PUTTING SOME GREEN BACK INTO INDONESIA

Over the past few weeks, Indonesia's pocket sized Vice President; Mr Jusuf Kalla has been in the good ol' US of A, doing the rounds of 5 minute meetings + photo with important people; trying to russle up some interest in investing in Indonesia, which he promises is becoming an "anchor of stabiliy" in the region. Sure, Indonesia is a country of opportunities and vast natural resources etc etc, but the trouble is, unless you're one of those insatiable, resource driven leviathans like the Newmont mining corporation or Freeport; who will do and spend almost anything to secure a lucrative contract, you're sometimes going to have a tough time doing business in Indonesia, especially if you're a small to mid sized production factory or something. So here are a few things that Bapak Vice President should add to his to do list or at least think about if his government seriously wants foreign companies to put their money, long term, into Indonesia:

Red tape and dragging bureaucracies are a problem everywhere (Tony Blair's Britain for example) and dealing with corrupt government officials and their never ending rubber stamp collections in Indonesia has been well documented and complained about for years and is now, sadly, accepted as part of the culture as it is in many other countries but you'd think that there might be some gratitude and support for providing long term job opportunities in Indonesia where unemployment is currently around 11%. Not always so. Many foreign owned factories and businesses who set up shop and hire people from local communities are often faced with the entire workforce demanding to be fired, shortly after being hired because the redundancy payment is more preferable and instant than the (often paltry, admittedly) monthly salaries and since we're talking about a large collective sum here, unscrupulous lawyers and judges will almost certainly side with and even encourage the local staff to demand redundancy on mass, in order to get a cut of the pay out, unless of course, the employer can or is willing to make it worth their while not to do so.

Once in operation, businesses and factories are often plagued by premen (hired thugs) and rapacious officials demanding various kinds of protection money on a regular business, to ensure that the company can keep running smoothly. In the old days you could pay off the representatives of the above with an agreed amount and that would be the end of it, but in the free for all that is today's democratic Indonesia, you pay one of these fellows his financial demands and then another one arrives and then another one and on and on.

Contracts and courts of law often mean nothing here and as a foreigner you're almost certainly going to come off worse if you need or become embroiled in the legal system because most investors do not come from countries where you need to start shamelessly passing around the brick sized, stuffed envelopes right from the word go, if you want to stand any chance of coming out on top in a legal dispute. Probably the one incident that put most foreign investors and businesses off ever doing business in Indonesia was when an Indonesian commercial court in 2004, declared PT Prudential Life Assurance Indonesia, which is almost completely owned by the British parent company, bankrupt for refusing to pay a Malaysian agent $150,000, allegedly owed in bonuses. Beyond belief, but we can almost certainly believe that the "agent" promised the crooked judges a slice of his claim, if they came out in his favour, and obviously Prudential refused to cough up, so the judges decided to punish the insurance giant. But declaring one of the world's largest insurance companies (with over $183 million dollars worth of assets and $109 million dollars of premiums in that year) bankrupt, is not just vindictive, it's...well...hilariously stupid. Of course Indonesians might not expect any less from their greedy and selfish public servants but don't expect foreign companies and investment to come pounding at Indonesia's door when this can be allowed to happen and the government seems to do little to prevent its jungle judiciary from behaving this way.

Things are improving, slowly and from urgent necessity rather than a change of attitude but while you shake hands and flash yer gnashers for the camera with the US power brokers; Pak Jusuf, don't expect all those foreign entrepreneurs who'd previously spent years doing business in Indonesia and then buggered of to China, over the last five years, to come back too soon.

VIVE LA PINKO REVOLUCION!

Here's an interesting one from the Expat Forum - living in Indonesia: A site for expatriates: Ross McKay; a "teacher" and ahem.."novelist", living in Jakarta, rails against "undesirable" gays and lesbians who might be teaching in Indonesia with their sexuality "unidentified" by their employers. Yikes ! (any volunteers for an expat anti fag Gestapo out there?) Dear old Ross, brimming with that touchingly sentimental expat nostalgia for his home country, refers to Western countries as "sickly societies" for their disgusting tolerance of gays and condemns Jakarta schools because they "turn a blind eye to perverts" and offer them employment. Browsing through Ross' previous posts on this expat forum, he openly expresses his hatred for communists, gays, Muslims, Indonesia, The Jakarta Post newspaper and well...pretty much everything, yet chooses to live in Indonesia, presumably because, as a senior citizen (an assumption based on his fierce condemnation of the ideology of Che Guevara, popular with Citizen Smith student types in the 1960's and 70's), he can still get laid, since he despises pretty much everything about the country. In a series of further tirades on this website for dollar earning expatriates, Rossie attacks Metro TV for showing the old and silly Hallmark TV series "Fidel", because the ailing cigar chomping Cuban beard is a horrible communist. If he'd bothered to watch the series (admittedly, staying in on a Saturday night, consistently, for over a month, might indicate a serious lack of a life!) he would discover that it chronicles Castro's life from the ideological young man, to the people's guerrilla freedom fighter to the intolerant, iron fisted motor mouth dictator that he became; skipping over some of the major events in the fiery beard's near five decade rule such as the US' failed attempts to invade Cuba and overthrow him and the CIA's repeated, and often hilariously creative, attempts to knock 'im off (remember that ludicrous beard falling out idea !?) and instead, includes the exodus of the Cuban boat people, the plight of Huber Matos and Castro's chaotic, hair brained mismanagement of the island's economy and the quick descent of the man into megalomania. Hardly a sympathetic portrayal, so don't worry Ross, I shouldn't think that many viewers will be inspired into pulling on combat fatigues and running to the Puncak mountains to begin a revolutionary insurgency for the people (although if there was one country that needed one...) after seeing this Hollywood masterpiece. Interestingly enough, like Ross (and here is the only remote similarity), Castro also considered homosexuals, in the earlier part of his regime, to be social and ideological deviants, throwing Cuban homos into jail and forced labour camps and later shipping them to the United States and furthermore, Castro frequently uses his pitbull security forces to beat up and surpress non government groups for congregating in public in the manner that Mr McKay advocates that the Indonesian security forces should do to various Muslim groups. So if Ross is looking for a country that outlaws gays (although Fidel claims they're a bit OK now apparently) and has a violent and intimidating security force willing to bash up and jail free speakers and citizens who step out of line and since he clearly hates SBY's Indonesia so much, then Fidel's Cuba sounds much more like his kind of place, and hey, communist or fascist, these are just ideological terms right ? A tyrannical regime is a tyrannical regime... and oh, they have lots of hookers now in Havana too...Vive la revolucion !(but hurry up before the deteriorating 80 year old dictator finally snuffs it and Cuba descends in a ghastly Western style "sickly society")