The AFR View
China card played on Australia’s Timor-Leste front porch
The task for Labor’s Pacific diplomacy is now to win back the lost ground in the independent sovereign state that Australia helped to found.
Many Australians are rightly proud of the leading role Australia played in the establishment of an independent East Timor, the former Portuguese colony that Indonesia took over by military force in 1975.
The Howard government’s backing for East Timor’s breaking away from rule by Indonesia, in its “year of living dangerously” in 1999, jeopardised and complicated the relationship with Australia’s giant South-East Asian neighbour in the near north.
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