Brazier’s appointment at the end of 2024, Foreign Minister Penny Wong observed that it was “impossible to overstate Indonesia’s importance to Australia”.
“A strong and prosperous Indonesia is vital to the peace, stability and prosperity of our region,” she said.
We have re-strengthened our economic ties, and, significantly, our defence and strategic ties with Indonesia in recent years and the shock that went round the globe with the closing of the Strait of Hormuz in March only highlights the importance of such ties in the region.
Remember our prime minister’s lap around South-East Asia on the search for more energy and fertiliser supplies a few months ago? And his reminder to our near neighbours at the time that it really is a two-way street between their economies and ours, particularly for resources?
The world is making a lot more local and dense trade and diplomatic ties in the Trumpian world. Whether or not countries walk from the United States — always the extreme and unlikely journey — they are just quietly rewiring and reinforcing bilateral connections.
Yet despite the worthy rhetoric about the significant of Indonesia to Australia, we seem to have only regressed in our focus on our nearest large neighbour.
Investors are nervous about the contradictions in Prabowo Subianto’s economic strategy. (AAP: Lukas Coch)
Fears of another Asian financial crisis
Despite two-way trade being at record highs, despite the closer defence ties, and despite one island in Indonesia helping making it Australia’s top destination for short term travel, news desks in Australia don’t seem to rate it very much.
“Bombs, bongs and boats” — is the way some jaded Jakarta correspondents describe their bosses’ interest in Indonesia.
Through much of this year, there has been a major tremble going through the Indonesian economy which, at times, analysts have feared might presage another Asian financial crisis.
Just this week, Bloomberg reported that the three biggest foreign banks in Indonesia have shipped around $US640 million ($920 million) of their earnings out of Southeast Asia’s largest economy since 2024 “as they pare exposure amid President Prabowo Subianto’s increasingly state-focused economic policies”.
“The Indonesian units of Citigroup Inc., Standard Chartered Plc and HSBC Holdings Plc remitted a total of 11.5 trillion rupiah ($US640 million) over the last two years, slightly exceeding their combined profits for the period, according to an analysis of their financial statements,” Bloomberg said.
There have been other alarming signs.
The Indonesian rupiah has depreciated “a lot” against the US dollar — to more than 18,000 rupiahs to one US dollar — the weakest point in its history, weaker than during the Asian Financial Crisis.
Currencies fall when more people are selling them than buying them.
In February this year, trading on the Indonesian stock exchange was briefly suspended after a two day sell off saw an 8 per cent drop in the market, worth an estimated $US 80 billion ($115 billion).
Overall the stock market has lost about a third of its value since the start of the year — making it one of the worst performers globally.
What’s making investors nervous are the contradictions in Prabowo’s economic strategy and how his administration deals with them: it aims for 8 per cent annual growth (compared to around 5 per cent recently).
But significant capital outflow has forced the central bank to lift interest rates (which slows growth) and the government has been mostly reluctant to cut back on the president’s expensive pledges to deliver a multi-billion dollar school meal program as well as fuel subsidies.
Indonesia has also imposed tighter export controls on some goods in the name of “resource nationalism”.
As analyst James Guild wrote in The Diplomat this week there is always a tension between state and market in Indonesia.
“With the current administration, we are seeing a sharper turn toward state intervention and economic nationalism and this is causing a strong market reaction,” he said.
Committee chair Tim Watts reflected on investments like school language and exchange programs, as well as university courses in Asian studies and languages. (ABC News: Matt Roberts)
Relevant to Australia’s interests
How this all develops is of significant interest to Australia in the short term and the longer term.
Which brings us back to Rod Brazier.
Ambassador Brazier speaks fluent Indonesian.
That’s because, as a young chap, he spent six months learning it in Makassar and living with an Indonesian family.
He then did an honours degree in Asian studies at Griffith University.
That makes him something of a dying breed.
Remember when Paul Keating talked about greater engagement in Asia? Or Kevin Rudd pushed for more Asian languages in Australian schools?
Well, the direction of our studies and engagement in Asia have only seemed to go backwards.
The grand vision at one point might have been an Australian population that had an awareness of our Asian neighbours, and all the opportunities they presented.
