Lindsay Murdoch – When Australian Prime Minister John Howard visited Jakarta six months ago, Indonesians held high hopes that their just-installed President, Megawati Sukarnoputri, would quickly oversee urgent reform of her country's economy, military and legal and political systems.
People were fed up with months of street protests and political instability under the rule of the erratic Muslim cleric Abdurrahman Wahid.
But if floodwaters that have inundated Jakarta ease in time to allow Mr Howard to make a scheduled three-day visit to the country starting today, he will find that Mrs Megawati has made little headway in implementing the hoped-for reforms.
"I don't see much happening at all," said Harold Crouch, an Australian academic who heads the Jakarta office of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. "We no longer see street demonstrations. Nobody is trying to bring down the President, because there is no obvious successor. But what we are seeing is a basic holding operation."
To be fair, analysts say, Mrs Megawati faces daunting problems not of her making. Indonesia's economic crisis – now in its fifth year – has left her administration with dramatically scaled back resources. Servicing a national debt that is nearly 100 per cent of GDP leaves little money to implement government policy.
But Mrs Megawati has remained largely silent and appears increasingly disengaged as costs rise, exports drop, investment plummets and unemployment soars. She refuses journalists' requests for interviews and protocol dictates she cannot be questioned in public.
The country is having trouble serving its $US140 billion in foreign debt, restructuring banks, auctioning debtors assets and privatising state companies. Mrs Megawati's administration has disappointed many observers because of its failure to start to tackle problems that continue to scare away foreign investors, especially the country's weak legal system and endemic corruption.
Only a handful of the family and cronies of the corrupt former president Soeharto have been brought to justice. Despite the promises, no-one has yet been prosecuted in Indonesia for the rampage in East Timor in 1999. A special court to hear Timor cases has only just been appointed.
In Aceh, security forces are continuing a brutal crackdown on dissent similar to past campaigns that made the Acehnese even more hostile towards Jakarta's rule.
Military reforms that Mr Wahid tried to implement have stalled. In Papua (formerly Irian Jaya), the Government has still to form an independent investigation into the murder last November of the independence leader Theys Eluay, further alienating the indigenous population at a time that Jakarta has put a generous autonomy package on the table.
Worse, Mrs Megawati's administration is being increasingly seen by the rest of the world as the weak link in the war on terror in South-East Asia, despite protests by Indonesian officials that people cannot be arrested without hard evidence.
In other words, Mr Howard's visit comes at a time Mrs Megawati is coming under growing criticism at home and abroad. Observers expect him to publicly back her during the visit.
Indonesian officials have made it clear that talks between the leaders will not be dominated by the problem of asylum seekers. Mrs Megawati's Government insists the problem must be dealt with at an international level.
A meeting of 35 nations to be hosted by Australia and Indonesia this month is expected to discuss a regional approach to the asylum seekers crisis. Observers say the meeting, scheduled to be held in Bali, could become a watershed in the Howard Government's often-troubled relationship with Indonesia.
A workable action plan to stem the flow of asylum seekers and help the Megawati administration cope with the several thousand who are stranded in Indonesia could rebut criticism that Australia and Indonesia cannot work closely together for mutual benefit, observers say.
And unlike past years, East Timor has largely been removed as an issue that dogged relations between the two countries. The Indonesian Army has stopped incursions by militiamen in West Timor into East Timor, where Australian troops remain dug in along the border. Genuine efforts are being made to clear the West Timor camps of East Timorese refugees. And later this month the first meeting of its kind between Australia, Indonesia and East Timor will discuss ways to improve co-operation between the three neighbours.