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Gusmao looks to jobs, food, education

Source
Sydney Morning Herald - August 27, 2008

Hamish McDonald – Xanana Gusmao has had many difficult roles in his 62 years: as rural teacher, guerilla leader, political prisoner, symbolic president of a raw and traumatised new nation.

His latest job could be the toughest of all: restoring progress to a Timor-Leste whose 1 million people soon woke from long dreamt-of independence into a grind of unemployment, poverty and violence.

Since moving from the presidency to the hands-on job of prime minister a year ago, Mr Gusmao has seen the setting get so much harder, with the world oil price shooting higher than $US100 a barrel and traded rice almost trebling in cost.

Last month his Government felt obliged to dip deep into the petroleum fund his predecessor had set up to save Timor Sea oil and gas revenue for the future, lifting this year's budget by 120 per cent to $US788 million with much of the increase going to subsidies for food, fuel and building materials.

Mr Gusmao has been savaged by the opposition party Fretilin and reportedly criticised by the World Bank for using savings to subsidise consumption. He was also attacked for giving the job of securing rice supplies to a former resistance comrade without going to open tender.

In Sydney yesterday on an official visit to Australia, Mr Gusmao said he could do nothing about oil prices, but investment in food production was taking Timor-Leste towards rice self-sufficiency by 2012 – if rains are good. "If next year we don't have [rain], we have to feed our people," he said. "If nothing [adverse] happens, we will not use the money. It is more for preventing problems."

He is also hoping that education will head off the population explosion threatening his country, with the current birth rate indicating a doubling by 2020. "Fertility is a matter of education," he said.

Two years after the violence of 2006, peace is returning to his capital Dili, with thousands of internal refugees returning to their homes, protection camps closed, and small businesses reopening. "It is stable, calm, sometimes you use 'apparently calm' – it is I believe the right word," he said.

"It is calm but it is fragile. We need to make efforts in other sectors to give more sense of hope. Now our duty is to provide jobs."

Some of those jobs, he hopes, will come from East Timorese taking part in the seasonal farm labour scheme just announced for South Pacific countries. That will not happen yet, the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, made clear in their meeting this week. "Maybe by the end of the year the Australian Government can consider the option," Mr Gusmao said.

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