President Yudhoyono's visit highlights Australia-Indonesia friendship

Mar 9, 2010, 1:24 GMT

Sydney - Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono arrived Tuesday in Australia for a 48-hour visit that will see the recently re-elected leader of the world's fourth most populous nation address Parliament and sign a pact on people-smuggling.

It is Yudhoyono's second official visit since the 1994 election that brought him to power and highlights the normalcy that Indonesia's embrace of democracy has brought to bilateral relations.

Suharto, the military strongman whose exit in 1998 raised the curtain on democracy, visited only once during his 32-year rule.

Yudhoyono, who began a new five-year term in September, will become the first Indonesian leader to have the honour of addressing Parliament in Canberra.

He is expected to sign an agreement that would see people- smuggling become a criminal offence in Indonesia and those people- smugglers caught and prosecuted in Australian courts given greater rights.

Corruption in Indonesia has allowed it to become a staging post for people from elsewhere whose only way to enter Australia is to pay for an illegal passage on an Indonesian vessel and claim refugee status on arrival.

Sri Lankans, Afghans and Iraqis have been the most prominent nationalities in the 20 boats that have arrived so far this year.

With an election due in 2010, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is keen to get Yudhoyono's help to staunch the flow and neutralize people- smuggling in the coming campaign.

'We're at the highest rate of arrivals per month since boat arrival records have been kept, and if it keeps on this track we'll have over 100 (boat) arrivals this year and well over 5,000 people,' opposition Liberal Party immigration spokesman Scott Morrison said.

Morrison has accused Rudd of twisting Yudhoyono's arm to get him to stop boats coming, arguing that it should be Canberra taking action to make Australia less attractive to migrants pursuing new lives in a wealthy country.

'Kevin Rudd has been looking for an Indonesian solution so he doesn't have to come up with an Australian solution,' Morrison said.

Immigration Minister Chris Evans looked to legislation that would mandate long prisons sentences for those whom Indonesian authorities catch ferrying people to Australia.

'They have certainly made every effort to disrupt people-smuggling activities, but it's true that successful prosecution and deterrence is more difficult without that legislation,' he said. 'We think it would make a huge difference if we were able to have them prosecute people smugglers in Indonesia.'

Rudd will also be badgering Yudhoyono to show clemency to Australians caught trafficking drugs in Indonesia and given the death sentence.

Julian McMahon, the lawyer representing two of the three convicted Australian drug smugglers now under sentence of death in Bali, is arguing for Indonesia to abandon capital punishment entirely.

'Indonesia currently has a different view, but it's a matter often debated in Indonesia,' he said. 'I'm hopeful that Indonesia may take a leadership role in the region in this debate, in eventually bringing an end to the death penalty.'

Australian National University politics professor Hugh White is among those calling for Australians not to view Indonesia as a ramshackle country that only poses problems and start seeing it as a big neighbour whose political and economic dynamism brings opportunities.

The former senior defence bureaucrat said Indonesia's economy would one day overshadow Australia's and that people should prepare themselves for that shift in the balance of the relationship.

'We have always been much richer and therefore much stronger than any of our neighbours, and we assume we always will be,' White said. 'Even between countries with much in common, changing places on the power ladder is an edgy business.'

After spells in Canberra and Sydney, Yudhoyono will visit Papua New Guinea.