Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Reconciliation and the Arts) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Indonesia has only recently emerged from a period where freedom of political and cultural expression was seriously curtailed and at times censored. The Jakarta International Film Festival started in 1999, after the fall of Soeharto. In July 2005, funding was approved by the Australia-Indonesia Institute to support master classes between Indonesian and Australian film-makers and to show four Australian documentaries: Dhakiyarr Versus the King, a story of reconciliation; the President Versus David Hicks, an award winning film seen on SBS, directed by Curtis Levy; We Have Decided Not to Die; and Garuda’s Deadly Upgrade. The Australia Indonesia-Institute aims include developing relations with Indonesia by the promotion in Australia of a greater understanding of Indonesia and by the promotion in Indonesia of a greater understanding of Australia.

Foreign Minister Downer visited Indonesia in early December 2005 and was in Jakarta on 6 December. The festival was due to commence on 9 December, but on 8 December, 24 hours before the opening of the festival, the festival director was told by the cultural counsellor to the Australian embassy that funding of $18,000 had been withdrawn from the festival. The reason given was that the four films in question did not conform to the objectives of the Australia Indonesia Institute. I have placed a number of questions on notice to the foreign minister concerning these events. We need to know if his department was responsible for pulling this extraordinary act of default censorship at the eleventh hour.

Despite the films having been approved for broadcast in Indonesia and having been already seen in Australia, and despite the fact that a number of Australian film-makers were already in Jakarta to participate in the program, we witnessed the extraordinary and embarrassing spectacle of government intervention in the program of a film festival of another nation to prevent our own documentary films from being shown.

Perhaps as he landed at the airport the foreign minister decided that the films did not fit within the revised direction of the Australia Indonesia Institute, which has been expanded to include projecting ‘positive images of Australia and Indonesia in each other’s country’. But, more likely, he realised that these films spoke to the record of the Australian government and, like Caesar, he simply took away that which he had the power to grant and left the directors and the film community in the lurch and the festival without a program.

In the meantime, Australians should reflect on the tragic irony of an Australian government body suppressing the showing of films. These films had already been seen by Australians but our neighbours, in a country that has experienced suppression of political and cultural opinion, were denied the opportunity to see them. The reaction in Jakarta and Indonesia was one of incredulity. No other country, to my knowledge, has tied its funding of the festival to film selection. It is urgent that the foreign minister answer these questions. (Time expired)