The Prime Minister, John Howard, and his Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, have done a remarkable job in improving Australia's bilateral relationship with Indonesia, arguably our most important neighbour, from its nadir just after Australia's intervention in East Timor.
This process has been aided greatly by the election of Indonesia's new President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who seems to have developed a good working relationship with Howard.
Relations with Indonesia have been strengthened further by the Howard Government's prompt and generous humanitarian response to the Boxing Day tsunami.
For the Howard Government, the main threat to better relations was always going to be the conduct of Australian aid organisations. They have a long track record of becoming embroiled in Indonesian politics, which has included some support for separatist movements.
While there is high-level awareness in both governments of the activities of Australian aid organisations and the challenges they pose to relations, in the Australian media Indonesian claims of "foreign interference" are usually put down to paranoia.
However, it would be a mistake to ignore the substance of these claims, especially when it comes to the activities of Western aid groups operating in Indonesia.
By and large, the trend among aid organisations has been to become more involved in politics, although this activism has been largely masked from the public.
For example, the City of Sydney Council chose Oxfam Community Aid Abroad as the principal beneficiary of the council's New Year's Eve celebrations. Oxfam has an interesting history, particularly in Indonesia.
In a 1999 submission to the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee inquiry into East Timor, Oxfam Community Aid Abroad said: "Soon after the 1991 [Dili] massacre, Community Aid Abroad [now known as Oxfam Community Aid Abroad] was informed that we could work in Indonesia only if we dropped our position supporting the rights of the East Timorese to self-determination". It added: "To this day, we remain officially banned from working in both Indonesia and East Timor".
With the subsequent independence of East Timor, Oxfam has resumed operations in Indonesia.
Oxfam is not alone. Caritas Australia is another aid group with a track record of political activism, as is the ACTU's humanitarian arm, Union Aid Abroad.
Organisations such as Oxfam would reject the notion that they play politics. Rather, they would argue that they are simply defending people's rights. But as the human rights scholar Michael Ignatieff argues in his book Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry: "Rights are inescapably political because they tacitly imply a conflict between a rights holder and a rights 'withholder' ".
Globally, the trend is for aid groups to become more political and adopt what is called "a rights-based approach to development". At its core, this approach argues that aid groups need to tackle the "root causes" of poverty rather than just the symptoms, such as the lack of food, water and shelter. This may sound fine in theory, but in practice many aid groups have used this approach to become involved in the internal politics of the sovereign countries in which they operate.
Aside from protecting Australian bilateral relations with Indonesia, there is a strong humanitarian argument for keeping aid organisations out of Indonesian politics.
Any political activity by aid organisations could not only threaten the safety of aid workers from organisations not engaged in politics, but also runs the risk of aid organisations being denied access to Aceh, as was the case before the tsunami.
When the tsunami struck Indonesia, Western aid groups were absent from the province of Aceh, which has been the scene of a long-running insurgency by the Free Aceh Movement for independence.
One reason for this was that they had been barred by the Indonesian Government after previous instances of aid groups aligning themselves with separatist movements in West Papua and East Timor. The groups had actively promoted these causes and had sought to get countries such as Australia embroiled in these issues.
Given the sheer scale of destruction, it is imperative that those aid organisations that are focused purely on delivering humanitarian relief and development be allowed to have continued access to Aceh.
Having dramatically improved Australia's relations with Indonesia, it is essential that the Howard Government closely monitor the activities of Australia's foreign non-government aid organisations in Indonesia.
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