Timor’s Gas - Clawback or Payback?

Timor’s Gas  - Clawback or Payback?

After the shakedown comes the clawback. East Timor’s relations with Australia reads more and more like a morality tale.  “Shakedown” is the title of the book written by Paul Cleary describing Australia’s bullying, and at times thuggish tactics in getting far more than its fair share of the oil and gas in the Timor gap.  In fact, Australia came close to getting virtually all of it

Fortunately, due to the efforts of some left wing Labour politicians working with Timorese representative (now President of Timor Leste) Jose Ramos Horta, the UN refused to recognise the Indonesian ‘sovereignty’ over East Timor, but the Hawke government, fawning over the ‘Indonesian Lobby’ in DFAT with the Foreign minister of the era, Gareth Evans, sealed a deal of dubious legitimacy in international law, with the Indonesian government, over the ‘Timor Gap’ gas and oil reserves.

East Timorese independence was a big monkey-wrench in the works, and it put the international arrangements between Australia and Indonesia into a spin that – well … drew a bit more international attention than Timor Leste had attracted (apart from human rights activists) previously. Paul Cleary’s book documents how the Australian government tried to bully the East Timorese into passing the former (internationally illegitimate) agreement with Indonesia, on to the newly independent Timorese, that gave the Australian government rights to gas and oil exploitation that were frankly, unacceptable under international conventions.