Sam Roggeveen is certainly right to praise the achievement of an Australia-Indonesia Code of Conduct.
There is, however, an additional point to be made. The ambiguity of the text, which Sam says is mutually beneficial, exposes the nature of the negotiations: Australia gave away nothing, and Indonesia had to back down from its initial position.
President Susilo Bambang Yodhoyono wanted to sort this out before his term ends in October, so he was under some time constraint, while the Australian negotiators have demonstrated by their 'sit on your hands and wait for the storm to blow over' attitude that they see no urgent need to fix the relationships with our close neighbour.
This outcome has two drawbacks. First, it confirms the commonly held Indonesian view that Australia is characteristically sombong ('arrogant'). More seriously, it shows that intelligence policy-making is still in the hands of the people who got us into trouble in the first place. It was a serious lack of judgment that had us listening to the telephone conversations of SBY's wife (and members of the Cabinet who were not sensible targets for this sort of operation, such as the Minister of Finance). This lack of judgment is, unfortunately, all too common. It was demonstrated again by the attempts to bug the Timor border discussions, to the benefit of Australian commercial interests.
This agreement would have been more beneficial still if it had demonstrated that the Canberra intelligence community has learned something from its mistakes.
Photo courtesy of DFAT.
