The scourge of the Asia Pacific

In early 2013, the Australian Signals Directorate was spying on Indonesian officials involved in trade negotiations with the US. The private communications recorded were most likely relating to disputes over clove cigarettes and prawn exports.

It’s hardly the stuff of international espionage. It wouldn’t make the title of a John Grisham or Tom Clancy novel – The Great Shrimp Conspiracy – but it’s an illustration of the link between the state and private capitalists.

Recent leaks by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal that the Australia government offered this information to the NSA, which passed it on to “interested US customers” who found it “highly useful”.

On 16 February Tony Abbott, responding to the Snowden spying revelations, said “We certainly don’t use it [surveillance] for commercial purposes.”

This is a bald-faced lie.

The Australian and Timor-Leste governments are currently in international arbitration at The Hague. The Timorese want a $40 billion oil and gas treaty ripped up, claiming that the Australian government illegally obtained intelligence to gain advantage during the negotiations.

A decade ago, government offices in Timor’s capital Dili were given an expensive makeover under an Australian Foreign Aid program. What appeared to be a generous gift turned out to be a Trojan Horse.

According to a former spy turned whistleblower, in May 2004 Australian Secret Intelligence Service agents, disguised as site workers, planted listening devices in the walls of the Timorese cabinet room, just two offices away from the chamber occupied by the prime minister. After the treaty negotiations concluded, the agents returned to remove the evidence.

The treaty concerns a region in the Timor Sea known as Greater Sunrise. It’s a $20 billion bonanza for resource company Woodside Petroleum, which has been acting in concert with the Australian government to screw over Timor.

Deakin University professor of Asian Studies Damien Kingsbury is an expert in the case. “If Australia had recognised the Convention of the Law of the Sea and drawn the boundary halfway between the two countries”, he points out, “East Timor would get 100 percent of all of the reserves, as is its right under international law.”

The accumulation of profits has always been a driver of Australian foreign policy.

In 1975, the government supported the invasion of Timor by the Indonesian military. Ambassador to Indonesia Richard Woolcott wrote in August of that year, “We are all aware of the Australian Defence interest in the Portuguese Timor situation, but I wonder whether the Department [of Foreign Affairs] has ascertained the interest of the Department of Minerals and Energy in the Timor situation.

“It would seem to me that this Department might well have an interest in closing the present gap in the agreed sea border and this could be more readily negotiated with Indonesia than with Portugal or independent East Timor. I know I am recommending a pragmatic rather than a principled stand, but that is what the national interest and foreign policy is all about.”

“National interest” was code for profits for big business, which were considered more important than the lives of the Timorese people.

Today nothing has changed.

Australian capitalists are still making a killing in the Asia Pacific with the help of the Australian government.

Sometimes this involves espionage, sometimes it’s driving a hard bargain at the negotiating table and other times it involves brutal violence.

The PNG mobile squads involved in the recent attacks on asylum seekers on Manus Island, for instance, are funded by the Australian government. These squads gained infamy in 1989 on the island of Bougainville where, at the behest of Bougainville Copper Limited, a subsidiary of Rio Tinto, they were unleashed on local landowner activists who had shut down the Panguna copper mine.

The squads tortured and executed people, raped women and torched houses.

They’re not the only death squads Australia funds in the region. The Indonesian Detachment 88, formed in the wake of the 2002 Bali bombings, is funded and trained by the Australian Federal Police and the CIA in “counter-terrorism”.

In reality, they are little more than skilled assassins. In 2012, they gunned down West Papuan popular independence leader Mako Tabuni. In 2010, they executed Kelly Kwalik, a leader from the Free Papua Movement. They are ruthless and above the law.

The West Papuans’ struggle for self-determination and land rights threatens lucrative mining profits. West Papua contains the largest known deposit of gold in the world, the Grasberg complex, controlled by the Arizona mining company Freeport.

Rio Tinto has secured a 40 percent stake in all future production at the Grasberg complex from 2021, as well as 40 percent of all new excavations in West Papua.

Australian capitalism considers the Asia Pacific its business. With the help of the government, it will do almost anything to secure a profit from the region.

Follow Kim on Twitter @kim_doyle1