Alan Ramsey – It was never a secret. If you were around at the time with your eyes and your brain open, you'll remember. If you weren't or didn't, then go back and look at the headlines. They weren't all about the political hysteria of sending the Whitlam Government to the stake. East Timor was big news, too.
In the end, though, for most of us, Kerr's coup was bigger than Soeharto's and the repercussions more immediately relevant. Even the deaths of those five newsmen far off in some unpronounceable place came and went at the time as a sidebar to the death of the Whitlam Government.
But what happened in Timor was never a secret. So when Malcolm Fraser poked his head up the other day and suggested he might have been kept in the dark about what Indonesia had really been up to in East Timor in late 1975, and how complicit Australia had been by default, you had to wonder whose leg he was trying to pull.
Yet when ABC television's Tim Lester asked Fraser four days ago if he had been briefed, as caretaker PM after November 11, 1975, on Australia's warning by its diplomats in Jakarta of the coming Indonesian invasion, he replied: "It's 25 years ago, and there's that caveat on it. But I very strongly believe I would have remembered such a material fact. I do not believe I was briefed. I believe it was a very serious omission." Q: "Had you been properly briefed on that prior warning, might it ultimately have changed the Fraser Government's long-term policy on the question of Indonesia and East Timor's integration?" Fraser: "That's a real possibility."
Politicians can be so shameless. At least Gough Whitlam, to date, hasn't tried to pretend, not that he might have forgotten but that he "would have remembered". Or twaddle that, 25 years in retrospect, it was a "real possibility" that there "might" have been a different government attitude if he had been "properly briefed". Whitlam has remained silent. He has much to stay silent about, of course.
But Fraser, too, could well have shut up. At least until he had refreshed that memory that might or might not be working, by reading this week's release of 800-plus pages of official Australian documents on the 1974-1976 period of the East Timor tragedy.
You will have noticed that Andrew Peacock, Fraser's foreign minister at the time, hasn't rushed into print. He, too, figures prominently in some of the documents, just as he did in the events of the period. But like Whitlam, it seems, Peacock is likely making sure that, whatever he might say, it won't just look like some smarmy self-serving excuse.
John Howard stayed silent for just 24 hours. Then, in an Adelaide radio interview on Wednesday with Jeremy Cordeaux, Peacock's son-in-law, the Prime Minister tried to be wholly statesmanlike but gave in to the temptation of both shafting Malcolm and preening over Paul Keating's political corpse.
Was he surprised Fraser had said he wasn't told of intelligence reports about Indonesia's invasion plans? No, Howard said, "but I don't pretend to speak for Mr Fraser". Maybe, said Cordeaux, but "he's always giving you advice, and I thought ..?" Howard took the proffered bait. "I don't normally repay the compliment. I tend not to make too many comments on the remarks of former prime ministers. I think it's a good idea to sort of keep one's counsel occasionally in these things." Of course.
Having put Mister Fraser, an outspoken pain on Aboriginal issues, in his place, the Prime Minister continued, loftily: "Look, we released these documents in good faith. They speak for themselves. We're not making any judgments about the actions of the Whitlam government or the Fraser government. We will be held accountable about our own actions, and our own actions in relation to East Timor have been wholly honourable and decent." Indubitably.
Then, expansively: "But the world is different now to 25 years ago. One has to make an allowance for that. People viewed things differently. I think it's important to always remember the context in which things have occurred." Indeed.
"And the action we took in relation to East Timor was very different from what would have happened if the Keating Government, for example, had remained in office. I have no doubt Australia's response to East Timor would have been totally different if Mr Keating and Mr Beazley had been running the country a year ago. But I can talk with some feeling and authority about that because they were events directly within my control." Fraser, Keating, Beazley.
Rarely does a politician get the chance to so effectively verbal three irritants in the same breath. Thank you, Jeremy Cordeaux. Thank you for plopping up such a wondrous donkey drop. And what did Labor say? Beazley tried to pretend that, like Manuel, he knew nothing. He was nowhere to be seen when the documents were released on Tuesday. And the next day, up in Brisbane, he shied from reporters' questions like a startled duck. He had not had a chance to read them, he claimed lamely. "I don't expect I will for another week or so." Yet despite, presumably, knowing nothing about what they said, and thus being unable to comment on the Whitlam Government's documented complicity, Beazley found it no problem to criticise the Howard Government's non-release of all the relevant documents of the period.
"If you take [the release] to de jure recognition [in late 1976 of Indonesia's incorporation of East Timor], you involve decisions of a Liberal government. There's been a partial revelation, [but] there seems not to have been a willingness to go that far, which would be necessary to produce the complete Timor story from the Australian point of view. Now, as I said, having said that, I've not had a chance to read the documents, so for me to comment on what they mean would be a bit invidious, really." It would certainly be embarrassing.
Laurie Brereton, Beazley's foreign affairs spokesman and the man who, in Opposition, finally got rid of the Whitlam/Hawke/Hayden/Keating/Evans whining policy of appeasement of Soeharto, was no more forthcoming in his initial reaction on Tuesday. But by yesterday, in a Herald article written by his adviser, Philip Dorling, a former diplomat, Brereton was candidly acknowledging Labor's long record of appeasement and the pure pragmatism of its blind eye to East Timor's misery.
Unfortunately, he also acknowledged: "First, our foreign policy should always be firmly grounded in the values Australians hold dear. Second, we should be aware of the risks associated with foreign policy formulation by narrow, exclusive and often elitist circles." Unfortunately, that is, because neither of these professed fundamentals came within a bull's roar of what actually happened when the Keating Government, of which Brereton was a senior member, negotiated, in great secrecy and without reference to Parliament, its 1995 defence treaty with the Soeharto regime.
