Indonesians, especially Jakartans – have a wicked sense of humour. Their biting jokes, fine-tuned by years of authoritarian rule, were designed to make hard lives easier, by giving people means to laugh at the authority figures – but only if you could read between the lines.

So what to make of Indonesian President Joko ’Jokowi’ Widodo’s charmingly whimsical Sydney speech, in which he blamed Netflix, proposed that Australian business spend more in Indonesia and spoke of the need for politicians to engage with constituents, “otherwise people would turn to television’s House of Cards” instead at the ASEAN meeting

The meeting, convened by...