THE GOOD OIL

A few months ago I went to East Timor to check the newly-independent place out and to help with the distribution of ten tonnes of rice that you listeners so generously donated.

Since then we have been supporting a Christmas project for Australians to buy intricately, even tediously, woven bookmarks at five dollars a piece to try to help women in East Timor make some sort of a living.

On 3AW, and in the Sunday Herald Sun, I made the point that Keep in mind that 60 per cent of people in that country of only 800,000 people are under the age of twenty. Their parents were slaughtered by the drug-fuelled militia. Backed by Indonesian soldiers.

On the island I met a brave nun who hid more than twenty young girls in one room at a convent when crazed militia were trying to break down the front door. She eventually got them out and, in the dark, spirited them away to the hillside forests where they slept under logs. And avoided being raped.

In orphanages I saw the fresh faces of kids who also had the dead fish eyes of children who had seen horror. Fourteen-year-olds who had been brutalised. Sixteen-year-olds whose parents had been killed.

Australia led the world to go in there in 1999 and help them form an independent country. To help them get rid of the oppressive yoke of Indonesia which had kept a boot on their necks for nearly thirty years. After decades of Portuguese colonialism.

A yoke which, inexplicably, Labor and Liberal Governments in this country had enthusiastically embraced.

(As I have said before we even had Prime Minister Keating secretly signing a groveling agreement with Jakarta about some so-called Indo-Aussie mutual peace agreement).

East Timor is back in the news again because of the marathon dispute between that new country and Australia over boundaries and seabed rights and oil and the continental shelf.

The talks about billions of dollars broke down again recently. I have said before and say again: We owe this country. We dudded them in World War Two, when we abandoned them to the Japanese, and I believe we betrayed them in 1975. It is true Australia, more than any country, came back to help them after their brave Independence vote was brutally trashed and spat on by the Indonesians.

But right now, I believe we are still screwing these people over oil royalties. I fear we will be ashamed by the final deal that talks about the “Continental Shelf” and self-serving, selfish, claimed boundaries.

I think we are legally and morally wrong. Just give it to them. Give them a chance. It is the only resource they have.

Recently a woman sent me an e-mail after a plane trip from Darwin to Dili. She claimed that she had heard a couple of Australian negotiators in front of her boasting that their job was to “string out” the East Timorese as long as we could. And eventually screw them.

We’ve done it before. Let’s not do it again.

Tuesday, November 9, 2004

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2004