Analysis - Indonesia at Melbourne

Why are more Indonesian university graduates jostling for menial jobs?

Indonesia now has two familiar images of graduate hardship, each with its own distinctive colour: the graduate in a green ojol (online motorcycle-taxi) jacket, and the graduate in an orange PPSU vest. They are usually told as separate stories. But both point to the same condition: graduates working in jobs that do not require the qualifications they spent years acquiring.

Selected, not shared: what Indonesia's limited dual citizenship proposal reveals about who counts as diaspora

Analysis, Policies, Society

The proposal for limited dual citizenship also appears ironic. It seeks to persuade highly skilled Indonesians overseas to return, yet President Prabowo has repeatedly urged those who are dissatisfied with the government to ‘look for another country’. Such mixed signals help explain why many members of the diaspora remain reluctant to formalise their ties to a state that seems ambivalent about their belonging.

Prabowo should not be paying for diplomacy (but he should stop travelling so much)

Analysis, Foreign Policy

There is something profoundly unsettling about the suggestion that Indonesia's president might personally pay for his official overseas travel. Not because it reflects generosity, but because it reflects institutional failure.

Military-cleric alliance may fuel new anti-LGBTQ sentiment in Indonesia

Analysis, Gender, Human Rights, Religion, Security

Whatever political games are at play on this issue, efforts to frame LGBTQ people as a non-military threat and efforts to criminalise sexuality will only open more avenues for persecution, mostly for the underprivileged. It will likely be used as a pretext for security forces to further encroach on people’s privacy. In this scenario, everyone, not just the LGBTQ community, is at risk.

Police vs prosecutors? Indonesia’s latest corruption scandal exposes elite fracturing under Prabowo

Analysis, Corruption, Law, Politics

The corruption case implicating top prosecutor Febrie Adriansyah reflects not only the institutional rivalry between the police and the prosecutors. It also exposes the broader conflicts involving major oligarchic factions in the country.

Prabowo’s managed coercion is reshaping Indonesia’s political-economic order

Analysis, Economy, Policies, Politics

Prabowo’s regime has demonstrated that the state retains a latent, potent capacity to dictate the terms of economic accumulation. But this does not imply the erasure of Indonesia’s elite networks, but rather a structural rearticulation of their relationship with the state. While the oligarchs are currently forced to adapt to these centralising arrangements, their compliance should not be mistaken for permanent submission.

Indonesia’s economic centralisation under Prabowo

Analysis, Economy

The question for Indonesia today is whether Prabowo’s unbridled centralisation will deliver the sustained economic growth that it promises, or merely build new institutions that distort the coordinating work of markets. Economic centralisation certainly offers more command over the nation’s wealth and a stronger hand in bargaining with the world, but any policy is only as good as the hands that work it.

From founder to prisoner: is Nadiem's verdict the end of regulatory trust?

Analysis, Economy, Law, Policies

No one should be surprised if, slowly but surely, Indonesia keeps sliding off the shortlists of major allocators - not because its market has shrunk, but because its institutions have stopped underwriting it.

What the New Order's failed clove monopoly tells us about Prabowo's single-door export policy