Australians are being urged to rethink the way they view Indonesia and recognise the country as a stable, pluralist democracy and not a hotbed of fundamentalist Islam.

Presenter: Sen Lam

Speaker: Doug Ramage, country representative for the Asia Foundation in Jakarta

Ramage: Well I think because the challenges that Indonesia faces today are not the challenges of a country we saw say five years ago. It's not a country which is balkanising or splitting at the seams, or in which radical views are taking over, rather it looks a lot more like Brazil, India or Mexico. In other words, large democracies grappling with fundamental development problems, namely poverty.

Lam: Yes, well your paper speaks of Indonesia being largely stable and you say is no longer balkanising. What about provinces like Aceh and Papua? They haven't exactly given up ambitions of autonomy or independence?

Ramage: Well, I think this is actually one of the most under acknowledged dimensions of Indonesia in the past five years, the degree to which through political means both crises Aceh and Papua on the eastern and western most edges of the archipelago have more or less been solved for the time being.

What I mean is that in Aceh we have the peace process which has resulted in directly elected provincial government for the first time, headed by the former separatist leaders and in Papua, direct local elections for the very first time in Indonesian history have elected provincial governors who seem genuinely popular in the eyes of the Papuan voters.

Lam: And yet the Papuan voters, those same voters accuse the TNI the Indonesian military of abuse?

Ramage: They do, and none of this means that abuses are not occurring. What it means though, is that citizens in Papua appear to see the system is legitimate. How do we know that? Papuans voted in overwhelming numbers in the last provincial elections in Papua. They were the first ever direct elections for governor. Turn out rates were if anything higher than other parts of Indonesia, and that alone indicates that its citizens believe the process is legitimate and the focus now from the Papuan Government tends to be on development. And what this has done as we say in the report it's more or less sucked the oxygen out of the independence movement in Papua.

Lam: What about the TNI itself, Indonesia's military? Does it still pose a threat to democracy in your view?

Ramage: I think that we cannot be sanguine about this question. We've seen democratic roll back all over the world and most recently in Thailand.

However, in Indonesia's case, I think we were all struck by the alacrity that the Indonesian armed forces were forced out of formal politics between 1999 and 2002. That the Indonesian military leadership no longer has a say in most issues of national life matters greatly. It's hard to game out a scenario in which they come roaring back, but we've seen again, we've seen this happen in other countries. But Indonesia as of now it's very hard to see how that could happen.

Lam: Well, as you heard in the introduction there, we have been warned not to just view Indonesia simplistically as a hot bed of Islamic fundamentalist and yet Islamic radicalism still resonates in the poorer rural regions. Is that no longer a cause of concern?

Ramage: Well, I think that radicalism resonates and remains an enormous cause of concern from purely a security perspective, but not from the perspective of radical voices or zealotry taking over the country if you will, which was the concern a number of years ago before Indonesia starting having all the direct local elections.

Because what we have seen when Indonesians have voted so often, they are been about 350 elections in the past three years. What we've seen is political parties which put forward and Islamist or Sharia based platform lose dramatically. In other words, to be an Islamist and pro-Sharia on the hustings in Indonesia is a guaranteed vote loser. So Indonesians by their ballots are showing that they want a mainstream secular nationalist kind of government. It doesn't mean that the security threat has disappeared though.

Lam: Mm. Finally Doug, do you think misconceptions about Indonesia might hamper Canberra's bilateral relationship with Jakarta?

Ramage: Well, I think the government, the bilateral relationship is actually in superb shape. It's been in good shape for sometime. The real disconnect though is more on the nation-to-nation relations, the people-to-people relations if you will in which, for example, last year a Lowy poll showed most Australians don't know that Indonesia's a democracy. So government-to-government relations are good, people-to-people relations are rather poor.