Mean-Spirited over Timor oil, gas claim
The Australian Financial Review
19 April 2004

It is said that if you give a poor man a fish to eat, he will be grateful but will need to come to you again the next day to ask for another. If you teach a man to fish he will feed himself for life.

The claim of East Timor for a just settlement to its oil and gas fields, currently being resisted by Australia, is a case in point. The Australian Government seems intent on keeping East Timor on a perpetual drip feed of aid.

The average East Timorese has a life expectancy 57 years; 40% live in abject poverty; only 60% are literate and infant mortality is one in ten. East Timor’s annual budget of approximately $150 million is highly dependent upon aid. (By comparison, the annual operating budget of Brisbane city council is $1.6 billion).

It need not be the case.

If Australia (which, according to the CSIRO, already derives $50 billion annually from commercial exploitation of its seas), were to comply with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, as East Timor wishes, most of the oil gas fields would fall within East Timor’s territorial waters. They would provide revenue to the poorest country in S. E Asis of $30 billion over the life of the fields.

It would not preclude oil company Woodside working with the East Timorese to develop the fields and provide jobs to Australians.

In a meant-spirited move, Australia is now refusing to submit to the International Court of Justice for arbitration and is dragging its feet on bilateral negotiations over the maritime boundaries between the two countries.

The gas and oil fields will be dry before Australia settles the boundary.

Prime Minister John Howard made much of doing the ‘right thing’ when we intervened in East Timor is 1999; but is keeping a nation on our door step a perpetual mendicant the just thing to do in 2004?


Marc Purcell
Executive Officer
Melbourne's Catholic Commission for Justice, Development and Peace