Australia is Guilty of Same Misconduct as China Over Our Treatment of East Timor

Jul 14, 2016 | Tom Clarke
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For 14 years now, Australia's tiny neighbour, East Timor, has been consistently requesting Australia to negotiate the establishment of permanent maritime boundaries between the two coastlines. For 14 years now, Australia has refused to even consider doing so. Instead it has jostled East Timor into a series of temporary resource sharing arrangements, all of which short-change one of the poorest countries in Asia out of billions of dollars in oil and gas resources.

To think China is the only bully in our region willing to thumb its nose to international law for greater territorial control and access to lucrative resources would be to overlook the fact the Australian government has unilaterally depleted the contested Laminaria Corallina oil fields. These are fields that the East Timorese claimed belong to them, that have now been sucked dry without East Timor receiving a single dollar.