Australian journalists and the country's ambassador to Indonesia, Paul Grigson (right, in beige jacket), eat state-approved street food at a photo op with Jakarta governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (right), universally known by his nickname, Ahok, at Jakarta city hall in March. Photo: Timothy Tobing

At Jakarta's city hall, the Donald Trump of Indonesian politics is holding forth.

Basuki Tjahaja Purnama​ – universally known by his nickname, Ahok – is telling a group of visiting Australian journalists about protests outside the building by the militant Islam Defenders Front.

"I tell them they should come inside," the Jakarta governor says. "I still have a good punch!"

Australian journalists are shown the workings of the Jakarta Smart City team, who monitor problem spots across the city for flooding, rubbish build-up and traffic congestion, at Jakarta city hall. Photo: Timothy Tobing

Moments earlier, we had all been swept out into the lobby of the building to eat street food with Ahok and Australia's ambassador, Paul Grigson, in front of dozens of press cameras and adoring young people filming with their phones. The cassava chips are tasty, but the point of this show is that such food will now be delivered to Jakartans through a mobile app from government-accredited traders.

Advertisement

A country that has relied for so long on manufacturing, commodities and its informal sector, Indonesia is being plunged into a shiny new world of technology-driven retail.

There is retail transportation – the swarms of two-seater motorcycles weaving through the capital's notorious traffic are peppered with green helmets bearing the logos of Go-Jek and GrabBike, each operating an Uber-esque service for commuters. When the transport minister tried to regulate them, he was called off just hours later by Indonesian President Joko Widodo himself.

Australian journalists are shown rubbish build-up at a spot in Jakarta being monitored by the Smart City team from city hall. Photo: Timothy Tobing

Then there are retail services, which the country's Trade Minister Tom Lembong tells us are the most likely source of the nation's next leap in economic growth, making an expansion of tertiary and further education within Indonesia "critical".

And of course there is retail politics. Ahok – he tells us the name means "lucky son" – is campaigning for election, but with a twist.

In a system where anyone aspiring to office has traditionally found a political party to sponsor them, he is trying to crowdsource 1 million signatures to register as an independent. He tells us that he is up to 900,000 but procedural obstacles have come up.

"There are too many smart people, too many NGOs, too many people who only know how to talk," he complains.

Ahok is tired of established parties and tired of debates. He talks about how he brought in the army and police to raze the red-light district of Kalijodo so he could put a park in its place. He is in such a hurry to show us the photos that he crashes hip and shoulder into a locked door. It doesn't stop him.

He sends us upstairs, where a computer screen covering a whole wall shows Google Maps technology being used to monitor the flow of everything from traffic and floodwater to rubbish and excavators around this city of 10 million souls. Clean-up tasks are divided into red (not addressed), yellow (being addressed) and green (resolved).

Ahok makes no bones about wanting to be Indonesia's president. Yet he is a member of two minorities, being ethnically Chinese and Christian in this overwhelmingly Muslim country of more than 250 million people. In his political high-wire act, he thus has much farther to fall than a rich white Manhattanite like Trump.

For many Indonesians – and that means for many Indonesian Muslims – his success or failure is now a bellwether for the country, a test of whether it is delivery and not identity that counts.

This new retail world does have its dark side. Talking to those brave Indonesians who work in counter-extremism and counter-terrorism, we hear of social media dominated by hardline Islamists who deliver their combative take on the religion in spiky soundbites and slogans, while the mainstream Islamic civil associations, with their tens of millions of members, struggle to sell a staid, wholesale message.

"It takes five or six minutes to explain the proper context and scholarly interpretation of an Islamic principle," one researcher tells us. The assembled media practitioners hardly need to be reminded that online, that's often the kind of engagement time you simply don't have.

Mass-participation Islamic groups like Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) may still have deeper support in Indonesian society as a whole, but among the youth – especially those new to urban life – it will not be enough to provide a state-approved narrative in a paper cone, like the cassava chips we ate with Ahok. 

It is, one expert with a long family connection to NU insists, a question of working out a whole new Muslim identity that responds coherently and instinctively to reject jihadism and hostility to minorities.

Those bewildered by the government's talk of foreign investment and a more liberal trade regime – which now even includes the possibility of joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership – are also pushing back.

While Tom Lembong talks about Indonesia needing to escape a "shallow, narrow nationalism", at the country's parliament we are warned about foreign threats in the form of "proxy wars". It is never quite explained to us who will launch these wars, but it would seem that foreign nations and even foreign corporations are eyeing Indonesia's resources and land as key territory in a future where food and fuel are scarce.

Senior Indonesian editors tell us that the republic's armed forces also talk darkly about proxy wars, as they once did about the communist threat. Since the advent of democracy in the late 1990s the military has taken a backseat in public life, but its interests are still extensive, and as concern over police corruption grows, it may find itself once again in the foreground.

Lembong knows that economic nationalism and statism are still forces to be reckoned with. One of the reasons that the agreements being negotiated between Jakarta and Canberra and Jakarta and the European Union are called "comprehensive economic partnership agreements" and not "free trade agreements" is that the latter term attracts a strong negative reaction at home.

If some Indonesians are wary of imported goods or imported Islam, there are also voices pushing for a more confident and outward-looking approach. Lembong insists that Indonesia's president is one of them – "Jokowi wants to spend political capital and gamble", he tells us – but others wonder. 

When Dino Patti Djalal, a minister in the last government, is asked about the South China Sea, he wishes aloud that Indonesia would live up to its own billing as a "maritime fulcrum". "ASEAN should be more assertive," he tells us. "The Philippines took on China and got clobbered. But what if Indonesia pushed back?"

That would be a change from the old Javanese decorum – "we wear our kris [a traditional dagger] in the back, not in the front", as one senior editor puts it – but it is a time of change.

With the Middle East mired in violence and political instability, Joko and his Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi​ very pointedly put Indonesia forward as a champion of Palestinian rights during our visit, before quickly running hard up against the realities of the region.

In an increasingly automated and competitive world, Lembong puts his faith in the people skills and politeness of Indonesians. "The human touch will become more and more important," he says. 

But he is also anxious that his people do not lose their friendly and relaxed approach in a scramble for economic growth. "Let's not lose what we have, right?" he tells me.

On our last day in Jakarta we sit down with Professor Bahtiar Effendy, a senior figure in the Muhammadiyah Islamic group. We ask him if he worries that Indonesian Islam is being subverted by less tolerant currents, particularly the strict "Wahhabi" Sunnism of Saudi Arabia. 

The professor smiles and points to the increasing education of Saudi women and the controversy around Rajaa al-Sanea's novel Girls of Riyadh to suggest that such pressures flow both ways. "On women's rights, we will influence them," he assures us.

Once you have met Indonesians and spoken to them, you have to hope that both he and Lembong can be proved right.

​Maher Mughrabi visited Indonesia as part of a group of senior editors supported by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and sponsored by the Australia-Indonesia Institute.