Dividing Up the Spoils: Australia, East Timor and the Timor Sea

Abstract

Following centuries of colonisation by the Portuguese and then occupation by the Indonesian military since 1975, the people of East Timor (Timor Leste) voted for independence in a popular referendum in 1999 and the new nation finally became independent in May 2002. This accords with Lind's argument that “nationalism … is the most powerful force in the world today”. Timor Leste is an extremely poor country that has suffered serious destruction of its infrastructure in the wake of Indonesia's troop departures following the referendum. With aid assistance from the international community, a massive rebuilding effort is currently underway but in the future it is likely that much of this will be funded from revenues from oil and gas resources in the Timor Sea. This paper focuses on these resources and the long drawn out negotiations between Australia and East Timor over their ownership and control. Australia has successfully negotiated a very favourable outcome that has soured relations between the two countries. Parallels are drawn with other situations where rich and poor nations are in the process of negotiating joint development of resources in the offshore zone.

Notes

David Mercer is in the School of Social Science and Planning, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. E‐mail: [email protected]. The author would like to acknowledge the helpful comments of two anonymous referees on a previous draft of this paper as well as Jennifer Drysdale, Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies (CRES) at the Australian National University, Canberra.

This is the Tetum terminology. The more common (Portuguese) terminology is Timor‐Leste.

Timor Sea Treaty Between the Government of East Timor and the Government of Australia, 20 May 2002; and Exchange of Notes Constituting an Agreement Between the Government of the Democratic Republic of East Timor and the Government of Australia Concerning Arrangements for the Exploration and Exploitation of Petroleum in an Area of the Timor Sea, 20 May 2002.

In September 2001 there was an amendment to the Migration Act 1958 to excise the Ashmore and Cartier Islands, as well as Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands from the ‘migration zone’ to Australia's north‐west. This meant that it was now illegal for any non‐citizen landing on these islands to apply for refugee status. What was openly publicised as the threat of the ‘Asiatic menace’ in the early 20th century has now been replaced by the ‘Muslim menace’. Australia is still the only country that imprisons political refugees (Plate, 2002).

Timor is a Malay word, meaning ‘Orient’.

The main companies involved have been BHP–Billiton, Santos, Phillips Petroluem, Shell, Woodside, Petroz and Inpex Sahul.

On 27 September 1999, the UN Human Rights Commission voted for an international inquiry into alleged human rights' violations and atrocities in East Timor (Resolution S‐4/1).

Exchange of Notes constituting an Agreement between the Government of Australia and the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) concerning the continued Operation of the Treaty between Australia and the Republic of Indonesia on the Zone of Co‐operation in an Area between the Indonesian Province of East Timor and Northern Australia of 11 December 1989, Dili, February 2000; and Memorandum of Understanding between the Government of Australia and the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET), acting on behalf of East Timor, on Arrangements relating to the Timor Gap Treaty, Dili, February 2000.

This reasoning was upheld in 1969 by the International Court of Justice in the North Sea Continental Shelf Case (ICJ Reports 3).

Treaty on the Zone of Co‐operation in an Area between the Indonesian Province of East Timor and Northern Australia (Timor Gap Treaty).

Peter Galbraith was Cabinet Member of Political Affairs and Timor Sea in the East Timor Transitional Government.

See Riley (2003) for details of the now publicly available transcript of the negotiations between Australia's Foreign Affairs Minister, Alexander Downer, and the East Timorese Prime Minister, Mari Alkatiri.