Abstract

Communications 109 there is no prospect of the Suharto regime disappearing. I disagree with Maxwell when he remarks regarding his personal views that "this is really beyond the point here". It is, on the contrary, people's political stances which help determine the questions to be placed at the centre of any discussion about "the past, present and future" of any society, whether Indonesia or Australia. His position is, of course, the same as the official position of the Australian government, which praises Indonesia's economic growth and stability, and ritually "expresses concern" about the etc. etc.'s, while often claiming, as Gareth Evans did in relation to east Timor, that the situation was "irreversible". For myself, I oppose the etc. etc. approach, an approach which does not put the political, economic and social rights of the mass of the people at centre stage of the discussion of the development of any society. Such an approach also relegates to the margins all those real, on-the-ground struggles in Indonesia for changes in political and social conditions, including those struggles to win a different, more democratic government—a prospect that Maxwell, sitting in the ANU, has apparently arbitrarily predetermined will not happen "tomorrow, the day