Portfolio — 22 May 2026

Foreign Minister Penny Wong announced two rounds of people-to-people engagement grants on 22 May, using bilateral institute funding to embed Australian expertise across a wide sweep of Southeast Asian policy domains. The ASEAN–Australia Centre's 2025–26 grant recipients — the Australian Industry Group, Global Viet Women, and Sports Inclusion Australia — will deliver creative-industry development, cultural-heritage expertise, and sport-inclusion programming across the region, including the Empower HER Through Sport program targeting women with disability [TA-260522-foreig-c489a1b22728].

The breadth of grantees signals that the Centre is being used as a vehicle for soft-power projection that cuts across arts, gender equity, and disability inclusion simultaneously.

The Australia–Indonesia Institute's 2025–26 cohort is larger and more technically diverse, spanning the Hunter Innovation and Science Hub, the University of Adelaide, the University of Indonesia, Monash University Indonesia, Dromana College, and the University of Tasmania [TA-260522-foreig-c8cc269da235]. The funded work ranges from climate-resilient fisheries management and STEM and clean-energy skills transfer to inclusive health and aged-care practices, urban heritage conservation, and sport cooperation — a portfolio of activities that maps onto Indonesia's own national development priorities and reflects Australia's interest in deepening the bilateral relationship at an institutional level.

The clean-energy and climate-resilience threads are particularly notable, embedding bilateral cooperation in domains where Australia has significant commercial and diplomatic interests with Jakarta.

The two announcements together constitute a coordinated deployment of public diplomacy funding across ASEAN and the bilateral Indonesia relationship. Both institutes operate as arms-length mechanisms channelling government grant funding through civil society, university, and industry partners — a model that diffuses risk and builds durable non-government connections.

The range of topics funded in the Indonesia round, from fisheries to aged care, suggests the Institute's mandate is deliberately broad, designed to map onto whichever bilateral sub-agenda is most active at any given moment.