John Birmingham – What was Bill Leak thinking last weekend? There he was, a senior diplomat, respected authority on Australian foreign relations, widely known to have the ear of John Howard and the autonomy to pronounce on government policy without fear of contradiction, and in a fit of madness he throws it all away just to... Oh, sorry. That's right. He's none of those things. He's a cartoonist. In other words, a professional heretic blessed with artistic flair, a sense of humour and no respect for hypocrisy or privilege. Far from being the voice of Canberra, he is an implacable and pitiless mocker of almost everything that happens there.

Yet, watching the "two dogs" fiasco unfold this week, you could be forgiven for thinking that Leak is some high official who has somehow betrayed us all and plunged our relationship with Jakarta into desperate crisis.

Lost in all the huffing and the puffing are a few uncomfortable truths. This is merely the latest episode in what will be a never-ending series of "oh no" moments with our impossible neighbour to the north. And as much as we have to learn about managing that relationship, Jakarta has an even longer road to travel before it comes close to understanding the nature of its impossible neighbour to the south.

Still, a close examination of the two dogs affair could lead you to imagine that perhaps they understand our political class only too well.

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who at first was reported to be amused by Leak's cartoon, did not reveal himself to have been deeply wounded by it until our Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, had rushed out to perform a pre-emptive buckle by deploring the illustration the day it had been published.

Doubtless many hours of weekend overtime went into determining the precise extent of the buckle, the number of twists and turns, and the degree of difficulty involved, but perhaps a moment's consideration could have been given to whether one was even necessary.

Of course, Yudhoyono didn't feel the need to apologise when The Rakyat Merdeka ran the original cartoon of Howard and Downer as humping dingoes, and neither of the naughty puppies in question looked particularly upset by it. Unlike Leak's response, the Indonesian cartoon was neither very well drawn nor particularly funny, but it made what would have been seen as a valid point in Jakarta, after Australian immigration officials granted protection visas to 42 West Papuan asylum-seekers.

When Leak sat down to frame his full colour, and slightly off-colour, reply, he was simply doing what he does as well as any editorial cartoonist in the world, spinning a witty and – ahem – penetrating joke off a developing news story. Leak's role is not to further Australian national interests, to salve wounded egos or to make life easier for the likes of Howard or Yudhoyono. (That's what Greg Sheridan gets paid for.)

Leak has one job, six days a week. Humour for Dummies would probably explain that he has to distil the essence of a story into a caricature that will make most of the people who read it laugh, most of the time. They laugh because in the real world the issues Leak deals with are usually tense, even threatening.

Like all satirists, he finds the absurd within these situations and exposes it, releasing some of that tension. Like the best cartoonists, Leak is able to work on more than one level. Downer's rush to make an apology that was never his to deliver betrays a number of anxieties, some specific and some free floating.

More generally, Downer was acting in accordance with a longstanding practice of Australian diplomacy, which is to treat the sensitivities of regional powers like sweating gelignite. Specifically, however, he knew Jakarta was alive to any suggestion that Australia might not be 100 per cent committed to Indonesian sovereignty over its Papuan province.

Leak's crime was not just to draw Yudhoyono in the same fashion as his colleague on The Rakyat Merdeka had drawn Howard and Downer. It was to make obvious in a brutal and graphic fashion the subtext that there exists in Australia a significant body of opinion that Indonesia has been screwing Papua for decades.

Yudhoyono is an intelligent, sophisticated man who will use a variety of means to pressure the Australian Government on the Papuan issue. His response to the cartoon should be seen in that context.

In that way, Downer's hasty apology played right into his hands, allowing the Indonesian President to appear as the aggrieved party when in fact he is the leader of a state that has responded to an intricate and difficult question of nation building with ham-fisted violence, duplicity and folly.

For what can it be but folly to repeat in Papua the same tactics that failed so spectacularly in East Timor?

While Downer's fumble can perhaps be explained by the distraction of the AWB scandal, there can be no excuse for the breathtaking sanctimony of The Sydney Morning Herald (see The Australian's Cut & Paste yesterday).

Earlier this week, the Fairfax publication flayed poor Leak for being tasteless, unfunny and "consciously more offensive" than The Rakyat Merdeka's man, "since the dog is regarded as a particularly unclean animal by Indonesia's Muslims". This po-faced example of witless cultural relativism was surpassed only by the paper's statement: "It is hard to think of any other world leader being depicted the same way as the cartoon did Yudhoyono."

Apparently, in the course of coming over all a-tizz about the unspeakable Leak, the Herald's editorial writer completely forgot about the original Indonesian cartoon. Or perhaps it is just that in urbane, cosmopolitan Sydney, bestiality is the sort of thing our Prime Minister is supposed to just shrug off with a giggle, which, to his credit, he did.

While the political actors were merely playing their roles with varying degrees of ability, I'm at a loss to explain the Herald's fit of the vapours, other than as a cheap shot at a competitor. They cannot seriously imagine that Leak, and by extension his colleagues at Fairfax such as Alan Moir or Michael Leunig, should restrain themselves from lampooning the likes of Howard and Yudhoyono too harshly. That would be a handy result for the horny dingoes but a great loss for the rest of us.

[John Birmingham, author and former defence department researcher, wrote the 2001 Quarterly Essay piece Appeasing Jakarta.]