Australia keeps signing security deals with a military that is moving into government

Serving military officers now run ministries in Indonesia, and one of them runs a state food company. Soldiers help deliver the president's free meals programme, and the army has moved into making medicine. On the Talking Indonesia podcast from Indonesia at Melbourne, the researcher Natalie Sambhi of Verve Research goes through that list and asks what it adds up to. President Prabowo Subianto's own answer has been steady for years: the military is a disciplined workforce that gets things built, so use it.

Sambhi's warning is that the sentence is not new. It was Suharto's argument too, and it carried a military government that lasted 32 years and stole on a huge scale. The practical worry is simpler than the history, though. A soldier answers upwards, to a commander, not sideways to a governor or a mayor and not to voters. So when soldiers cook school meals or manage a state firm, an ordinary complaint about a spoiled lunch or an unpaid supplier leaves the civilian system that is supposed to handle it.

Australia is the other half of the episode. In 1999 President B.J. Habibie tore up the security agreement with Canberra after Australian troops went into East Timor. Relations have since been rebuilt further than anyone expected then: a defence cooperation agreement that replaced the 2008 one, and this year's Treaty on Common Security, the Jakarta Treaty. Canberra is deepening these ties at the moment the institution on the other side is changing what it does at home, and Australian officials say almost nothing in public about that change.

Why it matters

The question for people here is who you complain to when the service comes with a uniform. A school, a clinic or a cooperative run by officers is harder to question at a council meeting, and slower to answer a journalist. Watch which ministry or state company gets an officer next, and whether the DPR asks about it, because the outside partners signing treaties are not going to raise it for you.