Leslie Palmier, Indonesia and the Dutch (1962)

What makes democracy work, particularly in a new country that has little experience of its workings?

When Robert Menzies became the first Australian prime minister to visit Indonesia in December 1959, he was keen to stress to his audience that the nationalist revolution which had brought about independence from the Dutch was not ‘the end of the journey’, but merely the beginning of the new ‘journey of nationhood’ and the immense responsibilities which came with it.

As analysed in Indonesia and the Dutch, the new republic to Australia’s north was certainly going through some political teething pains. Its proportional representation system had produced a fractious parliament in which parties were encouraged to take on extreme positions in order to garner attention and votes. Moreover, there were immense tensions involved in imposing a Javanese hegemony over a vast and varied chain of islands. Author Leslie Palmier argues in the book that this ‘Javanese faction’, embodied in Indonesia’s ruling party, was the key dynamic in understanding Indonesian politics at the time. Such were the depths of these issues that President Sukarno would ultimately opt to roll back political freedoms, and impose what he dubbed a system of ‘guided democracy’, that many argued was little better than a dictatorship.

While Menzies was hardly in a position to tell Indonesia how to run its domestic affairs, he nevertheless used his visit to try to teach Indonesians how to make democracy work – a topic which he had given considerable contemplation since Australia had faced its own democratic crises in the 1930s and 40s. At the centre of his solution was education, as outlined in a speech given at Gadjah Mada University on 3 December:

‘You have just begun the journey of nationhood. And because that is so true, it is a wonderful thing, from my point of view, to see so many thousands of young men and women going into your Universities so as to equip themselves for what will be needed in Indonesia in the long history of free nationhood that lies before.

There is one parallel, perhaps, that I might use on this matter and it is this. Before the last World War, the population of the Australian Universities was not enormous. It is probably four times as great today as it was then and the crowding in of so many thousands who want a University training is already filling the old Universities to over-flowing and leading to the creation of new Universities and those new Universities will, no doubt, be more than crowded within a few years time. So great was the problem in my own country where we haven’t had a revolution, where we haven’t had these tremendous experiences, in my own country where some years ago my own Government realising that the Universities were of supreme importance for the future of the nation and that the self-government [sic], though it has no authority over education ought to help in the Universities field, my government set up, first of all, a series of grants to the Universities and we have now set up an Australian Universities Commission, a splendid group of men of the highest talent, whose task it will be to advise us, the Government, as to the needs of the Universities as to the orderly development of the Universities getting rid of overlapping, but encouraging all the time, the fullest growth in the Universities field, and this will be a great experiment and I myself am looking forward to remarkable results from it.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I said just now that you are at the beginning of a journey, not at the end of it. That is not a profoundly original remark, but I have frequently had occasion in my own country, where we have enjoyed complete self-government for many many years, I frequently have had occasion to say that when you achieve democracy, as we understand democracy, that is not the end of it, that is where all your troubles begin. That is where your problems become your problems and not somebody else’s problems. Not a bad idea in some respects to be able to blame somebody else but when you have self-government then blame yourselves if you don’t that is the great challenge of democracy, and, of course, just as your own past history, not so very long ago, has called for courage, tenacity, devotion, and patriotism, so you who are within this University and all of those who are within the other places of learning in Indonesia, you must be here to develop those faculties which  are needed for its orderly prosperity, sound justice and freedom in the intellectual sense.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, that I think is sufficiently true to merit a little bit of elaboration.  First of all, as I understand your problems, and I don’t profess to understand them intimately, you have, with your independence, come into possession of a great problem of public administration. Tremendously important in any country. Sound administration, intelligent administration, un-corrupt administration. Yes, that is quite right, believe me, any country in which  democracy becomes corrupt will lose its democracy through decay. That has been the whole history of the modern world: how are you to get a public administration, highly intelligent, trained mentally, with a proper spirit of approach to the task, objective, honest, how are you going to get these things unless the Universities, and this University in particular, will turn down every year hundreds of people equipped in that sense for the service of the nation? How many are going to be needed, how many engineers are going to be needed? After all, you have an enormous population and the pressure of the population on your area, must be enormous. I look forward to the time when you will have a variety of industries in which you will harness water power for electric power, in which you will do all these things that require the services of highly skilled engineers. And that is one of the tasks of the University.

