A new security treaty between Indonesia and Australia would symbolise the increasingly close relationship between the two countries. The question is whether we really need such a symbol, when practical co-operation has yielded excellent results in the absence of one.

Thanks to the joint work of Indonesian authorities and the Australian Federal Police, 30 of the key Jemaah Islamiah operatives who planned and perpetrated the Bali bombing on October 12, 2002, have been rounded up, tried and sentenced. In a piece of especially good news on this front, we learned over the weekend that JI's spiritual leader, Abu Bakar Bashir, will be charged in connection with the Bali blasts which killed 202 innocent people, including 88 Australians along with the bombing outside the Jakarta Marriott last year, which claimed a further 12 lives. Australia's security co-operation with Indonesia includes $10 million in annual counter-terrorism aid, as well as education aid focused on countering the influence of radical Islamist colleges like the one run by Bashir.

As a piece of grand symbolism, a treaty is a good idea. And if the idea emanates from Indonesian president-elect Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, whose inauguration John Howard will attend on Wednesday, it would be churlish to resist the advance. But as the history of the last attempt to forge such an agreement between the two nations, which foundered on the shoals of Indonesia's brutality in East Timor, demonstrates, there are risks in attempting to steer two such different political cultures in the same direction. Rebels in the Aceh and Papua provinces still have the potential to arouse Indonesia's notorious Kopassus special forces to action that Australia would find unacceptable. While that can be contained under the present pragmatic relationship, under a treaty it could result in a full-blown diplomatic crisis.

The big difference between the context in which a treaty was envisaged during the 1990s, and now, is that Indonesia is a democracy. Partly as a result of that, instead of being sprung on us fully formed like the secret agreement nutted out between Paul Keating and president Suharto, this one can emerge naturally from the ongoing dialogue and co-operation between the two countries. An argument for a security treaty is that, like a trade agreement, it encourages the kinds of cultural and political exchange that will hasten the flowering of liberalism in Indonesia. Contrary to those who claimed the Howard Government could not chew gum with Washington and walk a co-operative road with Jakarta at the same time, relations between the two countries have gone from strength to strength. The question is whether trying too hard to speed that development carries a minor risk of derailing it.