Indonesia, East Timor and Australia

Abstract

The combination of bilateral and trilateral relationships linking Indonesia, East Timor and Australia will, over the next decade or so, be amongst the most difficult Southeast Asian regional relationships to develop, and at the same time the most important. There can be little chance of regional peace and security unless these relationships are put on a reasonably sound and equitable basis. In this discussion, I want to look briefly at each of these relationships to see how they might develop. Although I will be talking in part about the economic aspects of these relationships, I will be focussing more on the political ones which seem to me to be the over-riding ones, for the present and for the foreseeable future.As this paper was being written, the terrorist bombings in Bali took place, on 12 October 2002. It seems likely that these events will have a long-term and substantial effect on Australia-Indonesia relations, and possible Australia-East Timor relations as well. However it is still very early to be making any definitive statements about these effects. The remarks made about them in this paper must therefore be regarded as being extremely tentative.