"Australian communists much admired Soekarno"

It's time for a low-key response to ease tensions with Indonesia, warns Gerard Henderson.

"West Papua previously titled Irian Jaya.
Jakarta has always placed greater importance on Papua remaining part of Indonesia than East Timor. The former was part of the Dutch East Indies, over which the Netherlands retained sovereignty when Indonesia gained its independence from the Dutch in 1949. East Timor, on the other hand, was a Portuguese colony and was not a factor in the Indonesian independence movement. Throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, Australia's political leaders advocated that West New Guinea (as it was then termed) should not become part of Indonesia. It did so essentially for two reasons, one altruistic, the other strategic. Robert Menzies and his ministers pointed publicly to the ethnic differences between the native-born inhabitants of New Guinea and Indonesia. But, privately at least, there was also concern at the security implications of the radical nationalist Indonesian leader Soekarno gaining territory next to Papua New Guinea, for which Australia had responsibility at the time. Neither the US nor Britain was prepared to become embroiled in what would have been termed a colonial war in defence of a colonial power (the Dutch) against a newly independent nation.
Eventually the Menzies government accepted the realpolitik of the situation. West New Guinea was placed under the control of the United Nations in 1962 and transferred to Indonesia the following year, pending a plebiscite to be conducted no later than 1969. The plebiscite was inadequate by any standard. Yet by the time it was conducted in 1969 the matter had been effectively resolved.
As Peter Edwards points out in Crises and Commitments, total opposition to the Indonesian claim on West New Guinea "was one point on which there was almost complete agreement across the political spectrum, from the left wing of the ALP to the Democratic Labor Party and the RSL". As Edwards documents, only the Communist Party "took the opposite view". Australian communists at the time much admired Soekarno. Now support for an independent Papua is coming, in the main, from what is left of the extreme left."

Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.