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Features Australia

Indonesia should grow up

The country’s ability to conduct itself as a mature regional power is increasingly in doubt

1 March 2014

9:00 AM

1 March 2014

9:00 AM

Since the Whitlam era, an abiding myth about Australian foreign policy goes like this: Asia is a monolith and we must engage with it. Moreover, it is the Australian Labor party that has promoted engagement with the region more effectively than conservative governments that are more or less hung up with outmoded commitments to ‘great and powerful friends’ (in Robert Menzies’s language).

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David Martin Jones is associate professor of politics at the University of Queensland.

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