Destinations known | Indonesia’s extramarital sex ban could be disastrous for country’s tourism industry
- A proposed penal code, which would criminalise sex before marriage and outlaw same-sex relations, has caused protests, petitions, bad press
- Travellers are already cancelling holidays, amid fears of getting locked up or fined
Tourists in Bali could be forgiven for forgetting that they are visiting the country with the largest Muslim population in the world. The pura-peppered Hindu-majority island has become a centre for Western “spirituality”, to which “enlightened”, mostly white travellers have flocked to cleanse their chakras and meditate away their materialism, all while sporting the latest Lululemons and posting pictures of their green juice-fuelled, eat-pray-love lifestyles to social media.
However, despite being an exception to Indonesia’s predominantly Muslim rule, Bali is still subject to the laws passed by the central government in Jakarta, and that would include a new penal code criminalising consensual extramarital sex and effectively outlawing same-sex relations, which was initially set to pass this week.
Andreas Harsono, senior Indonesia researcher at Human Rights Watch, has called the criminal code, “disastrous not only for women and religious and gender minorities, but for all Indonesians”. Under the draft law, unmarried couples who are reported to the police for living together could face up to a year in prison or a fine – and that would apply to tourists, too.
On September 20, Australia updated its travel advisory to Indonesia in response to the proposed penal code and tabloid The Daily Telegraph reported that holidays to Bali were being cancelled in light of the expected legal amendments. “The law has not even changed yet and I have already received cancellations,” Elizabeth Travers, who manages 30 villas across the Island of the Gods, told the newspaper. “One client said they no longer trust coming to Bali because they are not married,” she said, adding that the punitive code had the potential to damage the island’s tourism industry more than any terrorist attack or natural disaster it has yet had to weather.
Tourism contributed 890 trillion rupiah (US$63.2 billion) to Indonesia’s economy and accounted for more than 10 per cent of employment – nearly 13 million jobs – in 2018, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council. Undermining that financial contribution could prove ruinous for the nation.