None of us can say that we have seen Indonesia, although a group of us from Australia have just returned from an immersive visit here. It was a glimpse, maybe, into a kaleidoscope on a particular week in a particular year: each tiny piece of life telling a reflected and vibrant story, together seeming to form a discernable and mesmerising pattern. Yet look again in just a second and you will see something completely different.
To generalise from such a brief insight might be foolish, yet not to describe the wonder of being there, dismissive.
Indonesia is Australia’s largest national neighbour by far and surprisingly to some, also Australia’s closest geographic neighbour bar Papua New Guinea. New Zealand comes fourth. While visiting, our party worked with Indonesia’s largest pharmaceutical company, Kalbe, on their digital strategy. We also toured other Jakarta-based businesses as members of the 2019 Senior Executive MBA cohort with Melbourne Business School.
The kaleidoscope I saw was a fraction of Jakarta on a fraction of an archipelago in a slice of history that was being remade before our eyes.
A proliferation of green plants among tarmac, determined to find soil in every crack between the half-made, half-ruined cement, flourishing despite putrid waterways, smog-obscured sun rays and competition from the organic and inorganic alike. Roads layered upon roads as if someone had upended a bowl of concrete noodles onto the Javan soil and it had set there, just as it was, each strand carrying a congestion of shiny new vehicles that hid less than luxury fit-outs. A mass of metallic mega-malls beside slums, shanty houses and uneven roofs, lit up at night by megalithic digital displays flashing “I heart JKT”. A tangle of falling electricity wires hanging low over the streets. Street hawkers perched beside crowed roads between jam packed warungs, beside strangely empty toll-ways. Car parks filled with motorcycles. Skinny stray cats meandering among the wheels of bikes and between the legs of toothless, dark-skinned men, who sit smoking under the shade of lean-to cafes.
Every congested street crammed with vans and people movers like a jar full of rocks, while a trickling sand of motorcycles wends its way between. Girls in headscarves laughing with each other at the bus stop after school and young boys jumping on Go-Jeks to get home in the heat of the day. The everywhere, always-on millennials with their penchant for bright colours over neutral tones, smoking and messaging each other while riding on the backs of motorcycles, unfettered by worries or, at times, helmets. What a difference their view of risk, in the context of this chaordic city.
Unmistakable ingenuity hangs in every drop of humidity, heavy in the air, either presaging a downpour or threatening suffocation. A police vehicle creates a third lane in the middle of a two-lane highway and the bus falls into its slipstream, not missing a beat to beat the gridlock.
This is a place where a pervasive Indonesian acceptance has sidestepped the need for a particularly Western virtue: patience. Our party could not even wake with the morning call to prayer without voicing daily complaint. Yet buses backed up highways without a second thought and entered one-way streets the wrong way because it was sensibly the best route available, evoking little response from fellow commuters but shrugs, quick reflexes and seamless self-rerouting. Patience only comes after the relaxing of preconceived expectations. Here, the starting expectation itself is absent.
The assault on our Western sensibilities is real: how 28 million people somehow find a way to co-exist and smile their way through their average day. How 260 million people bootstrap themselves into the aspirant middle class without wealth to spend much beyond the basics. How an upwardly mobile nation might face into an intangible health crisis, as the populous energetic youth discovers its age, day by day. How the country is possible at all.
It is hard to put a finger on the political temperature in such a short time. Unlike other nations in the region, there are no framed pictures of self-adulating leaders or politicians on billboards, mocking from the roadside the peoples’ belief in their democratic will.
Security checks at the hotel and at the entranceways to shopping centres – although barely taken seriously by the security guards that manned them – remind us that somehow we are the threat, here only to disrupt the local order or spend. The stereotype we bring with us of middle eastern Islam is woefully inadequate to describe the Sunni disposition of the dominant Indonesian religion. Yet somehow the language to grasp the core of Indonesian belief remains outside of our purview.
A strongly national sentiment seems to have settled low in the air like smog, spoken about as if it were obvious and permanent, voiced into existence by practiced Indonesian Minsters. That manufacturing will be brought home. That raw materials will no longer be imported. That cheap labour combined with strong technical skills will be what it takes to compete. In contrast with China, where silent out-manoeuvring is the play, the political is personal in Indonesia and its presence is palpable in every handshake, all respectful bows, every smile and meeting of the eyes. Here, indirect foreign investment sits like familiar beads of sweat on the skin of Indonesia’s global aspirations.
For us, the comfort zone falls away within the confines of our five star hotel, as our party falls ill one by one. We are surrounded by well-trained Australian doctors, yet every one of us feels the risk of not being to access the right medication or the right advice, watching the doctors themselves fall ill and the local chemists dry up. Mothered by necessity, our own social network of support and traded medications springs up overnight.
It is a lesson we perhaps had to learn to drop our preconceptions of the Indonesian condition: what all the Western brains will fail to achieve if the anticipated infrastructure doesn’t exist; what all the modern sensibilities ignore when commerce is the only goal; how quickly band-aid solutions work when there is a will and a need and an underlying social fabric. Like the Indonesian Universal Health Care program which did the impossible by covering its sprawling populous within a few years of launch, and may create a second miracle when it emerges from the ashes of financial ruin. Assume nothing: old order frameworks don’t function in this place. It may look unsustainable but the jury is out.
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Jakarta, Indonesia.
Everywhere the talk is of Industry 4.0. Perhaps further from the starting gate of the fourth industrial revolution than Australia, but much closer to the national conversation about what it might mean to get there, this is a country actively grappling with its future. Four home-grown Unicorns provide it with an entrepreneurial success narrative. True, a developing nation leapfrogging its neighbours doesn’t fit with the Victorian Trade Commissioner’s worldview. Perhaps it isn’t the story he wants Australian businesses to be entangled in.
Yet with GMF’s rapid ascension through the rigours of international accreditation, and its global expansion plans well developed, how rapidly might it enter the top global echelons in its field. How quickly Kalbe might outsource its homegrown success, beyond manufacturing into exportable services that flow into the region and beyond. Cracks are opening up in the global economic pavement and Indonesia has the gumption to find fertile soil where no one else will go, growing against the odds. It’s not impossible that Indonesia’s non-linear progression toward Industry 4.0 will see some of its more mature cousins left behind.
And so, perhaps our party did not fully appreciate the aspiration of Indonesia’s largest pharmaceutical company, Kalbe to change the health outcomes of a nation ten times our size. Perhaps we did not look much past the narrow lens of conservative commercial outcomes into the soul of the project that was put to us. Perhaps we never did brush off welcome banners and dancing girls to probe the scale of the social and economic ambition at the heart of the leaders whose companies we visited. None of us can really say that we have seen Indonesia. But Indonesia has seen us, and it has summed us up nicely. Is it the image we hoped for, I wonder? Having dinner with the Australian Ambassador at the Australian Embassy, the metaphor offered was of neighbours working together to shape a great neighbourhood. To know our place in this, to understand what kind of leader and follower we could be or need to be, we should return with different intent. Open ourselves up to real friendship. Grapple with risk differently. See more of the world through Indonesian ingenuity. Who might need whom in the end? This is the unspoken question, as the kaleidoscope turns.