But now the problem is now rather more existential: will we even have enough Indonesian-speakers, or for that matter Mandarin speakers, or Japanese speakers to fill the ranks of our diplomatic corps in the future?
Will we have any deep academic knowledge of what is happening in our own region?
The report found language subjects have faced a steady decline in Australian education. (ABC News: Lachlan Bennett, file)
Language enrolments falling
The House of Representatives standing committee on education this week handed down its report into “Building Asia capability through the education system and beyond”.
Committee chair Tim Watts reflected on the long investment made by — and for — our diplomats like Brazier: school language and exchange programs; university courses in Asian studies and languages.
“These steps led them to be at the forefront of our engagement with the region and to make an enormous contribution to our nation’s security and prosperity in Asia”, Watts said.
But the committee is warning that “school and university language programs, in-country exchange and immersion programs, Asian studies courses at our universities —all of these stages in Australia’s Asia capability pipeline are now facing an existential crisis”.
“Australia still has the people and the knowledge to make our own way in Asia today. But the school language programs and university courses that produced them are closing, one by one,” it warned.
“To ensure Australian self-reliance in Asia in challenging and contested times, we need to act to preserve the institutions that build our Asia capability.”
The numbers are indeed staggering.
Domestic enrolments in South-East Asian languages at Australian universities have fallen by 75 per cent between 2005 and 2024.
“Barely 500 of the one million domestic Australian university students are studying Indonesian language, fewer than when Menzies was prime minister”, the committee’s report says.
“The situation is even more dire in our schools. Just 3.3 per cent of Australian Year 12 students studied a priority Asian language in 2023, down from 4.7 per cent at the time of the Australia in the Asian Century White Paper (2012).”
“The number of Year 12 Indonesian students across Australia fell from 1,160 in 2010 to 486 in 2024.
“In Queensland, Indonesian is already functionally extinct. Over the past 15 years, only two schools have consistently taught a Year 12 or combined Year 11 and 12 class in Indonesian. In 2026, just four students across the state were projected to sit a year 12 Indonesian exam.”
The committee’s report notes there has been a multitude of earlier reports that have urged government strategies to help Australia make its way in Asia.
But it says that “while Asia has grown more important to Australia during this time, governments from both sides of politics have not met the challenge set by these reports”, which will require “sustained national policy focus over the long term”.
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An incentive to study language without culture
The committee heard two justifications for why nothing had to be done about this.
One was AI translation tools which, it is claimed, will make language learning redundant. This overlooks the fact that relationship building actually needs just a bit of contextual and cultural expertise.
And it is perhaps worth noting here how government policies with different agendas can often destroy good intentions.
Independent MP Kate Chaney noted in the committee’s report how the Morrison government’s ‘Job-Ready’ graduates package worked.
(Job ready restructured university fees to cut the costs of some degrees in areas like STEM subjects while doubling or even tripling fees for arts, law and business. It felt like there may have been just a tad of woke-smacking going on in the policy process. It was a singular failure: it turns out that people study things they are interested in, not what they can afford).
Chaney noted Job Ready did actually lower the student fee contribution for foreign language courses, but “it simultaneously raised costs for Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) degrees, increasing the maximum student contribution for the latter from $6,804 to $14,500.
“The result is a purported financial incentive for students to study language without culture, precisely the opposite of genuine Asia capability,” she said.
“Deterring students from HASS study reduces the pipeline into Asian language and area studies programs.
“It weakens the institutional sustainability of programs in history, politics, international relations, linguistics and cultural studies, which produce precisely the kind of deep regional expertise this report identifies as critical to Australia’s national interest.”
“Targeted investments in language programs, teaching pipelines and in-country experiences will have limited effect if the underlying funding structure continues to signal that understanding Asia’s societies, cultures and politics is not worth students’ time or money.”
The other justification put to the committee was that the Asian-Australian diaspora would solve the problem.
Yet our universities and schools don’t even give communities an opportunity to learn their heritage language. Only two Australian universities, for example, offer courses in Hindi.
It’s not just Indonesian or Hindi that are in trouble. The language and cultural expertise in China — our largest trading partner — is also fading.
It only becomes more important that we have people like Rod Brazier who are competent to protect our interests in the future if we don’t seem that keen as a nation to understand the people and places around us.
Laura Tingle is the ABC’s Global Affairs Editor.