Alexander Downer – With the death of former Indonesian foreign minister Ali Alatas, Australia has lost a good friend who was also a decent bloke.

Last week the Asian region lost one of its significant leaders, the former Indonesian foreign minister Ali Alatas. Gareth Evans and I worked for many years with Mr Alatas but for both of us much of our work with him revolved around the problem of East Timor.

Mr Alatas was urbane, professional, polite and interested in Australia. His passing is a sad moment for many of us.

Our media tend to concentrate on social developments and politics in America and Britain. There are Australian journalists based in Los Angeles, New York and Washington and there is a big Australian news contingent in London.

However, there are about 230 million people in Indonesia, we have a common maritime boundary of several thousand kilometres, it is the frontline for us in the war against Islamic extremism, it is the largest beneficiary of Australian foreign aid and it is the home of people-smugglers.

You don't hear as much about Indonesia in our media as you might expect. What you do hear is, in the main, bad: Terrorist threats, foolish Australians getting caught smuggling drugs and natural disasters. But not much else.

For the Australian Government, though, it has been, and still seems to be, at the forefront of our diplomacy.

After I became the foreign affairs minister in March, 1996, I very deliberately made my first overseas visit to Jakarta. It was a big event. Ali Alatas and his wife came to the airport to meet us. Their message was simple: "Australia's important to Indonesia and we want to get the relationship with a new Australian Government off to a smooth start."

The travelling journalists had other ideas. Always ready to plagiarise Labor's critical narrative of the Liberals, they assumed there would be a sharp deterioration in Australia's relations with Indonesia because their hero Paul Keating was gone. Not surprisingly, it was complete nonsense.

From that time onwards my dealings with Mr Alatas were professional and frank. He knew I was determined to put a major effort into building a broad relationship with Indonesia and, unlike many Indonesian political leaders of that time, he took the relationship with Australia very seriously.

Mr Alatas was, though, front and centre of Indonesia's East Timor policy. He'd borne the brunt of Australian criticism and protests after the so-called Santa Cruz or Dili massacre in 1991 and by the time I came on the scene he was developing the Indonesian policy of wide-ranging autonomy for East Timor – but not independence.

From that day in April, 1996, when I first met Mr Alatas at Soekarno-Hatta airport outside Jakarta, I told him that solving the East Timor problem was fundamental to building a strong and durable relationship between Indonesia and Australia.

We had our moments. In 1998 I told him his autonomy plan wasn't going to work. He didn't like it. He didn't like the Howard letter in late 1998 either, which constituted a revolution in Australia's East Timor policy. And after President B.J. Habibie said East Timor should decide its own future, Mr Alatas wanted that decision to be made by a hand-picked group, not by all the public in a referendum. In February, 1999, I told him that wouldn't work. A couple of months later he and his government recognised that only a UN-administered referendum would suffice. The rest is history.

Ali Alatas, in the end, was a product of the Soeharto era. He never believed in the Habibie East Timor policy and he tried to keep East Timor within Indonesia. But the thing about him was his professionalism. He may not have liked what Mr Habibie was doing or what we were saying and doing on East Timor but he managed to keep in line with his President and was always charming, always urbane and always calm.

What Mr Alatas did do was help make Indonesia the leading country of South-East Asia. Despite being the world's fourth most populous country and its largest Muslim nation, there's often been in international circles a sense that Indonesia has punched below its weight. That isn't true now and it wasn't when Mr Alatas was the foreign minister. In my time he was without doubt the doyen of Asian foreign ministers. Mr Alatas may not have been a household name in Australia but he should have been.

In recent years we have made unprecedented progress in building the relationship with Indonesia.

We agreed on the maritime borders between our countries, we worked together through the Asian economic crisis, we fought terrorism with great effect, until recently we clamped down on people-smuggling, we lead the region together in developing inter-faith dialogues and we worked together to provide humanitarian assistance after the 2004 tsunami. In 2006 we signed a groundbreaking bilateral security treaty, the Treaty of Lombok. From the ashes of East Timor in 1999 has emerged not only an independent East Timor but also an Indonesia which is a warm friend and strong partner of Australia.

When Mr Alatas was at the height of his powers, Indonesia was a dictatorship. Many Australians, without much justification, feared Indonesia. Since 1998 there has been a breathtaking transformation in Indonesia, from dictatorship to the world's third-largest democracy.

It's a wonderful thing for Australia that our largest neighbour has been transformed in such a dramatic way. And it makes nonsense of those patronising arguments about Muslims not being able to adapt to democracy.

Ali Alatas was there for much of that transformation. He was a friend of Australia and a decent bloke. We may have lost a good friend last week but Indonesia's quiet revolution to neighbourly democracy is here to stay.