Australia-Indonesia Attitudes & Understanding Research: Qualitative research of contemporary attitudes and interventions

This report outlines a two-part project examining Australians’ attitudes to Indonesia, and Indonesians’ attitudes to Australia. The first part focuses on the adaption of the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) software to understand Australian-Indonesian relations, including the development of an Indonesian language version of the software to analyse Indonesian texts. Four newspapers were examined for differences in reporting events relevant to both Australia and Indonesia. Two of these newspapers (one in Australia and one in Indonesia) can be described as having editorial slants which are right-leaning and the two others left-learning. The second part of this project focuses on qualitative data from focus groups conducted in Australia and Indonesia. The aim of the project was to provide baseline tools to further understanding of Australians’ and Indonesians’ respective attitudes to one another, and some of the factors that may influence these attitudes.