Iraq is not the only humanitarian issue facing the Howard Government today.

East Timor's President Xanana Gusmao made an urgent and desperate appeal to Australia last week and failed to raise a flicker of media interest.

The crisis facing East Timor is profound. "Independence is very good,"Gusmao told this paper during his Australian visit. "But without capable administration then maybe we will fail."The 2002 Human Development Report documented the scale of crisis on our doorstep: 40 per cent of the people live on less than US55c a day; life expectancy is 57 years; the infant mortality rate is 80 in every 1000 births; and the adult literacy rate is only 43 per cent with 46 per cent of people having no schooling or skills.

In a speech to the Asia Society's Australasia Centre last week, Gusmao looked with a forgiving realism upon his country: "Once fortnightly I meet with dozens of people, mothers, widows, youths, orphans, men, elderly, who raise and present their difficulties to me: be it the fact that they have no means of subsistence, or no jobs, or no roof, or mostly, they cannot pay their children's school fees. Just try to imagine: one Australian dollar per month per child in prep and primary school. Even this, they cannot afford to pay."There is no functioning economy or "mechanisms for the purchase, processing and distribution of products". Most people operate in subsistence agriculture. The conditions for foreign investment are yet to be created. As he said, maybe East Timor will fail. But is anybody listening?

Gusmao tells me he wants to focus not on human rights violations in the past but human rights needs for the future-clean government, anti-corruption, food, housing and education.

But he made one specific request. Just one, for the moment. Could Australia, acting out of compassion, allow the 1600 East Timorese residing here to stay at least for some time? These are the Timorese who came in the first part of the 1990s and whose return home will just further impoverish a poor nation. Gusmao knows their status as asylum-seekers is no longer relevant since East Timor is free. He appeals "to the sensibility of the Australian authorities, in particular, to the Prime Minister". It is a President to Prime Minister request.