PM Lawrence Wong at the Joint Press Conference with Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto (Nov 2024)

Your Excellency President Prabowo
Ministers
Ladies and Gentlemen

Let me start by thanking President Prabowo for his warm hospitality to me and my team. This is my third visit to Indonesia within this year alone. It is also my fourth time meeting President Prabowo this year, because he had a visit to Singapore. So we have met four times this year. But this visit is special because it is my first official visit to Indonesia as Prime Minister, and I am honoured to be President Prabowo first official guest as well, and I am grateful that he is able to find time to host me so soon after his inauguration.

President Prabowo has charted out a full agenda ahead. I am inspired by his energy and determination to lead Indonesia to an even brighter future, and I assured him of Singapore's support as a close friend and steadfast partner in this journey. We want Indonesia to succeed, and Singapore remains deeply invested in Indonesia's success.

Both President Prabowo and I are leaders starting out in our new roles, but we have both benefited from the work of our predecessors. They have helped to lay a very strong foundation in bringing our two countries close together. And through their leadership, we have been able to resolve long standing issues and resolve them in a way of mutual cooperation and mutual benefit.

So as new leaders now, both of us are able to write a new chapter in our bilateral ties and take the relationship to even greater heights. And so I had a very productive conversation just now with President Prabowo and together with our ministers, and we discussed some new and exciting opportunities for collaboration in the coming years.

This includes on defence, taking the relationship even further. We are very honoured and grateful to President Prabowo for his leadership as Defence Minister in bringing the Defence Cooperation Agreement into being and allowing that to come into force. Now we can work together to bring our two militaries even closer together and continue to strengthen our defence cooperation in new ways.

On trade and investments, we continue to facilitate more trade, more investment flows, and we want to see cooperation in new areas, like digital technologies, like healthcare and other areas.

We also discuss opportunities to collaborate in areas which are aligned to Indonesia's priorities. One of them is on food security. And so we are discussing how through exchanging of best practices, through sharing of technologies, we can mutually benefit from cooperation in the agriculture and food sector.

Another important area is energy security, and we also had very good discussions on how we can work together on areas like clean energy and sustainability. This can be a new growth engine for both our countries, especially when we realise cross border energy exports as well as cross border carbon capture and storage projects in the coming years.

And then finally, on human capital, we are very happy to support President Prabowo’s plans for human capital development, such as through the ramping up of training and exchanges between our students, our teachers, our officials and our young professionals.

Importantly, the Indonesia-Singapore relationship is one that is built on a very strong foundation of friendship. Friendship not just amongst leaders, but across all levels of our society. At the leadership level, we have very close links, and our leaders have known each other for a long time, and also know each other very well. At the business level, we have close ties, lots of collaborations amongst the private sector and mutual flow of trade and investments. At the people-to-people level, we also have very close ties and many mutual visits between Singapore and Indonesia. In fact, we are among each other's top visitor arrivals, and our educational and research institutions have very close links. And the President and I discussed different ways in which we can continue to strengthen these people-to-people ties across all the different areas - education, research, healthcare, business. We want to do more together.

Both the President and I also had a very good discussion on the wider global environment. We are entering a more troubling era in global affairs. We know that there are going to be more geopolitical tensions to manage, but Indonesia and Singapore share many common strategic perspectives of the world. We both want to be friends to all. We both want to be good neighbours. We both want to be able to have close ties with America as well as China. And we will both exercise active and independent foreign policies towards that effect, in order to achieve mutual benefit, mutual interests, and importantly, peace, stability and prosperity for ourselves and for Southeast Asia. So we hope that the strong bilateral ties between Indonesia and Singapore will not only help our respective countries, but provide pathfinders to accelerate ASEAN integration and make for a stronger and more united ASEAN. In this more complicated world, a strong ASEAN will serve us well and will help to ensure that the region is able to prosper, attract investments into Southeast Asia and provide a conducive environment for all the people of Southeast Asia, Indonesia and Singapore to benefit together.

So once again, we are very grateful, President Prabowo, for your hospitality, for this opportunity, for us to be here to have a very fruitful and productive conversation with you and your cabinet members. I look forward to welcoming you to Singapore in the near future and to continue our conversations at our annual Leaders Retreat, which Singapore will host next year.

Terima Kasih, Prabowo President.

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