The continuing drama that is taking place between Australia and East Timor over off shore gas and oil deposits could contain lessons that extend beyond the Timor Sea.
Australians are so proud of the role we played in the realisation of East Timorese independence.
We waved the flag around and called forth the always ready and always welling emotion of patriotism to the fore when we marched in with our guns and our ships and armoured vehicles.
We had stood in between a people who had for too long been downtrodden and a nation too quick with the gun, too liberal with its orders to local militia. We saved these people from the machete and the rifle.
We gave them independence.
This is what we would like to think (not taking into account that we also helped lose it back in 75 when the Australian government not only knew about the impending invasion, but with its economic and military aid to Indonesia also facilitated in its execution). And we would be right to the extent that Australia had a big part to play in quashing the violence that made independence little more than a pipedream.
We then took that pipedream and turned it into a real pipe. A pipe that drains more than $1million worth of gas from Timorese Sea gas reserves per day.
Australia refused to cooperate with the International Court of Justice and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, making it impossible for East Timor to find recourse in international institutions of justice or arbitration.
East Timor was expecting, and should have expected given how we talked up our own generosity and beneficence, that we would agree to a maritime boundary that lay along the median line between our two countries.
This has not been the case. When it has been in our interest, Australia has used the continental shelf as the maritime boundary, at times placing oil reserves that are twice as close to East Timor as to Australia in Australian control, and for Australian profit.
Since 1999 we have syphoned $1bn worth of gas and oil from reserves that, under a fair agreement, would belong to East Timor.
What I would like you to keep in mind is that this is how Australia has treated a country that it supposedly saved from bedlam, massacre and frustration of its dream for independence.
Could East Timor, and Australia’s economic treatment of it, be the tea leaves that predict the behaviour of the coalition of the willing toward Iraq?
The question on everyone’s lips now is – will the coalition give the new Iraqi regime total control over its oil reserves?
Hopefully Australia’s lead (as sad as this is to say, being Australian) is not followed.