 Good afternoon. I'm Associate Professor Greg Feely from the Australian National University and I'm one of a number of speakers at the Australia 360 event this morning at Old Parliament House. It's my pleasure to be joined by my colleague from the Department of Political and Social Change at ANU, Eve Warburton, who's an expert on Indonesian politics and research development. And one of the themes in the session that we've just come from has been the state of Indonesian democracy and Eve has just presented a very interesting paper talking about democratic regression. In other words the view that Indonesian democracy is in decline and this very much runs counter to the public perception that Indonesia has been a strong, continues to be a strong democracy. So I wonder Eve if we might begin our discussion by you telling us some of the key indicators of this democratic backsliding in Indonesia. Sure thanks Greg. So I pointed to three sources of Indonesia's democratic fragility, one of which emerged in 2014 and that was this rise of a kind of neo-authoritarian populism in Indonesia. It's a brand of politics that is anti-democratic that explicitly challenges some of the sort of foundational democratic institutions such as elections and it's accompanied by a sort of nativist and xenophobic nationalism and the person who most clearly expressed that particular brand of populism was Prabowo Sobianto. Now even though he lost that election in 2014 against the current president, Joko Widodo, he lost only narrowly so he garnered a lot of support from the Indonesian population. He continues to be a really important part of the Indonesian political landscape and most analysts believe he will run again in 2019 against Joko Widodo in Indonesia's fourth direct presidential election. So that's sort of one ongoing source of concern for observers of Indonesia's democracy and the second one has been this sort of recent upswing in sectarian and Islamist mobilization and perhaps that's something that you can speak to a little more because it's been a subject of a lot of interesting debate amongst observers of Indonesia. To what extent has this recent upswing in sectarian mobilization or to what extent does it really matter for the quality of Indonesia's democracy? I don't know if you want to comment on that Greg? Yes well just to talk about some of the things that scholars are focusing on and a lot of this particularly revolves around the Jakarta gubernatorial election that was held earlier this year and the defeat of the incumbent governor Ahok as he's commonly known who was a Chinese Christian and the really quite virulent sectarian campaign and racist campaign that was run against him and that has led to generate a lot of discussion about Islamist mobilization and that Islam would go from being a rather peripheral element in Indonesian politics even though the great majority of Indonesians are Muslim to being a central element is something that particularly can be used in the negative to bring down an incumbent and as you said in your presentation there is a fear particularly and on behalf of the current Indonesian President Joko Widodo that the same kind of tactics could be used against him. So in your own view do you think that's a strong likelihood that we will see the replication of these kinds of Islamic mobilization and attacking of political minorities and the like in future Indonesian elections? I do think that we will see once again attempts by some of the mainstream political elite to mobilize those sorts of sectarian ideas because it did work so well in the Jakarta election however the second question is whether it would work so well again in another situation would it work that well against a popular Muslim president such as Joko Widodo and that's what we don't know but even I guess the notion that mainstream politicians who don't necessarily support that sort of radical agenda themselves are more than willing to coalesce with and to form coalitions with those sorts of fringe radical groups and to legitimate those sorts of fringe radical groups is concerning in and of itself but I guess one final point that is worth talking about is the way in which the Joko administration responded to that to the Islamist mobilizations because they clearly did see or the Joko administration has clearly seen that as a threat to his own political stability and he's responded by coming out and staunchly defending Indonesia's pluralist and its secular foundation but he's done so using tools that are necessarily undemocratic and illiberal so he's issued a presidential decree in order to kind of avoid all the checks and balances that Indonesia has under certain laws to protect the rights of people to organize to express their opinion and he's done that in order to try and manage right wing Islamist organizations but he's done so in a way that in and of itself constitutes a threat to Indonesia's democracy. I suppose one question would be Joko appears very much to be a pragmatic political leader he's not someone who thinks a great deal about political principles or norms but rather what he needs to do to be successful and do you think he's winning with his campaign to intimidate or to undermine a potential Islamist opposition to him? Will he pull this off? This criminalization of Islamic leaders and this use of legal instruments in order to put pressure on Islamists. It's very hard to know now what impact this will have because on the one hand you know observers of Indonesian politics have been very well very critical of President Yudhiana for not doing enough in fact to deal with sort of sectarian and Islamist groups in Indonesia the most radical groups in Indonesia he sort of sat on his hands and even invited them into the fold in some ways and so to see Jokoie coming down hard on these sorts of groups to the extent that he's criminalizing some of their leaders planning on banning their organizations some people might breathe a sigh of relief and say finally we have a president who's doing something about it but the risk first of all I already mentioned the risk to Indonesia democratic institutions but the risk is also that you alienate particular constituencies within the Indonesian population those who might not support these radical agendas but that might feel some sort of sympathy for their Muslim brethren and also that you might drive these groups underground you might radicalize people who were not at the moment radicalized and so those are the big questions and I'm not sure that we have the answers to those questions now I'm not sure if you have an opinion on that very question Greg. Well perhaps one thing to just take up from what you've said is you mentioned former president Cecila Bambangu de Yonoh and he was one of the people widely accused of disbursing large sums of money perhaps millions of dollars of money to mobilize people against Ahok and certainly in his public statements he gave succor to people who were using racist or sectarian messages against the incumbent Jakarta governor and so this seems to be a good example of what you were talking about before where the people who are helping to orchestrate this Islamist mobilization and not themselves Islamist Prabowo Sobyanto would be a good example of that and most certainly Yudhiyono it's well known that both he and his wife don't particularly like militant Islamists they don't like the way they dress they don't like their views but he had a short-term political benefit from mobilizing them because among other things in Yudhiyono's case his son was one of the unsuccessful candidates in that Jakarta election so I think that's one of the things that's interesting for us to see even if Jakowi succeeds and he has formally banned now the organization his butahria and there's talk that other organizations might be targeted shortly but those networks whatever happens to the formula organization those networks can actually regenerate remarkably quickly and in an election campaign if you have the suitable conditions if you if someone can get traction with a message that the current government say Jocko Widodo is an anti-Islamic president will then suddenly we can get the kinds of mobilization that we had in Jakarta so as you say that's one of the things that we'll have to wait and see but very interesting things for us to follow.