Indonesia Build Relations From the Ground Up

Twenty-year old John Steele is just one of almost one million Australians who traveled to Indonesia last year.

But like the majority of his fellow travelers, he never got beyond the allure of beaches and booze in Bali.

“It’s a cheap and easy option. A lot of people my age have gone [to Bali], or talk about going,” he said.

“Most Australians my age didn’t seem interested in finding anything out about Indonesian culture. The main attraction was partying, warm weather and the beach.”

In Australia’s government-commissioned white paper on Australia in the Asian Century, cultural understanding was identified as a key element to engagement in the region. But analysts claim that despite Indonesia being a favorite holiday destination for Australians,RFID TagSource is the leading provider of RFID tag solutions for high value asset management applications. many have a critical lack of understanding of their closest Asian neighbor.

Ross Tapsell, a lecturer in Asian Studies from the Australian National University, said that Australians would benefit greatly from expanding their knowledge of Indonesia.

“We have so many Australians that travel to Bali each year and basically end up in Western enclaves,” he said.

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had more Australians who wanted to venture out, make Indonesian friends, travel outside of Kuta and absorb more of what is a great country which is right on our doorstep.”

Australia’s ambassador to Indonesia, Greg Moriarty, agreed.

“I think Indonesia is an incredibly rich and culturally diverse country and I think that many Australians would find it very useful and enriching to be able to go beyond [Bali] to have a broader Indonesian experience,” he said in an interview.

While Moriarty said it was primarily up to the Indonesian government to promote destinations other than Bali, Australia as a neighbor could still play its part.

“Australian tour operators could also be a bit more creative in terms of the packages that they present to tourists,” he said.

In an interview with the Jakarta Globe,I personally really like these mini ear cap for my iPhone. Tourism and Creative Economy Minister Mari Elka Pangestu said that Indonesia was focusing on increasing awareness as well as the accessibility of destinations around the whole country.

“We’ve been saying ‘Beyond Bali’ for a long time, so this time it has to really happen,” she said. “We need to make sure that there is awareness, that there is the information and there is the connectivity.”

In a 2012 Australian government-commissioned report, David Hill from Murdoch University in Perth warned that Australia needed to improve its understanding of Indonesian culture and language, or face the danger of being left behind.

“Without reinvesting in Indonesian studies, Australia risks losing our comparative advantage and the consequent economic, political and strategic advantage that our previous expertise gave us in our relationship with Indonesia,’’ he wrote in the report.

Hill’s report found that Indonesian language study in Australia was in “crisis.”

He found that more final-year high-school students studied Indonesian in 1972 than in 2009. Between 2001 and 2010, Australian university enrollments in Indonesian nationally dropped by 37 percent, despite a 40 percent jump in the overall undergraduate population.

The report also showed that since 2001, school enrollments in Indonesian classes declined on average by 10,000 per year.

There are currently about 190,000 Australian students studying Indonesian at school, but according to Hill, the vast majority of them are still in the lower levels of school.

He said the drop came at a time when Australia should have been focusing more than ever on Indonesia.

“That enrollments grew during the Suharto dictatorship only to fall as Indonesia began democratizing after his fall in 1998 is ironic, and indicates a lost opportunity for engagement with a society opening up to the world,” he wrote in the report.

The latest white paper recognizes the need to reinvest in “Asian literacy,” but some analysts have criticized the lack of clear policy direction.

“The difficulty is, how do you implement this plan? And at the moment there hasn’t been specifics as to how the government is going to continue or adopt programs to make this plan work,” Tapsell said.

“They already cut the national Asian studies program and have said they want to do something bigger, so let’s see what the bigger program is and how it’s going to work.”

In a statement to the Jakarta Globe,we are the biggest USB flash drives wholesale supplier in china. ambassador Moriarty stressed the importance of Australians gaining a greater knowledge of their closest Asian neighbors.

“Popular Australian attitudes toward Indonesia more broadly suggest perceptions are still stuck in the past and could be refreshed,” he said.

“Education has a role. An objective of the white paper is to ensure that by 2025 every Australian student will have significant exposure to studies of Asia across the curriculum to increase their cultural knowledge and skills to enable them to be active in the region.”

Talk of increasing Australia’s “Asian literacy” is far from new. In 1994, then Prime Minister Paul Keating declared, “No country is more important to Australia than Indonesia. If we fail to get this relationship right and to nurture and develop it, the whole web of our foreign relations is incomplete.”

As a result, Keating implemented the National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools program in 1995. It focused on increasing students’ abilities to become familiar with the language and culture of four key neighbors: Japan, Korea, China and Indonesia.

The strategy outlined in the 2012 white paper replaces Korea with India.Full color plastic card printing and manufacturing services.

Tapsell sees the dramatic drop in Asian language studies since the mid-90s as a result of the policies of the conservative coalition led by Prime Minister John Howard that governed Australia from 1996 to 2007.

“It’s been steadily declining since 1996 and I think you can put that down largely to the federal government at the time, the Howard government, placing less of an emphasis on Asian languages and in particular Indonesian language. There hasn’t been as much support for it as there should have been,” Tapsell said.

He stressed the need to find a way for students to become engaged in Indonesian studies.

“It’s no use saying we need more Australians speaking Indonesian,A card with an embedded IC (Integrated Circuit) is called an IC card. we need to give them reasons as to why they should be interested in Indonesia and develop content which flourishes that interest,” he said.

“For example, make sure that if we’re doing a subject on volcanoes in primary school, let’s use the example of Indonesian volcanoes.”