During his most recent sojourn in Indonesia, Prime Minister Albanese may have found time to notice that nation’s national slogan ‘Unity in Diversity’. Thought up during the tumult of the birth of the new republic, it was meant to envisage a future for all peoples of the numerous islands, from etiquette-obsessive Javanese to ebullient Bataks, to Hindu Balinese and Christian or Confucian Sino-Indonesians, Peranakan, descendants of Chinese traders.

If Mr Albanese did not stop to give thought to that simple, but prescient slogan, he should have.

Despite some terrible massacres of the past, which brought the generals to power for decades, Indonesia...