Tony Parkinson – Australia's role in the emancipation of East Timor was an ill-considered "frolic" that could easily have led to military humiliation, former governor-general Bill Hayden said last night.
Saying he was deeply uneasy about the outcome for the people of East Timor, the former Labor foreign affairs minister used a speech in Hobart to defend the policy of successive Australian governments in accepting Indonesia's incorporation of the province, and to praise the achievements of former President Suharto.
He ridiculed the Howard Government's 1998 policy switch in favor of a free East Timor as "a good idea on a comfortable Canberra afternoon" and said it had carried far too great a risk of a long military entanglement with pro-Jakarta forces.
"We were lucky in East Timor that the situation didn't escalate to the point where it could have exhausted and humiliated us," Mr Hayden said. "Frankly, the Americans saved our bacon. We should remember that before we embark on any other thinly thought-through frolic like that one."
Mr Hayden warned that a diminishing US presence in South-East Asia, and a more volatile regional outlook, would mean Australia had to tread carefully, and should refrain from trumpeting over the success of its action in East Timor. "We Australians have to come to terms with the sobering reality that we are really quite a small country ... a tendency for big talk, big noise, might be our undoing," he said.
Mr Hayden's speech at the University of Tasmania was his second controversial intervention in the national debate in the space of a fortnight, following his criticism of the findings of the stolen generation inquiry.
Lamenting what he called the "savage jolt" to relations between Australia and Indonesia, he said Australians should be thankful for the "phenomenal advances" of the Suharto years in bringing greater stability to a highly fragmented regional neighbor.
On the contentious issue of Australia's East Timor diplomacy, he stood firmly behind the Whitlam government's decision in 1975 not to resist Indonesia's military takeover of the former Portuguese colony. "Gough Whitlam's policy on Australia-Indonesia relations was generally right, and that policy was the right one for Australia through the succeeding years up until fairly recently," he said.
Mr Hayden said the portrayal of Australia's stance as one of appeasement towards Suharto reflected a media debate characterised by "intellectual sloppiness as well as blatant dishonesty". He said the only policy alternative – "to send a couple of Australian warships offshore from East Timor" – would have risked the "imbecility" of direct military confrontation. Mr Hayden said this would have attracted no support from the region, or the United States.
He said the Australian debate on East Timor policy had since been distorted by the media's obsession with what he described as the legend of how five journalists were killed by Indonesian forces at Balibo in October, 1975. Mr Hayden said he found nothing in the official documents of the time to support the view that the Whitlam Government and Australian diplomats had prior knowledge of the threat to the lives of the journalists. Mr Hayden said although he sympathised with the families of the bereaved, he suspected the continuing controversy might be linked to a potential damages action against the government.
This claim was rejected last night as "repugnant" by Shirley Shackleton, wife of one of the journalists killed, Greg Shackleton. "This has never been about money, actually," she said.