Page 2176 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 22 June 2005
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crops and with our assistance. I have a friend who is one of the people advising East Timorese about the varieties of rice that grow best there. There is so much work to be done. Yes, Australia is doing its bit through aid and so on but, while people are still starving there, it is simply not enough.
There are issues that I want to raise with the ACT government, because I do think this is a motion that is relevant to the ACT. I was one of the people who were instrumental in setting up the Canberra Friends of Dili. I helped organise the public meeting that really started the whole thing off in 2001 with my predecessor Kerrie Tucker and with a woman called Patricia Woodcroft-Lee, who has now moved to Melbourne but who really set this East Timor friendship group in motion. She spends a lot of time in East Timor and she knows the issues from on the ground.
One of the reasons that we decided to call it a friendship relationship, rather than a sister city relationship, is that the sister city relationship occurs at the government-to-government level. We wanted it to be something that arose from the community, but we wanted the government to be involved. We actually invited Mr Stanhope to that first meeting in an attempt to get maybe some resources, maybe someone in the Chief Minister’s Department who would be able to facilitate this arrangement. Remember in 2001 Dili was a basket case. It had just been through the whole situation of the war. So we felt that there was a lot that Canberra could do. As you know, the Canberra Friends of Dili are still very active and we have heard about some of their projects.
I would like to see some more work from the government, perhaps in the same line as the work we do with Beijing. For instance, East Timor has been calling on tourism from countries like Australia for a long time now. Why cannot our minister for tourism go to Dili and investigate how we can promote tourism from the ACT with Dili? I would like to see a stronger effort from the education department to develop relationships between schools in the ACT and schools in Dili. I think there is room for us to promote business relationships between ACT business people and Dili, and here I want the underlying theme to be, “We’re not doing it just for our profits. We’re doing it because we care about supporting this very poor, very needy neighbour to our north.”
While I support Mr Gentleman’s motion and endorse a lot of it wholeheartedly, I would also like to see the ACT government getting a little bit more involved at the level of government, not leaving it all to the Friends of Dili. I note, for instance, that at a recent conference in Victoria University in Melbourne called “Cooperating with East Timor: ideas for good development practice”, one of the key themes was how Australian governments, federal, state and local, are working with the Timorese. There was one representative of the Canberra Friends of Dili, but there were no ACT government representatives.
MS PORTER (Ginninderra) (4.15): I would like to speak to the motion and to the amendment. First of all, I would like to say that I do not support Mr Smyth’s amendment. I am pleased to speak in support of the motion moved by Mr Gentleman.
The strong and developing ties between Canberra and the capital of the newly-independent Timor-Leste, Dili, are certainly worth reaffirming. As members of the Assembly may recall and as Mr Gentleman mentioned earlier, the Chief Minister
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