The 17 April Indonesian elections and fallout could have been big news inAustralia.According to some experts they should have been.

Instead media consumers Down Under got more of US President Donald Trumps distant domestic political shenanigans than they did of the blood and fire crises facing their neighbor nation and its re-elected President Joko Widodo.

The result from the worlds third largest democracy staging the worlds biggest one-day election will impact many countries, but most particularly the adjacent southern continent.

Although the times have been tumultuous inIndonesia, consumers of the ABCs sound and vision news bulletins would have concluded most salient events were happening 13,000 kilometers distant in the Northern Hemisphere not next door.

Using the ABC’s website search box, Widodo appears only a dozen times compared with 150 for ‘Trump’ in the same seven-week period. ‘Indonesia’ featured on 60 occasions.

_The Australian_newspaper did better with 36 mentions of Widodo.

This survey doesn’t measure story length, prominence, or note overlap.Its a crude measure of quantity, not quality.That doesnt undermine the point:the gap is too wide.

The political happenings in Indonesias during the last few weeks appear to have been judged by news editors in Australia as minor against those in America, even though the US didnt feature an election or resulting tumult.

Perth-based_Indonesia Institute_President Ross Taylor said: The statistics simply reinforce our Institutes view that the only time we here inAustraliaengage withIndonesiathrough the media or as a community is when something shocking happens in the rest ofIndonesia.

Our media reported how the Jakarta riots terrible scenes were a result of people protesting against alleged vote rigging and anti-Widodo sentiment The main contributors to those ‘riots’ were young thugs, Islamic radicals combined with disaffected youth happy to get three dollars each to create a protest’. That should have been a story in its own right.

Australian journalism is facing crook times; an estimated 3,000 jobs have been deleted this decade, most from newspaper newsrooms as consumers click screens rather than flick pages. Rip-and-read reports, mainly from the Anglosphere, often fill space.

That leaves much heavy lifting to the public broadcaster.The ABC is the most trusted news organization in the nation, according to Roy Morgan Researchs_MEDIA Net Trust Survey_.

Told that Trump was eclipsing Widodo by a factor of twelve on ABC news sites, Corporation spokeswoman Sally Jackson responded:A keyword in the search box does not surface all ABC coverage. It is not a reliable basis to draw conclusions from.

When asked what the search box misses and how searching could be refined she added: We did a lot of coverage - both planned and breaking news we hadtwo reporters on the ground reporting for all platforms and many live crosses at night.TheIndonesiastory was an important one that was covered thoroughly for all our readers, listeners and viewers.

Thats not contested.The issue is the disproportionate attention and higher ranking given long term to US affairs above those inIndonesia.

Dr Andrew Dodd, Director of the Center for Advancing Journalism at Melbourne University told this paper(The Jakarta Post) low rates of news coverage reflect the sad fact that in Australia we are still not switched on to the great changes occurring in Indonesia.

We are still largely ignorant of the people and parties and policies in play and why the protests are occurring. This does not reflect well onAustralias media or population, given so much is at stake.

Unless the story involves an Aussie backpacker doing something stupid in Bali it seems we just dont really connect with stories inIndonesia. Were too busy focusing on the latest idiocy occurring at the centers of Western culture - inWashingtonandLondon.

Presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto had some disquieting ideas.

The former general publicly promoted_Ghost Fleet_aUSsci-fi novel which forecasts that by 2030Indonesiawill be brought to its knees by cunning Westerners plundering the archipelagos resources.

It gets worse.According toDrEdward AspinallandDrMarcus Mietzner, both from theAustralianNationalUniversity,Indonesian democracy could have died with a Subianto win.

Thats what they claimed back in 2014.This year they analyzed a Subianto speech and concluded he believed direct elections were not compatible with the Indonesian cultural character and gave a strong signal that he wishes to do away with the practice.

The possibility of a giant dictatorship on the doorstep led by a Trumpian figure who lives in a self-created bubble of imagined greatness according to Mietzner, should have turned Australian media attention to the islands above.

Another factor: Had the May mayhem which followed Subiantos defeat continuedAustraliamight have been hit with a flood of refugees fleeing the violence. That happened in 1998.

President Widodo has visitedAustraliaofficially three times, but the Prime Minister he most liked, Malcolm Turnbull, was deposed last year in a Liberal Party coup and replaced by Scott Morrison.Hes infamous for riling the Republic by proposing to shiftAustralias embassy inIsraelfrom Tel Aviv toJerusalem.Relationship repairs will be required.

Next comes a new Widodo Cabinet; few Australians could name the personalities and parties involved, though theyd be familiar with key players in US politics.

CommentedTaylor: As a community,Indonesiais simply the stranger next door; yet when Australians spend time inIndonesiathey realize that Indonesians are gracious people with a great sense of humor, value family and value good friends. They also aspire to the thingswe seek.

Which are deeper and wider understandings of each other.That comes through expanded media coverage of issues and individuals on both sides of the shallow and narrow Arafura andTimorSeas.

A version of this story was first published in TheJakartaPost.Duncan Graham is an Australian journalist writing fromIndonesia.