President Joko Widodo met Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in Sydney, where the pair also discussed growing tensions in the Asia-Pacific region. Indonesia and Australia are the world’s two biggest thermal coal exporters, but are anxious to shed their economic reliance on polluting fossil fuels.
Both leaders agreed clean energy technologies should become a joint priority. “Indonesia and Australia must build a more substantive and strategic economic cooperation through the joint production of EV batteries,” Widodo said following the meeting.
Widodo’s government has grand ambitions for Indonesia to increase electric vehicle production, making better use of its vast natural deposits of cobalt and nickel. To do so it would need to secure a reliable pipeline of Australian lithium, another key component in rechargeable batteries.
Australia supplies almost half of the world’s lithium, the vast majority of which is currently shipped off to be processed in China. “There is a lot that Australia can offer Indonesia and the region in the energy transition, including the global move towards electric vehicles,” said Albanese. “We are rich in all of the components and the expertise needed for renewable energy.”
Albanese hosted Widodo at Admiralty House, a sprawling government building with prime views over Sydney’s picturesque harbour.
They later strolled through leafy Taronga Zoo, stopping briefly to see the Sumatran tiger exhibit.
The bilateral talks between Indonesia and Australia come at a tense time for the Asia-Pacific, and the two countries have taken starkly different approaches to the fierce strategic rivalry playing out in the region between China and the United States. Canberra has joined in the landmark Australia-United Kingdom-United States (AUKUS) security pact, acquiring nuclear-powered submarines to increase its naval clout through the South Pacific. Indonesia has walked a more neutral line, stressing the need for cooperation and regional stability.
Albanese and Widodo on Tuesday agreed on the importance of maintaining stability as China and the United States jostle for influence.
“All countries in the region, large and small, have a collective responsibility to help keep the region peaceful,” said Albanese. Widodo said the countries of the Asia-Pacific should focus on “collaboration and concrete cooperation”.
Analyst Gatra Priyandita, from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said Indonesia had been slowly warming to the AUKUS alliance.
“AUKUS is still seen as posing challenges to regional stability,” he told AFP. “But there is now greater openness to seeing AUKUS as also a source of opportunity for Indonesia’s future security relationship with Australia.”
