Damien Kingsbury’s recent piece, Timor-Leste appears to abandon sustainability, recycles tired tropes from Australian academics bent on safeguarding Canberra’s interests in the Timor Sea.
From bugged cabinet rooms to relentless critiques of Timor-Leste’s oil and gas plans, a pattern emerges: undermine Dili’s ambitions to tilt benefits toward Australia. Kingsbury’s latest “salvo” exposes not just bias but a glaring credibility gap – contradictory claims masquerading as sober analysis.
Countries that process oil and gas onshore reap higher revenues, jobs, and industrial growth, facts Kingsbury sidesteps. Yet Timor-Leste’s pursuit of this model via the Greater Sunrise field and Tasi Mane project is framed as a disaster – “stalled”, “unrealistic”, a “headlong rush towards the fiscal cliff”. Woodside’s Darwin-or-bust stance gets a free pass, while Dili’s vision is belittled. Where’s the scrutiny of Australia’s foot-dragging since 2007? Or envoy Steve Bracks’ efforts to unlock Greater Sunrise? The silence is deafening.
Kingsbury leans heavily on the Petroleum Fund’s “unsustainability”, a “$16 billion” nest egg (88% of GDP in 2024) funding 88% of Timor-Leste’s budget.
He has been repeating the 16 billion figure since 2017, but the fund currently sits at about US$18,97 billion. Revenues from investments in financial markets alone have generated $10.26 billion. In 2024, the return from overseas investments was approximately 6.8%. But Kingsbury writes withdrawals exceed the “sustainable” limit — possibly $1.2 billion annually — warning of collapse by 2035 as Bayu-Undan fades. Dogma casts the fund as a sacred idol, not to be touched for development, only preserved for some distant future. But Timor-Leste’s leaders, like Xanana Gusmão, see it differently: why bequeath a poor nation with no infrastructure, locking in dependency? The fund isn’t just for worship – it’s a tool to build roads, drains, and flood defences, tangible gains Kingsbury ignores.
The “fiscal cliff” — coined by Fretilin’s ex-finance minister in 2023 — doubles as a political cudgel against Gusmão’s Tasi Mane vision and an economic scare tactic for austerity. Fretilin’s own $2 billion Oecusse white elephant gets no mention, nor does the 2023 court ruling against its billion-dollar veterans’ fund as unconstitutional pork-barrelling. Kingsbury praises the government’s “restraint” — $1.6 billion budgets stalling growth — while decrying the 2025 $2.6 billion as reckless. Context vanishes: new Chinese built roads cut farmers’ travel from days to hours, flood mitigation shields Dili from another Cyclone Seroja (2021), and urban upgrades lift living standards. Austerity won’t fix the 40% in absolute poverty or 50% facing food insecurity – development will.
Kingsbury’s contradiction peaks with Greater Sunrise. He admits it’s worth at least $33 billion, with Timor-Leste’s 56.6% stake promising $50–$100 billion over decades – enough to stretch the Petroleum Fund to 2045 and beyond. Yet he insists Dili’s onshore dream dooms it to ruin, while processing in Darwin or Australia’s 90% offer is salvation. His maths just don’t add up: either way, on or offshore, billions flow. Onshore processing adds jobs and industry — diversification preached but unfunded by critics — while Darwin just fattens Australia’s coffers. Sceptics claim on the one hand only a handful of unskilled jobs in cleaning and security will be created and, without blushing, on the other that the country doesn’t have enough skilled workers to sustain the project. The fact is local worker experience and training in Timor-Leste and overseas already exists and is ongoing, only to increase in the future. The 2025 Wood report, from Britain’s John Wood Group, backs onshore as viable, yet Kingsbury shrugs it off as a pipe dream.
The 2025 Wood Report, echoing TIMOR GAP’s concept study, torches this scepticism with hard data: onshore processing at Tasi Mane could create 17,700 full-time jobs in Timor-Leste — spanning extraction, processing, and support roles — while pumping $50.3 billion into its GDP. For Australia, it’s no loser either, delivering $7.7 billion in upstream revenues — outstripping Darwin’s $5.9 billion — and a $27.9 billion GDP boost, dwarfing alternatives. With lower costs ($18 billion capital, $300 million operating) and a solid 14.6% return, the report buries the “unrealistic” tag. Kingsbury’s silence on these figures betrays a narrative allergic to facts.
He criticises 2025’s budget — 31% on “recreation, culture, and religion”—as frivolous, ignoring its education and community focus for a nation where 60% are under 25. Meanwhile, Australia’s $200 billion Future Fund sits against $600 billion in liabilities — where’s its “fiscal cliff” lecture? Timor-Leste isn’t broke yet, as Kingsbury predicted in 2017, nor do its people live beyond their means; Greater Sunrise, onshore or off, bridges the gap to the future. Claims of Chinese or Kuwaiti interest spark “angst”, but sound like sour grapes from a neighbour loath to lose leverage.
With the same “iron stubbornness” that brought it independence, Timor-Leste has been busy paving roads. Kingsbury — who once claimed independence was the result of ‘lucky events’ — has been paving the same old tired doomsday narrative for the best part of 10 years. He paints Timor-Leste’s post-2002 path as a betrayal of a sustainable Eden, not a war-torn restart. Expecting houses of local materials — bamboo and grass? — over steel and cement while oil money flows is naive. His sanctimonious hook — “abandoning sustainability” — crumbles under scrutiny: selective stats, amnesia about Australia’s role, and a bias that judges the minnow while sparing the whale. As Dili negotiates with East, West, or Eurasian players, this white noise from Australian academics offers little, just a credibility gap laid bare.
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MARTIN HARDIE
Martin Hardie has had a global career spanning law, academia, journalism, and cultural advocacy. Born in Australia, he holds a Law Degree with Honours (Northern Territory University) and a PhD in Legal Anthropology (Deakin University). He has lived and worked in Australia, the UK, Timor-Leste, Panama, Mozambique, and Spain, blending legal practice with social impact. As a lawyer, Hardie pioneered the Aboriginal copyright cases in the 1980s–90s and served in landmark cases like the Timor Gap and the NT Euthanasia disputes. He has advised Timor-Leste’s resistance and political leaders from 1992 until the present time. Academically, he’s taught law and society at universities worldwide, including Deakin, NTU, Florida State, UNPAZ and UNDIL.Beyond law, Hardie has managed bands (e.g., The Laughing Clowns and Warumpi Band), ran Aboriginal art centres, and has written for El País and cycling magazines. His book, Governing the Society of Competition examines law and sovereignty in neoliberalism through the lens on pro-cycling’s war on doping. Now based in Aileu, Timor-Leste, he is currently the Principal Research Officer for President José Ramos-Horta and runs with his family Dili Vanilli and Posada Txiriboga, merging his interdisciplinary expertise to shape law, culture, and development.
