Bernard Collaery - Oil Under Troubled Water: Australia’s Timor Sea Intrigue

During my many visits to Timor-Leste as a pro-bono adviser to Prime Minister Xanana Gusmo, I occasionally heard talk of the helium rip-off.

I was aware there was a helium plant in Darwin, one of only a dozen or so in the world.

I was also aware that under the treaty between Australia and Timor-Leste signed in early 2006 (the treaty known as CMATS that is now subject to allegations of spying by Australia during its negotiation), Timor-Leste was entitled to 90 percent of revenue from the Bayu Undan gas field.

What I did not realise, until I read Oil Under Troubled Water, was that the helium processed in the plant in Darwin was from the Bayu Undan gas field, and the Australian government had, in Bernard Collaerys words, connived to hide from the United Nations and the Timorese the presence of massive quantities of helium gas, produced as a by-product of processing the Bayu Undan gas in Darwin.

With the forensic eye of a highly skilled lawyer, Bernard Collaery delves into the detail of the helium rip-off and exposes the secret deals orchestrated by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, and its Minister Alexander Downer, that benefitted multinational oil companies at the expense of the desperately poor Timorese and, as it turns out, Australian citizens.

As a proud Australian it is devastating to learn of the extent of our betrayal of the Timorese in the years following independence in 1999. While our army was on the ground bravely bringing peace to a shattered land, in Canberra our Department of Foreign Affairs was scheming to deny Timor-Leste billions of dollars of desperately needed revenue.

Oil Under Troubled Water is essential, if difficult, reading for all Australians.

STEVE BRACKS

Bernard Collaery has devoted much of his legal life to advancing the welfare of the people of East Timoragainst Indonesian brutality, Australian chicanery and oil company greed. Now the government and its unintelligent intelligence service is persecuting him, but he refuses to be silencedthis book expertly analyses the foreign policy failures, over the past 70 years, by which Australia has sold out and then cheated its impoverished neighbour. East Timor is the country on our conscience.

GEOFFREY ROBERTSON

That one of the richest countries in the world would betray and rip off one of the poorest is shameful in the extreme. Bernard Collaerys meticulous account of this unconscionable misconduct is an important record. But more importantly his fight for those treated unjustly, and courage standing up to those who betray their positions of trust, is an inspiration to us all.

ANDREW WILKIE

Bernard Collaery is an Australian solicitor and barrister who specialises in litigation in high-profile catastrophic personal injury cases. He has acted for families of victims of the Thredbo landslide, the Royal Canberra Hospital demolition tragedy, the Glenbrook rail disaster in the Blue Mountains, the fire aboard HMAS Westralia, the tragic loss of an RAAF F111 in the South China Sea and an RAF Special Forces aircraft and crew in Iraq. He has appeared as counsel in many criminal jury trials.

Throughout his career as a solicitor, advocate and politician Bernard has been a fearless advocate for human rights. During his tenure as Attorney-General for the Australian Capital Territory, he introduced an independent law reform process that culminated in the drafting of human rights legislation, including anti-discrimination legislation.

Bernard Collaery advised the East Timor Resistance for more than thirty years, providing advice on international law and other matters during the United Nations Transitional Administration from 1999. He acted for East Timor at the International Court of Justice in relation to a maritime sea boundary dispute with Australia.

Currently Bernard Collaery is patron and honorary solicitor of various charitable and non-profit organisations serving Indigenous Australians and marginalised sectors of the community. For some years he assisted in the work of the Sydney-based St James Ethics Centre.

BERNARD COLLAERY

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

www.mup.com.au

First published 2020

Text Bernard Collaery, 2020

Map on page 362 Alain Murphy, 2019

Design and typography Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2020

National Security Series edited by Professor Clinton Fernandes

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Cover design by Philip Campbell Design

Cover images courtesy Getty Images and iStock

Typeset in Bembo 11.5/14.5pt by Cannon Typesetting

Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group

9780522876499 (paperback)

9780522876505 (ebook)

Recalling a childhood spent immediately after World War II, perhaps the only thing that made sense was the nobility of Australian sentiment in support of the values Britain and its Allies had fought for during that war. Many of my generation were marked by that great struggle and the stories and literature that emerged from it. Against that upbringing there is no wonder about my reaction when life led me to bear witness to the long duel within public conscience in Australia over Timor-Leste. It was a duel between rule of law and opportunistic greed, with all the usual actorspoliticians of foresight, foreign entanglements, decent and dissimulating diplomats, devious petroleum corporations and their political lackeys, muffled scientists, and, off stage but always in the wings, the intelligence services.

This book is as much about the history of events affecting East Timor as it is lament about the moral decay in Australian political leadership. In this study of the modern history of AustraliaTimor-Leste relations I have attempted to cast some light on how Australia through its leaders, some of noble intent and others of shameful moral weakness, played a role in the lives of ordinary Timorese through the darkness of World War II and during Timor-Lestes painful progression to independence. There were turning points in Timor-Lestes history, some shaped by collateral events far away of great moment during World War II and the Cold War and others by an opportunism that some see as peculiarly Australian.

Hopefully, the reader may form a view as to when key Australian players abandoned the conviction so often expressed by Australias wartime and post-war leaders that Australia would be an exemplary society. I have sought to illustrate an important concern to all who hold democracy and rule of law dear, namely, why, in the federal sphere in Australia, did the Westminster system of government fail the Timorese? In the second half of the 20th century, and so far in the 21st, both sides of Australian national politics have, with some notable individual exceptions, abandoned a rules-based order to support the exploitation of the sovereign petroleum assets of a poor neighbour.