Matthew Moore, Jakarta – When you're talking tar, few cigarettes can match it with Indonesia's kreteks, the aromatic tobacco and clove mix preferred by 90 per cent of smokers here.

The most potent full-flavour cigarettes available in Australia these days have 14milligrams of tar and 1.4mg of nicotine. But in Indonesia the Government has decided high tar will stay.

A local cigarette manufacturer produced a table this year listing kretek cigarettes' tar figures. Gudang Garam tops the list at 53.2mg of tar. Most are in the middle and high 40s, with one less than 30mg of tar.

It's not just the cancer-causing tar, or the nicotine levels of well over 2mg, that worry health authorities. Eugenol, a substance in cloves, compounds the effect of the tar, said Dr Anhari Achadi, an adviser to the Health Minister.

Also, the Indonesian health policy adviser for the World Health Organisation, Sarah Barber, said more and more men in particular are taking up smoking.

The Government told cigarette manufacturers to reduce the tar and nicotine content in cigarettes to a maximum of 20mg of tar and 1.5mg of nicotine within three years. After protests, the regulation was replaced in 2000 giving manufacturers years more time.

This week, the Government walked away from that regulation and said it would scrap tar and nicotine reductions even though the regulation was not due to take effect for four years.

Tulis Abadi, of the Indonesian Consumer Protection Association, said elections in April next year are the reason the Government acted now.

Many of the cigarettes are hand made, so reducing tar and nicotine content requires new types of tobacco, new ways of mixing tobacco and possibly the use of filters. The industry found it easier to politicise the issue, threatening mass lay-offs of farmers and factory workers rather than adapt to the regulation, he said.

While it was negotiating this surrender last month, a group of Indonesian Government health officials was in Geneva signing up to the framework convention on tobacco control.

To have any effect, Indonesia's Parliament would have to support the framework's anti-smoking measures, such as publishing tar and nicotine content figures on packets, a prospect that now seems a long way off.