Yet the mobility of capital in this age of globalisation mocks and exploits the caste solidarities of national labour. Nothing is easier than to close a factory in Wangaratta and move it Tangerang. If we were to take ethics seriously in this single system, we would be looking for ways to equalise labour conditions in the two places. That is in fact already happening, but on the worst possible terms for both sides. What is needed is some framework that will begin to allow a flow of labour between the two parts of this single, imaginary system of 'Indonesia' and 'Australia'.
Democracy is a remarkably universal value.
Indeed all the contemporary arguments for the reform of both Indonesian and Australian politics use the idiom of 'democracy'. Yet our existing democratic institutions are derived from eighteenth century European political thinking about regulating power within nation-states. The global capitalist economy flows over and through this system of nation-states. Today the globalisation of international finance and the dominant ideology of government deregulation has rendered national governments, democratic or otherwise, almost powerless. Democracy, in Australia as much as Indonesia, needs rethinking on the basis of shared trans-national interests to regulate highly mobile capital.