Ancient Javanese mythology, often inherited from India and adapted to fit local culture, is rich with striking characters in the wayang kulit shadow puppet theatre. The fat-gut wise clown Semar is charged with maintaining stability.

This mirrors Anthony Albanese’s zip-in-and-out visit to Jakarta. The prime minister came with the doctrine, made famous by Paul Keating in 1994, to tell President Prabowo Subianto that “there is no country more important to Australia than Indonesia".  

Keating may have thought it true – the electorate knows it’s not.

Albanese is being polite by meeting Prabowo and getting a hotel visit that was “warm”. Government PR has a limited temperature range for such events. There was much flag waving by the hire-a-parade service – but that’s a standard Jakarta welcome for VIPs.

Here’s the cold front that Albanese hasn’t addressed: In 2023 the Lowy Institute asked: Do Australians and Indonesians trust each other?

“Australian attitudes towards Indonesia have been — at best — lukewarm. And at worst, they betray a lurking suspicion.

“Only 12% of Australians nominated Indonesia as Australia’s ‘best friend in Asia’ – fewer than Japan, India and Singapore.”

If Albanese and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade have read the Lowy surveys, there’s little sign they’re clearing out the threadbare cliches for an Op Shop. Melbourne Uni Prof Tim Lindsey has written:

“Indonesia and Australia have almost nothing in common other than the accident of geographic proximity. This makes their relationship turbulent, volatile and often unpredictable.”

With this talkfest, all was predictable. Much of the reporting reads as though it’s been assembled using AI – such is the lack of mainstream media expertise in the region.

Security, trade and defence were the leads, though there were few proposals to effect change. The Indonesia-Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement is a bipartisan deal signed in 2020 after 10 years of negotiation.

It was supposed to improve two-way trade. Apart from adding university outposts, it’s failed to meet diversity goals, remaining a dealer in bulk – mainly meat and grains, heading from us to them. Albanese urged Oz Biz to show greater ambition, but the big problem is in Indonesia.

Explained The Jakarta Post: “Indonesia’s ambition to attract world-class investment is being quietly sabotaged, not by interest rates or the threat of US trade tariffs, but by the familiar menace of thuggery and extortion.

“From street-level rackets to entrenched mafia control of parking, freight and food markets, criminal coercion continues to drain business confidence, inflate costs and corrode the very rule of law that investors depend on.”

Now add numbers – 11 of them to one of us. Stir in the Red Threat – phantom Russian bombers scouting for a base in West Papua leading to nuclear strikes on Kirribilli. This beat-up was refuelled at the leaders’ media conference, though the hollow story has long been trashed by Jakarta.

The chance to raise serious issues in the relationship was missed. That was wrong. Likewise, the whitewashing of Prabowo, 73. To be informed world citizens, Australians need to know more of the ruler next door.

He now gets benign labels like “retired general” or “former army general and defence minister”. The full story is that in 1998, he was cashiered, fled into exile in Jordan and banned from the US and Australia for alleged human rights abuses and war crimes.

He denies the charges, which come from putting down dissident movements in East Timor and West Papua, and the kidnapping and disappearance of Jakarta students protesting for democracy in 1998. The BBC described him as “tainted”.

Through his recorded statements, the man comes across as a bombastic autocrat and a bit loony. Like Trump, he inflates nonsense: “In other countries they have made studies where the Republic of Indonesia has been declared no more in 2030.”

The source turned out to be the US Sci Fi novel Ghost Fleet.

Leaders can’t select neighbours. Had Albanese washed his shaken hands, all diplomacy would have gone down the gurgler with the blood.

Our Catholic prime minister would have missed the kiddy flag wavers and dashed for Rome ahead of the inaugural Papal mass.

He reportedly plans to ask the new pontiff to visit Australia in 2028 – an invite not offered to the divorced Prabowo.

DFAT knows he wouldn’t be cheered like his predecessor Joko “Jokowi” Widodo. He and his wife Iriana were hosted by Malcolm Turnbull in 2017 and enjoyed jolly blusukan – impromptu public walkabouts.

People-to-people ties are a key – but there’s little chance of that until we stop discriminating against Indonesians.

Malaysians and Singaporeans get free Electronic Travel Authority visas online – a facility not available to Indonesians who have to pay $195 per person and lodge a printed form. That could be changed at the admin level, and be a useful present for Albanese to offer.

Another would be the so-called Backpacker (Working Holiday) Visas. There are almost 5000 available to Indonesians but the quota isn’t full, probably because the rules — which include having $5000, a big sum for many applicants — are onerous.

There are no caps on the numbers of British passport holders.

Making it easier for young Indonesians to travel and earn would help lift cultural knowledge – and could be done without recourse to Parliament or arousing the Murdoch media.

Only one politician’s comment moved the dial from discussion to detail. David Shoebridge raised the plight of Hazara refugees stuck in Indonesia when Kevin Rudd struck the 1 July 2013 cut-off date for asylum-seekers.

Said the Greens Senator: “Labor previously opposed this policy because of its unfairness, but did nothing about it during the last Parliament; now is the time.”

The Hazara are not economic refugees and few are failed boat people; they are escapees from Sunni Taliban persecution largely because they are Shi’a Muslims. Many helped Australian troops as interpreters and guides during our 2001-2021 involvement in the war against the Taliban.

Prabowo and most Muslims next door are Sunni. In loose detention, the Shi’a are barely tolerated and unwelcome.

There are about 42,000 Hazara in Australia and about 7600 stranded in Indonesia – a state that hasn’t signed the 1951 UN Refugee Convention.

In the wayang shadow theatre, Semar often takes a more realistic view of the world as opposed to the idealistic. Just the guy to help improve the talks of two leaders from cultures far apart.