When the former prime minister Paul Keating produced a bilateral security treaty with Indonesia in 1995, his conservative opponents thought he had gone troppo.
They didn't criticise the idea of a treaty with Indonesia, focusing instead on the "secret negotiations" with then president Soeharto which had led up to it. It also became part of their story that Keating was tilting Australia away from its traditional Western alliances.
The treaty – between an Australian leader only months from election defeat and an Indonesian president two years from regime collapse – was repudiated by Jakarta in the 1999 East Timor crisis, possibly out of a misapprehension that Australia's Prime Minister, John Howard, was about to repudiate it first. More than a symbol of closeness, it had come to represent leaders out of touch.
Now symbolism is back in. Mr Howard will announce a "historic" security pact this month when he meets the Indonesian President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
The idea was floated by the Foreign Affairs Minister, Alexander Downer, soon after Dr Yudhoyono took office in October 2004, and has been discussed since.
After the sudden chill caused by Australia granting asylum to a group of 42 Papuans, it has been pushed to the fore as a sign of reconciliation.
Strangely for a Coalition that complained about secrecy in the Keating case, we are learning more about the treaty from Jakarta than from Canberra.
From what we are told, few Australians will disagree with the treaty, since it largely encompasses what the two countries are doing already, such as co-operating against terrorism. Nor will Australians object to professing support for Indonesia's territorial integrity, especially as the Indonesian Foreign Minister, Hassan Wirayuda, has made it clear Jakarta doesn't expect any gag on advocates of Papuan independence speaking out in Australia.
What will stick in the throats of fair-minded Australians is the political price of the treaty: shipping off future Papuan asylum seekers to dreary camps in Nauru or Manus Island, thus stripping away their rights to legal and administrative appeal under Australian refugee law. Whether more asylum seekers come our way will depend partly on the behaviour of Indonesian security forces and authorities in Papua, and partly on whether Papuans believe they need international publicity to get their grievances addressed.
The treaty's idea of deepening co-operation between the armed forces will also advance or falter with Dr Yudhoyono's reforms in the Indonesian military, the TNI. He has sidelined some of the more sinister generals, and the army has been surprisingly well behaved during the Aceh peace process.
However, the President has shelved proposals to remove the TNI's "territorial" role which allows it to parallel and supervise civil government. The plan of his Defence Minister, Juwono Sudarsono, a civilian, to wean the forces off their business activities – and the corruption that goes with them – may also be optimistic.
Still, most Australians will say "why not?" rather than "why?" to this treaty. The diplomatic roundabout still brings us back to the need for Australians and Indonesians to work on the relationship, and the treaty will help.