Culture

Indonesia Has Been Hating On Australia Pretty Hard This Week

Unsurprisingly, it has a lot to do with Tony Abbott.

by Meg Watson  22 February 2015

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Good news! There are lots of people out there who also dislike Tony Abbott. Bad news! That includes a large portion of the Indonesian population — that country we’re currently pleading for clemency with on behalf of two Australian men sentenced to death.

With Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran still awaiting execution in Jakarta, many Australians are putting in their last ditch efforts to appeal to the Indonesian government for mercy. Pretty much every politician except Jacqui Lambie has made a statement on the matter taking a stand against the death penalty and many of our nation’s famous faces have joined forces for the I Stand For Mercy campaign. Thousands of people around the country have attended vigils to show their support.

And, though Tony Abbott has led much of this appeal for the past few weeks through a direct correspondence with Indonesian President Joko Widodo, this week his requests for clemency got a little murky. Addressing reporters in Queensland on Wednesday, the PM invoked the aid Australian provided Indonesia during the 2004 tsunami as something akin to a bargaining chip.

“Let’s not forget that a few years ago when Indonesia was struck by the Indian Ocean tsunami, Australia sent a billion dollars worth of assistance,” he said, to the hesitant albeit familiar despair of his media advisors. “I would say to the Indonesian people and the Indonesian government: we in Australia are always there to help you and we hope that you might reciprocate in this way at this time.”

Understandably, shoving an enormous natural disaster in the country’s face wasn’t the best approach to get on their good side, and Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop has had to do whole a lot of sweet talking.

But, even though the Indonesian government has mostly put the remarks behind them, its people — the ones who lost loved ones and had their homes destroyed — haven’t been quite so forgiving.

For the past few days, a few vocal Indonesians have taken to the streets to collect coins and symbolically repay the $1 billion in aid that was given to their country via social media. SMH are reporting the campaign started in the province of Aceh which had more than 100,000 casualties in the disaster.

The resultant photos flagged with the hashtag #CoinForAustralia are basically a big up yours to Australia, and more specifically Tony Abbott.

Some Australians have also joined the conversation, but mostly in an attempt to distance themselves from the PM’s comments.

But wait, there’s more!

A similar thing went down earlier in the week after Julie Bishop suggested that Australians should protest the sentencing of Chan and Sukumaran by choosing alternative holiday destinations.

Bali is currently the number one hot spot for Australian tourists and the Foreign Affairs Minister hoped that the threat of losing their tourism trade would pressure the government into clemency. Many quickly jumped on the bandwagon declaring their protest through the hashtag #BoycottBali.

And though this is a valid idea from a political and economic standpoint, a lot of locals had serious doubts about its effectiveness.

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Despite all this, there looks to be no change to the fate of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. President Joko Widodo has stated there will be “no delay” in their executions and though no date has been set yet, the pair are due to be transferred to the prison island of Nusakambangan shortly.

At this point, with relations between the two nations under mounting stress, Tony Abbott suffering from ongoing bouts of verbal diarrhoea, and the two men still due to face the firing squad, things don’t look great for anyone.