Australia and Indonesia are being urged to simplify visa rules to make it easier to travel between the two countries, as Anthony Albanese leads a prime ministerial delegation to the country.
Ahead of the trip Monash University vice chancellor Margaret Gardner, a member of the delegation, told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald that both governments should work on making it easier for their citizens to travel between the two nations.
Joko Widodo and Anthony Albanese will meet in Jakarta this week.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
Indonesia’s Tourism Minister, Sandiaga Uno, says more flights are also needed to meet growing demand from Australian tourists, who are beginning to return to the holiday island of Bali more than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic.
Albanese flew to Jakarta on Sunday to meet Indonesian President Joko Widodo, widely known as Jokowi, for the first time. He was joined by Gardner, senior ministers Penny Wong, Don Farrell and Ed Husic and a business delegation including the chief executives of major Australian companies including Commonwealth Bank, Bluescope and Telstra.
Monash last year opened the first-ever international university in Indonesia in Banten, on the outskirts of Jakarta, and plans to ramp up to more than 2000 students at its new campus over time. Gardner says the university wanted a campus in Indonesia as it’s “a very, very significant country in the Asia Pacific region”.
“It’s one of the great dynamic democracies and it’s very close to Australia.
“You’ve got to make sure the barriers around visas and recognition and ability to partner are not ones that will cause people to not wish to come [to Australia], because people have to be able to find their way into those relationships” she said.
“There are [also] visa restrictions at the moment that are making it difficult for academics to go to Indonesia and for our students to go to Indonesia in the numbers we want.”
Albanese and the Jokowi will discuss bilateral trade and investment, with a particular focus on the two-year-old free trade deal, as well as greater cooperation on climate change and energy.
But China’s rise and growing geopolitical tensions in the region, underscored by an incident between a RAAF jet and a Chinese fighter jet last week, will also be a major focus and Albanese will also meet ASEAN Secretary-General Dato Lim Jock Hoi in Jakarta.
Albanese said, ahead of his departure to Jakarta and then the regional city of Makassar, that “it is important that we recognise that Indonesia isn’t just Jakarta and Bali, it is a vast archipelago, it is an important nation to our north, the largest Muslim country on the planet”.
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“We announced during the election campaign additional aid for South-East Asia. We also announced a particular envoy and other measures to assist our relations. My government is determined to have better relations across the Indo-Pacific region.”
Soon after becoming prime minister in 2018, Scott Morrison said his government would look at simplifying the visa system to allow tourists to travel from Indonesia to Australia more easily.
The visa issue was again raised by Jokowi when he visited Canberra in early 2020 and Morrison said he would reconsider the rules, but as COVID-19 has eased and international travel has resumed, it has become apparent to travellers from the world’s fourth-largest country that nothing has changed.
The issue was raised privately and publicly at a series of functions in Perth in the last week at which Indonesia’s ambassador to Australia Siswo Pramomo and officials from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade were present.
The Herald and The Age spoke to relatives of two Indonesians who applied this year to visit Australia on tourist visas with their Australian spouses. One was still waiting after 10 weeks while the other had finally just received approval after more than two months of processing.
Melbourne University Indonesia expert Tim Lindsey said the current visa system for Indonesians was an “extremely difficult process that most Indonesians find offensive”.
“There are so many reasons to do something about it. The government has to do something about the visa system, our tourists get a visa on arrival, theirs don’t,” he said.
“The next thing is education, universities want to diversify away from China, Indonesia is an obvious market that we haven’t achieved the penetration of that market that we should have. Paying students follow scholarships, so we need to increase the number of scholarships we grant too.”
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The visa application process is time consuming, costs $140, and asks applicants whether they have committed genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture or slavery, among a host of other questions. Australian tourists get a free visa on arrival in Indonesia.
Ross Taylor from the Perth-based Indonesia Institute said “if you come from Brunei, if you live in Singapore or the UK or Germany, you can just go online, apply, and you can get a visa within two hours”.
In an increasingly competitive Indo-Pacific, though, and with the Indonesian economy having accelerated in growth before the pandemic, there are new calls to level the playing field for Australia’s near neighbour, particularly for tourists, students and workers in high-demand fields such as aged care.
The Tourism Minister, Uno, said Australians were returning to Bali after two difficult pandemic years in which the tourism sector lost a million jobs and the country’s borders, like Australia, had been largely closed.
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“There’s some good news and some not so good news. The good news is demand is really strong, it’s robust and there’s a lot of enthusiasm, from both sides from Australia and Indonesia, in terms of resuming tourism in particular,” he said.
“The bad news is we don’t have enough flights. We have limited seat capacities, we have airlines scrambling to provide aircraft. In particular, some of the airlines have pretty much been focusing on Perth-Denpasar, Melbourne-Denpasar and Sydney-Denpasar.”
Currently just three airlines serve the Australia-Bali route – Garuda, JetStar and Qantas – which is fewer than before the pandemic and there are far fewer flights each week according to the Bali Tourism Promotion Board.