You need, in a country in which you yourselves now have the responsibility, you need trained people in the sciences. You need trained people in medicine, you need a variety of faculties and a variety of skills. And the prime purpose of the University is to produce those skills, those faculties, so I say to all you students and I say it with great gravity, you have a responsibility for the future of Indonesia, second to none, among the people of these islands. It will be for you, it will be dependant on your quality, on your attitude, on your approach, as to what the quality of your freedom will be in the future.

Of course, you expect as we expect, to have a peaceful future. We all hope for that, and believe that all around the world. But it is one thing to be peaceful, it is another thing to make progress in all the arts of living, and that is really the business of a University. You know, there are some people, I will speak now only of Australia, who send their children to Universities so that they may get a degree which will give them a licence to earn a particular living in a particular way, and that, of course, is quite right, but that is not the greatest point about a University. The greatest point about a University, is the quality of the mind and spirits that it produces. That is what counts in a University, that is why you have faculties of Arts, that is why you study literature, or study history. Not because you are all going to be lecturers in English, lecturers in history, but because these studies broaden the mind, extend the horizons of the mind, and give a new freedom to the spirit of the student. That is the great thing about a University, that is what distinguishes a University from all other forms of instruction where their junior schools, or high schools, or whatever description you give them in your country. When a man or a woman goes up to a University, he or she enjoys a degree of freedom and, therefore, a degree of responsibility that he or she never enjoyed before, and these matters impose great duties and the best way to understand them is to realise that in learning the arts of these, in learning how to improve the prosperity of your country, to improve justice, as between human beings in your country, here is the place in which you have the opportunity of your lives to learn.

I think, I perhaps, ought to just add one or two things about my own country. Many of you have not seen it. We have, in fact, had students from here, in Australia, in substantial numbers, and I think they have enjoyed themselves. But I just want you to know this about Australia. We are, I think, of all the people, just about the most friendly. We were having some public discussion with you about a particular matter and Dr. Subandrio, your Foreign Minister, came down to Australia. He had one of the greatest receptions by thousands and thousands of people that I have ever seen in Australia and, as I said to him afterwards, if you wanted proof, this demonstration not in any sense organised, is proof to you that we are a friendly people. We don’t desire to be on terms of hostility with anybody. Indeed, we would be very foolish if we did. Because if we were not friendly with other nations, believe me, we would be pretty lonely, wouldn’t we, in the world, and, therefore, our nature and our interest both work together to develop, to give us a friendly and easy-going approach with our neighbours and with the rest of the world. That is not to say that we don’t have strong views, we do. And we are quite capable of expressing them when we want to, quite capable of it. But that doesn’t matter. You can’t expect to be on friendly terms with the rest of the world by expecting that the rest of the world will agree with you on everything. That would be a pretty one-sided bargain, wouldn’t it? I don’t expect you to agree with us on everything. I think that we have 10 times as much in common, and 10 times as much reason for friendship as we have reasons for matters of difference, but I don’t expect you to agree with our view. You musn’t expect us to agree with you on everything that comes into your mind. That would be a crazy world.

I tell you that if I were to come back here, if I were  still alive, and every time I read the newspapers here, I see I am getting older and older, but if I came back here, let us put it quite bluntly, in 10 years time and found that everybody in Indonesia agreed with everybody else about everything, not a point of difference, I would say “how deadly, what a deadly country this has become”. Why you as students disagree with the other fellow on most matters I hope if you are lively students, as students were in my time, the whole art of civilisation is the art of learning to live with differences and of achieving a tolerance of other people’s views, which is in reality one of the great threads of civilisation.

Now I say that to you and I hope you will think about it. Don’t get it into your minds at any time that because some other country has a point of disagreement on some matter with you that proceeds from a spirit of hostility or bad manners or an unwillingness to see that you are right and that that country is wrong. You must give credit to other people for their views, that is one of the things you learn at a University. The only man I ever struck at the University whose views I treated as immaculately correct were the views of the examiner who was going to correct my papers and I daresay that a lot of you have found that to be true.

Sir, I am most grateful to you for giving me the opportunity of coming here and seeing something of my fellow students. There is no audience to beat a University audience. This is the only one I have had in my life in which I haven’t been counted out, as we say, once. Because in Australia if you get anywhere near a meeting of University undergraduates, and there is an election in the area, you will discover how many different points of opinion there are and with what freedom people express them. So I say good luck to this country. You have a wonderful opportunity but you have a history in front of you. A history as yet unwritten, chapters of which will, I hope, be profound and splendid and noble chapters, by those whom I am addressing today. Thank you’

 

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