East Timor has bad news for Julia
It only took a couple of days for Julia’s Gillard’s big asylum seeker fix to turn into a headache. The new PM was hoping to have the asylum seeker issue sorted by the end of this week, with the centrepiece announced two days ago. It was for Australia to set up, in partnership with other countries in the region, a processing centre in East Timor.
The trouble was that she had not told the East Timor government about it, having just held preliminary discussions with the country’s president, Jose Ramos-Horta.
Today we spoke to a senior East Timor official who said he was speaking for many in the party in saying the processing centre was wrong for his country at this time.
Dionisio Babo Soares is the Secretary General of the East Timor prime minister’s party, Partido CNRT. He is known as a reasonable man who doesn’t shoot off or grandstand. He is also a man with a close ear to the ground in East Timor.
I spoke to him today and he told me that the talks between the two countries will continue, but that at the end of the day the centre probably won’t happen. He said the timing was not right. He said East Timor hasn’t got the infrastructure, and is a country that is still recovering for the periodic violence that damaged the country, before and after independence.
Even when I put to him that Australia and its partners would pay for the centre, which would provide some of that much-needed infratructure and jobs, he still said the time wasn’t right, and the centre was not a good solution for East Timor.
If a person of such authority in East Timor’s ruling party can be so firm on the issue, (and following on from similar criticism from the country’s Deputy Prime Minister), you would have to think that Julia Gillard is really up against it to get the concept through, even if the discussions are continuing.
Julia Gillard may have expected opposition from the East Timor government. Perhaps that is why she choose to broach the idea with the President Ramos-Horta rather than prime minister Xanana Gusmao. But one thing she definitiely did not expect was the rapid criticism of the concept, a criticism that is embarrassing her badly just as she was hoping to put the asylum seeker issue to bed to give her time to deal with climate change before she calls the election in the next few weeks.
Whether East Timor approves the centre or not, Julia Gillard is learning that domestic and political timetables are just that, domestic and political. Independent neighbouring countries feel no need to follow your timelines, no matter how much you wish it. And this is especially true when dealing with a country like East Timor, which has just come out of a nasty fight for its life, and will not be pushed into anything that it doesn’t want. Kadalak press
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