Sydney – Australia's foreign minister has threatened to suspend talks with East Timor on disputed multi-billion-dollar Timor Sea gas and oil fields, saying the opposition Labor Party had politicised the issue.
Foreign Minister Alexander Downer accused Labor leader Mark Latham of acting irresponsibly by saying last week that he would start fresh negotiations with East Timor if elected in national elections expected in October or November.
The long-running negotiations have strained Australia's relations with East Timor, which wants a greater share of oil revenues, and Downer said Latham had "lurched into" the issue at a delicate stage in a bid to score political points.
He said Latham had undermined Australia's position and the government was considering suspending the next round of talks with Dili, scheduled for September.
"That's obviously something we'll have to consider," Downer told Channel Nine. "There won't be any point in going ahead with the negotiations if Labor is going to restart the negotiations after the election.
"This comes at a very bad time, because these negotiations are very delicate and difficult negotiations."
Australia's conservative government has been accused of bullying one of the world's poorest countries by claiming ownership of oil-rich continental shelf two-thirds of the way across the Timor Sea.
East Timor wants the border drawn midway between the two, a change East Timor Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri said last month would be worth an additional 12 billion US dollars in revenue for his country over the "next generation", compared to 4.0 billion dollars under the existing arrangement.
Latham said last week that Labor would start negotiations from scratch because "bad blood" had dominated the existing talks.
He said it was important for East Timor to remain a viable nation and it would not be in Australia's interests to have a failed state on its doorstep.
Labor foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd said Downer was playing politics ahead of the election.
Rudd said Labor's policy had two key points that had been on the record for six months – it wants an agreement to be finalised within three to five years, rather than the government's open-ended approach, and it wants international law, including the United Nations' law of the sea, to be considered.
In March 2002, Australia withdrew from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea before the dispute reached the arbiter.
"These were two clearly articulated differences and six months later Alexander Downer decides to make a political case out of it," Rudd said.