A Malaysian cartoon asked about the smoke. Indonesians cheered.

In September, while smoke from fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan sat over the region, the official account of the Malaysian children's cartoon Upin & Ipin reposted an old clip teaching kids how to cope with haze. Indonesian fans read it as a quiet dig at their own government and shared it anyway. "This is our lowest point: being roasted by Upin and Ipin," one wrote. Vindi Kurniawan, writing for Indonesia at Melbourne, argues that cheering a neighbour's joke was not disloyalty. It was people asking for numbers they could trust.

The numbers are the heart of the piece. On 12 October, President Prabowo Subianto pointed to 639 hectares of burning land as evidence that the fires were in retreat. Two days later the disaster agency and the forestry ministry clarified the figure: it covered only the land where firefighters were actually working, not everything burning across the country. So it could not show whether fires were falling or growing. Around the same time, the Dayak activist Emmanuela Shinta posted a video from Palangkaraya wearing a gas mask and called the city "a gas chamber", saying yellow-orange haze had settled over it every morning for about a week.

Public patience has thinned. Polling by Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting put satisfaction with Prabowo at 81.2 per cent last November, 51.1 per cent in July and 44.5 per cent in October. Kurniawan is careful here: neither that survey nor a separate online poll asked about the haze or about Malaysian criticism, so the fall cannot be pinned on the smoke alone. He is harder on the climate around criticism. In July, Prabowo said people who find Indonesia gloomy should look for another country. In August, Amnesty International Indonesia condemned the arrest of two people over social media posts about a presidential speech. When talking back at home carries a cost, a cartoon from abroad becomes the safer place to agree.

Why it matters

Kurniawan's ask is small and checkable: publish the firefighting total next to the total area burned, and name the companies holding the concessions where fires start. If you live under the smoke, that second list is what decides whether anyone pays for next year's burning. Malaysian civil-society groups took their own haze findings to their parliament in October and asked for stronger powers over Malaysian-linked companies working abroad, so pressure on the plantation owners may arrive from outside before it arrives at home.