Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran continue to endure their mental torture, awaiting a final decision on their execution. It’s a slim hope but Indonesia’s political and judicial systems are opaque and bendable enough that their sentences may yet be overturned. Australia has played a limited hand as well as it could. A low-key, bipartisan approach has side-lined nationalist red necks more focused on the fight than the outcome. But the episode says nothing positive about the bilateral relationship. What hope is there to build closer ties when President Widodo won’t even return a phone call from Prime Minister Abbott? Can our political leaders really have so little to say to each other?

To get a sense of the thinness of the relationship, one only has to look at DFAT’s website. It catalogues a history of half-starts, mostly Australian initiated, trying to build momentum for warmer ties. There’s the Lombok Treaty on security cooperation of 2006—John Howard’s attempt with President Yudhoyono to turn the page after East Timor’s bolt for independence. There’s also the remarkable 2014 ‘joint understanding’ on a ‘code of conduct in implementing’ the Lombok Treaty, where both countries pledge that they ‘will not use any of their intelligence, including surveillance capacities, or other resources, in ways that would harm the interests of the Parties’. DFAT’s page also records the April 2005 ‘joint declaration on comprehensive partnership’ and the November 2010 ‘joint statement on the strategic partnership’—worthy but largely stillborn attempts to manufacture closeness. Read more