NZ visits by two presidents a sad study in contrasts

I’ve had the pleasure of sitting in a room with Barack Obama three times in my career. As someone who has an interest in the power of speeches and speechmakers, I can attest that he’s one of the best you’ll ever see.

He has enormous charisma and I can understand the excitement that his New Zealand visit whipped up.

But my focus is on Asia, and I couldn’t help but be struck by the amazing amount of coverage given to someone who is an ex-president compared to a current president who visited New Zealand in the same week. That coverage speaks volumes about the real level of interest that New Zealand has in Asia.

That current president was Indonesia’s Joko ‘‘Jokowi’’ Widodo, the leader of some 260 million people. He’s the first Indonesian president to come from outside the political elite and the military, a heavy metal fan and a passionate vlogger. A recent episode features him boxing. He’s a leader not short of interest.

And for the purely economically focused, Indonesia is the only Southeast Asian country that belongs to the G20. It is projected by some to be the world’s seventh-largest economy by 2030 and by others to be the fourthbiggest by 2050.

Even more striking a contrast to the Obama visit was the coverage received by Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc when he stopped by for a couple of days.

Phuc attended a business forum in Auckland with more than 300 business leaders and investors from the two countries, but did you read or hear anything about that?

Jokowi’s visit did end up with a splash of media coverage, but this mostly focused on the fact he didn’t hold a press conference and who was responsible for that oversight.

Other coverage focused on human rights issues in West Papua, a topic of controversy since the province formally became part of Indonesia in the 1960s.

It’s understandable that the Papua region continues to be highlighted, but Indonesia is more

Are we a future-focused nation or would we rather look back to the past and to countries that we feel a bit more comfy with?

than Papua. We didn’t, for instance, hear much about the work Jokowi has been doing protecting secular principles in the constitution of the world’s largest Muslim country.

The Asia New Zealand Foundation knows from our Perceptions of Asia tracking research that Indonesia is one of the most poorly understood of any Asian countries.

In fact, the early results of our latest survey, to be fully released in May, show that fewer than one in five New Zealanders could correctly identify it as having a democratic political system.

New Zealanders don’t have an understanding of Indonesia that allows them to put tricky issues into a wider context, in the same way as they can with the US.

Let’s be realistic about the reasons behind the visits of the leaders of Vietnam and Indonesia.

They stopped by New Zealand in the margins of the first AseanAustralia Special Summit. It’s an event that shows Australia places increased importance on Southeast Asia. Australia achieved a new enhanced strategic partnership with Vietnam, and got support from Jokowi to join the Asean community.

What did we get out of these visits?

A couple of years back, I visited Indonesia as part of then-prime minister John Key’s business delegation.

Given the crowds and media coverage, you would have thought that Key was the leader of 260 million people, rather than the other way around.

Here in New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern stopped en route to her state lunch with Jokowi to collect a Greenpeace petition.

As a politician, Jokowi probably understood the domestic politics of this. But what of his accompanying senior officials? You know, the ones who actually make the decisions over New Zealand beef access or our halal certifications? What would it have signalled to them – from a culture where the concept of ‘‘face’’ is significant?

My real question though is, are we a future-focused nation or would we rather look back to the past and to countries that we feel a bit more comfy with? Did New Zealand value the opportunity for better interactions that these relatively rare high-level visits presented?

I mean, who knows, maybe Jokowi or Phuc would have liked a round of golf too. And Jokowi did tweet about New Zealand to his 10 million followers, free of charge. ❚ Simon Draper is the executive director of the Asia New Zealand Foundation.