Yet it was Alexander Downer, paradoxically the most ill-suited Foreign Minister since Billy McMahon, who best put in context what happened to East Timor and why. In a speech written by his department, the very same professionals blamed for the 1975 policy, Downer said in Sydney on March 1 last year: "... successive Australian governments endorsed Indonesian sovereignty over East Timor because Australia did not want to see the balkanisation of Indonesia with the granting of independence fanning separatist sentiment elsewhere.
"The Portuguese left East Timor in a state of civil war with little prospect of stability, and there were concerns that an independent East Timor would be economically weak and susceptible to interests inimical to Australia's and Indonesia's interests. Let me say I believe those considerations to be totally understandable ... In those circumstances, the acquiescence of the Whitlam government, followed by the Fraser and Hawke governments, to Indonesia's integration plans was not unremarkable ..."
Neither Howard nor Brereton explains East Timor policy any more in such terms. The fall of Soeharto, like the fall of the Berlin Wall, allows the politicians to equate national interest with national values. Morality in foreign policy is now underwitten by taxpayers, even if they don't know it.
The world has changed. Only old politicians like Whitlam, Fraser, Peacock and Keating are left to explain themselves. But to plead ignorance is the least plausible excuse of all.
Consider this. On January 16, 1976, just two months after Kerr sacked Whitlam and Fraser became prime minister, endorsed by voters a month later, Bruce Juddery, a foreign policy writer with The Canberra Times, wrote a front-page story based on the leak of a long assessment to the new government of East Timor policy.
The author of the advice was Dick Woolcott, Australia's ambassador to Jakarta at the time, later head of Foreign Affairs under the Hawke government. Woolcott figures prominently in the East Timor file released this week. So does the very document Juddery quoted 24 years ago. Woolcott was quoted as telling Fraser: "The Government is confronted by a choice between a moral stance, based on condemnation of Indonesia ... and a pragmatic and realistic acceptance of the longer-term inevitability. It is a choice between what might be described as Wilsonian idealism and Kissingerian realism. The former is more proper and principled but the longer-term national interest may well be served by the latter. We do not think we can have it both ways."
Woolcott endorsed pragmatism. So had Whitlam. So did Fraser and, later, Hawke and Keating. It was all out there, in public, 24 years ago. It was never a secret how Australia rolled over to "realism".
In the files of the Parliamentary Library is a transcript of a talk given at the Australian National University in Canberra almost a quarter of a century ago. The date was March 18, 1976. The Whitlam Government was four months dead. The Fraser Government was four months new. Indonesia's brutal military takeover of East Timor had begun amid the political upheaval of Australia moving from one to the other.
Several people spoke at the ANU seminar that day. One was Gregory Clark, a former young Foreign Affairs officer who'd resigned in 1965 after the Menzies Government committed Australian troops to "save" South Vietnam. He later became a distinguished foreign correspondent in Tokyo and in 1975 was a policy consultant to the Whitlam Government.
When Clark was introduced that day, the seminar audience was told he would "focus on what the Australian Government did wrong" in East Timor policy. Clark began: "What the Australian Government did wrong? Well, it wasn't the Australian Government. It was Gough Whitlam.
"I think Peter Hastings, who is here today, probably knows more about this than I do, because he was actually in Jogjakarta at the time, in September 1974, [for a meeting between Whitlam and Indonesia's President Soeharto] and his dispatches reporting Whitlam's attitude, the conversations with Soeharto, over Timor were dead accurate. They bore a remarkable similarity, a coincidence of accurate detail to the official reports, put it that way.
It was an excellent piece of journalism. "Whitlam is not a cruel man, but he genuinely had this obsession about the stupidity of creating small nation states. This of course parallels his political views about the future of Australian federalism. So Whitlam told the Indonesians that if they could incorporate East Timor, it would be healthier both for Indonesia and Australia.
"At this stage, nobody really imagined the East Timorese would fight for their independence. Everyone felt it would be done neatly, smoothly, a repeat of the West Irian exercise [when Indonesia subsumed Dutch West New Guinea in the early 1960s]. The Indonesians were working up a plan basically for the takeover by subversion of Timor. The plan reached Canberra through intelligence channels.
"It was seen, studied, at quite a high level of the Australian Government, and basically approved. That approval was given, again personally, by Whitlam to Soeharto in Townsville in the meeting they had in March of 1975. From then on it was simply a matter of time before the Indonesian juggernaut got into action.
"What to me was particularly upsetting was the behaviour of the Australian Government in September/October 1975, in that crucial two months period when it was clear Fretilin [the independence movement] was in control in East Timor, when Australia could have exerted pressure to prevent Indonesia's invasion. Instead we did the exact reverse.
"Fretilin made a series of appeals to the United Nations, to its powerful decolonisation committee. If the appeals had been properly handled and referred on to the General Assembly, to full membership of the UN, it is extremely likely Indonesia would have realised the extent of Third World opinion against invasion and would have been deterred.
"Australia smugly, almost joyously, co-operated with Indonesian officials at the UN to make sure those appeals were not debated, that they were shelved. Towards the end, Don Willesee, Whitlam's Foreign Minister, was definitely getting concerned about the implications. Even, I think, a section in the department was opposed. It was basically a Whitlam policy.
"To me what happened is worse in some ways than Vietnam." So no, it was no secret. Australia's complicity in Indonesia's annexation of East Timor, either by design or dissembling acquiescence, was on the public record at least as far back as March 1976. That complicity was widely asserted at the time. It was just as strenuously denied, always.
Twenty-four years later and the official records confirm Clark and Hastings were right. So were others. What muffled their voices was bare-faced political mendacity. The greater melancholy is we no longer seem outraged that our governments all governments lie shamelessly when it suits.