Australia’s Foreign Policy September 1999
November 17, 2008

RADIO 2CBA FOCAL POINT COMMENTARY BROADCAST ON FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 24 1999 ON RADIO 2CBA FM.

Australia is paying the price for its lack of integrity in foreign policy. We are now being forced to get involved in East Timor to make up for the errors committed from 1975.

East Timor was a forgotten colony in the Portuguese empire. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was a member of Lord Tony Gifford’s committee in England campaigning for an end to the Portuguese African empire. Portugal in 1967 spent as much per capita on its wars in Africa as the Americans spent in Vietnam. The wars bankrupted the country and the military rebelled in 1974. The new Portuguese Government decided to get out of its empire immediately.

While I served on Lord Gifford’s committee in London, there was no reference to East Timor. I knew nothing about the colony until in 1975 here in Sydney, I met the world’s youngest foreign minister Jose Ramos Horta, who was representing the self-proclaimed independent East Timor.

Gough Whitlam’s Labor Government did not like the idea of an independent East Timor. 1975, it will be recalled, was the year in which the Americans were driven out of Vietnam and there were fears of the southward march of communism.

Both the Whitlam Government and the Malcolm Fraser-led Opposition believed that it would be better for Indonesia to control East Timor than for it to be independent. They feared that a poverty-stricken small country immediately to our north would be vulnerable to communist manipulation and could have become another “Cuba”.

Short-term political considerations over-rode ethical concerns. Now the chickens are coming home to roost.

Indonesia failed to conquer the country. As we continue to see, the East Timorese are a brave and independent-minded people. The Australian Government and Opposition – like the Indonesians – did not understand the East Timorese.

Indonesia’s failure to conquer East Timor has meant that other parts of Indonesia think that they too can get away with their own claims of independence. Indonesia feared that an independent East Timor would somehow be an example to other parts of the country to push for independence. Whether that would have been the case is another matter; after all, East Timor was never a part of the old Dutch Empire (as was the rest of Indonesia).

But what we do know is that the way East Timor resisted the Indonesian aggression for 24 years and is now being set on the path to independence will provide a much better example for the more independent-minded parts of Indonesia. This process has proved that the Indonesian military may be brutal but it is not effective. Additionally, the Indonesian Government is now so loathed internationally, that any part of Indonesia seeking independence will get international sympathy.

If Australia and Indonesia had allowed East Timor to proceed to independence, then East Timor would have been a small, poor Third World country with a link to the European Union through Portugal, which would have caused no problems for anyone.

Instead, Australia’s unethical political thinking has created one of the greatest foreign policy crises in Australian history.