Australia and RI: Facing off on the the flip side.

(From The Jakarta Post)

from THE JAKARTA POST -- WEDNESDAY, JUNE 21, 2006 -- PAGE 6 If anything can go wrong, it will. This is popularly known as Murphy's Law, an expression the self-deprecating Irish use to "celebrate" the preponderance for messing things up. I, however, am referring to the relationship between Indonesia and Australia. It is a long distance, tenuous friendship reliant on selectively sent news -- and, unfortunately, it is not necessarily the best sort that reaches the other side

In fact, events which have gone wonderfully hardly rate a mention in the news, and are rarely held up as paradigms of good will, yet as soon as something turns pear-shaped it quickly becomes headline news. And then it becomes a source of resentment before escalating into anger and a flurry of mutual accusations

Curiously, Indonesia and Australia seem to have developed something of an art of walking into each other's lives at precisely the wrong time, and then reading …