Mellish legacy lives on in Indonesian media

Stephen Fitzpatrick
Jakarta correspondent
March 30, 2009 The Australian

INDONESIAN business journalism training took a step forward last week with a workshop in the name of Morgan Mellish, The Australian Financial Review reporter who died in the 2007 Garuda air disaster in Yogyakarta.
The four-day program, entitled Financial Literacy for Journalists, was made possible with funds raised at a Jakarta lunch speech given by Kevin Rudd last year.
Jointly run by the Jakarta Foreign Correspondents Club and the Indonesian Association for Media Development, the program attracted a dozen reporters from the archipelago.
Over the four days they ran through an intensive series of sessions aimed at improving general news reporters' ability to make sense of balance sheets, government and company budgets and annual reports, and to tease out the crucial nexus between politics and business.
Launching the fund last June, the Prime Minister said the program's emphasis on financial analysis was something Mellish "would have liked. (He) represented the finest tradition of Australian journalists and Australian foreign correspondents".
Each participant in the program will now take skills covered in the course and apply them to a particular story, with examiners to assess the results.
One journalist, Bima Marzuki from RCTI television in Jakarta, said he planned to produce a series of reports on gaps in the government budget in Nusa Tenggara Timor province -- Indonesia's vast easternmost administrative district, which includes the islands of Sumba, Flores, Maluku and West Timor.
"What we have found is that the Government there allocates up to 80 per cent of its budgets for administrative costs -- things like public servants' uniforms -- and only 20 per cent to actual projects, education and so on," Marzuki said.
He added that journalistic independence was still difficult in Indonesia, particularly with a high level of editorial intervention by proprietors and an extremely low level of union organisation.
"Even where there is (union membership), a lot of pressure is usually applied by the owners," he said. "For instance, people are told that if they're a member of AJI (the main journalists' union), they won't receive salary bonuses, that kind of thing."
Other projects by participants in the Mellish fund included a story about a district head in Java who was directing his local government's budget towards funding the local professional football team, and regional development funding being spent on a major cigarette company's marketing and research budget.
Coincidentally, the previous week saw the wrapping-up for this year of the Elizabeth O'Neill Journalism Award -- a scholarship jointly run by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Australia Indonesia Institute.
O'Neill, who also died in the Garuda crash, worked in the Australian embassy's public affairs section in Jakarta, and was a vital linking point between the two countries' media outlets.
Winners of the 2009 award were The Australian Financial Review's Canberra-based reporter Sophie Morris, who spent a month in Indonesia meeting government, business and other leaders, and Kartika Sari, the foreign news editor of Jakarta newspaper Rakyat Merdeka, who travelled to Australia for a series of interviews.
The newspaper and the embassy had had a prickly relationship for a long time. But a long bout of diplomacy seems to have won Rakyat Merdeka over.