BIG business is belatedly waking up to the sheer scale of the opportunity represented by a historic shift in Indonesia's politics and economy, according to Ross Taylor, of the Australia-Indonesia Business Council.
Mr Taylor said renewed interest by Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton and Coca-Cola Amatil, together with Moody's recent credit upgrade for Indonesia, confirmed the growing prosperity and stability of our northern neighbour.
"Indonesia is making this huge transition from being an inwardly focused, lower-class economy to one that's evolving very quickly, with a strong democracy, vibrant economy and emerging and rising middle class," Mr Taylor said.
"That is really good news for Australia. And you've got a number of big (business) players now saying: 'My God, this is a huge opportunity'."
He said Australia had been slow to respond because it had been "overwhelmed by the China phenomenon" and distorted perceptions of Indonesia still lingered.
"You ask people, even business people: 'Give me words about Indonesia.' You get Schapelle Corby, terrorism, dictatorship."
Mr Taylor, a former Wesfarmers executive, was among the speakers at a national crisis meeting in Perth on the state of Indonesian language studies in Australia's universities.
"Never before have we had such a need to be really pushing Indonesian language and never before have we seen such complete lack of interest in the learning of that language," he told the Weekend Australian.
Student numbers at university nationwide collapsed by 30 per cent between 2002 and 2009, according to Murdoch University's Indonesia scholar, David Hill, who organised the meeting.
"Kids will study Indonesian if they can see a benefit to them in terms of career and occupation," Mr Taylor said.
"Can you get by just using English (when doing business with Indonesia)? Absolutely. Is that disrespectful and disadvantageous to us? Absolutely."
When he was with Phosphate Resources in the 1990s, Mr Taylor travelled widely in Indonesia, including remote agricultural areas, to develop fertiliser markets. He said the neglect of Indonesia as an opportunity was not simply the fault of Australian business. "After the fall of Suharto, Indonesia itself was quite internally focused -- they had to be to deal with a whole range of issues. It's only been in the last five or six years, under (President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono), where stability has come."
Mr Taylor said there were opportunities for Australia in areas such as resources, agriculture, infrastructure, technology, management, education, training and tourism. "What (Coca-Cola Amatil) see is a huge emergence of a young, mobile and in a relative sense, affluent community. That's a lot of cans of Coke," he said.
"You've got 235 million people, 40 per cent of the population under 40, a big proportion now moving from poverty level into the middle class, and disposable income is starting to evolve.
"The whole consumer-based economy is booming -- and it's really the consumer-based economy that carried Indonesia through the global financial crisis, so they didn't dip into recession at all."
Mr Taylor thinks growth this year may nudge 7 per cent. In 2009, Indonesia was the third-fastest growing economy in the G20 and is forecast to have a $US1.1 trillion economy by 2015. However, commentators worry about the economy overheating.
West Australian state MP Bill Johnston, the only politician at the language crisis meeting, acknowledges the risks of doing business with Indonesia, but sees enormous benefits.
"I don't think Australians have a clear view of how important Indonesian is to our future," Mr Johnston said.
"We're a highly technical country with lots of capital and a small population base, and they sit next to us with immense resources, including human resources, a very young country, and they're crying out for technology and investment.
"While I acknowledge all the barriers to trade, it is really an opportunity for Australian business -- particularly services." Mr Taylor said prominent companies, including Wesfarmers, still lacked confidence in Indonesia.
"The issue of corruption is still very much there," he said.
And a devolution of power to shire councils, or regencies, had made business messier than during the Suharto dictatorship, when Jakarta was a "one stop shop" for approvals.
"Their infrastructure is absolutely terrible -- roads, rail, power, water," he said.
But here too there were tremendous opportunities for Australian expertise. The Australia-Indonesia Business Council is holding a conference in Sydney on March 7 to discuss two-way business opportunities.
Bernard Lane flew to Perth courtesy of the National Indonesian Colloquium backed by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council
Source: here
0 comments:
Post a Comment