Canberra doesn't trust Jakarta

Another leak from Edward Snowden (or whoever is pulling his strings i.e. China or Russia).

Canberra doesn't trust Jakarta:

The news that Australia's electronic spy agency, the Defence Signals Directorate, has targeted Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's mobile phone won't come as a surprise to the many hundreds, indeed thousands, of Australian intelligence officers ...

Why do we do it? Behind all the declarations of friendship and good neighbourliness by successive Australian governments, Canberra just doesn't trust Jakarta. We work closely with Indonesia, including in the fields of security and intelligence, but we don't trust them. We never have, and probably never will.

So, once again, we find our economic policy is at odds with our national security. Our free trade is facilitating the rise of a country we do not trust.

This is the same insanity as buying Chinese goods and then running around terrified that China is building a massive military machine. It is an insane disconnect.

We should be (a) trading with our racial/ethnic kin and (b) trading with relatively trustworthy Asian powers like Japan and India. These are the economies and military that we should be financing. Not China, and not Indonesia (90% Muslim).

And Tony Abbott, lunatic in chief, wants to deepen our free trade across Asia.

Australia is "open for business" (Abbott's mantra) but closed for national security.

File under: trade is a matter of national security.