Australia and Indonesia: Combatting Modern Slavery Together

In mid-August, Australia announced its new Ambassador to Counter Modern Slavery, People Smuggling, and Human Trafficking Jane Duke. The new ambassador’s role is to drive international cooperation between Australia’s domestic agencies and agencies within other countries. She will also play a central role in promoting and facilitating the Bali Process.

The Bali Process is a multilateral international forum created in 2002 in Bali, Indonesia, to facilitate international discussion, information sharing, and coordination of policy on issues of human trafficking, people smuggling, and transnational crime. Australia and Indonesia are the permanent co-chairs of the Bali Process.

According to the most recent Global Estimates of Modern Slavery produced by Walk Free – an international human rights group focused on the eradication of modern slavery – there are almost 50 million people living in modern slavery, which includes forced labor and forced marriage. Around a quarter of all victims are children. There is also a considerable overlap with human trafficking, with many victims of modern slavery also moved across borders as a component of their conditions.

Around 25 million people are trafficked each year. Human trafficking and people smuggling are considered two distinct concepts, as the former involves moving people against their will, while the latter concerns people who have indicated their consent to be moved across borders. However, people smuggling can also involve exploitation, with people being lied to about outcomes or lacking the full information about their movement across borders, so there can be an overlap between the two.

It is estimated that the market for trafficked people is around $150 billion per year. That means there are massive economic incentives to continue this form of abuse, and a need for new and sophisticated methods to break these syndicates.

Australia has tried to position itself as a global leader on combating human trafficking and modern slavery. Alongside Australia’s new ambassador to counter modern slavery, people smuggling, and human trafficking, last year Australia also established its first anti-slavery commissioner, to support victims and help businesses identify and address slavery risks in their supply chains.

Slavery continues to be a pervasive issue within global supply chains. Often this slavery is based on descent, with children born into slavery due to the conditions their parents are in.

Australia’s Modern Slavery Act requires businesses operating within Australia with a revenue greater than $64 million to identify and address slavery risks in their supply chains. Knowingly engaging in these practices risks penalties up to 25 years in prison.

As well as the Bali Process, Australia has also established – and funds – the ASEAN-Australia Counter Trafficking partnership. Established in 2018, it has sought to build a legal and monitoring framework within Southeast Asia and Australia to effectively tackle these issues as a regional concern.

Southeast Asia is an incredibly complex region to monitor and enforce laws around slavery, people smuggling, and human trafficking, but the effort has to be made all the same. Aside from the obvious need to find solutions to these human rights abuses, Canberra’s efforts have also been about finding common problems to address in order to drive Australia’s regional integration.

In particular, for Australia, the Bali Process has been about facilitating the habits of cooperation between Australia and Indonesia. After relations between the two countries became strained following the independence referendum in Timor-Leste in 1999, and the subsequent deployment of the Australian-led peacekeeping force as Timor-Leste moved toward independence, there was a need to find an issue that Jakarta and Canberra could use to restore trust. Human trafficking, people smuggling, and transnational crime were issues that both countries were heavily invested in finding solutions to, and saw as requiring a new international forum to combat.

What Australia and Indonesia’s approach to these issues has also recognized is that successful regional cooperation requires getting the hard stuff right. Economic opportunities and cultural exchange may be the fruits of regional integration, but the bedrock on which they flourish is the difficult work of solving unpleasant problems.

The task that Australia and Indonesia have set themselves may be daunting and it may be impossible to eradicate human trafficking and slavery completely. But with each syndicate busted, and each individual who escapes these scourges, there is a win. And these wins translate into victories for Canberra and Jakarta as they navigate as best they can their position as neighbors with considerable cultural divides.