Page 2172 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 22 June 2005
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that we should throw out all the rules for negotiating international boundaries and that we should do it his way because he thinks that it is better. Let us look at the rules of negotiation. The question is: do you negotiate or do you litigate? Over the last couple of years, Australia has settled other maritime disputes in the way that it is doing it now, by negotiation. We have done it with Papua New Guinea, with Indonesia, with France and more recently with New Zealand. We have done it by negotiation and that is what Australia is doing now. This is the established way to do it. You can go through the litigation process, but I do not think that anybody wants to do that.
Let me say some things about international law. These are things that motions such as the one before us never reveal. That is why we as an opposition are here; we are here to put on the record the truth of the matter. International law does not require that all overlapping maritime claims are to be resolved by a median or equidistant line. You do not just draw a line down the middle and say, “That is fair.” Nobody expects any nation to abide by that. That is why we have the process of negotiation.
The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea says that equitable solutions will vary according to the particular circumstances of the case at hand and effectively no two delineations are ever the same. In an article in the Sydney Morning Herald of 25 May 2005, Dr Natalie Klein of the Macquarie University said:
It is extremely unlikely that an international court would favour the use of the median line between Australia and East Timor.
So you have to look at the factors that militate against the median line. Australia’s case is based on the claim that we have applied to all our borders; that is, where our continental shelf lies, where the platform that is mainly Australian extends to. We have applied this against the French, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and New Zealand. We are applying it in the same way, consistently, with Timor. That is how it should be, Mr Speaker. It should be done on an equitable basis.
The fourth part of the motion is of concern and I have an amendment that I will move to it. Paragraph (4) states:
urges the Australian Government to conduct ongoing negotiations in good faith, and to consider the economic and political sovereignty of Timor-Leste as of paramount concern during negotiations.
The Australian government was elected by the Australian people to protect Australian interests and to look after the Commonwealth of Australia. Mr Gentleman of the Australian Labor Party wants the government to put that aside and say that our paramount concern is the sovereignty of Timor-Leste.
Let us look at the history of what this country has already done for Timor, and we have done a lot. No-one will forget and should ever forget the six Canberra AFP officers who went back into the Red Cross compound and reversed the whole flow of Western nations leaving Timor to its fate. Those six officers did an extraordinary job. Then, consequently, the Australian and United Nation forces came in. Timor is there today because of the actions of this country. So let us not say that Australia and its government do not have in mind the interests of Timor, because they have. But it is not our job to make them of
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