November to March in East Timor is the hungry season. It is a time when more than 42 per cent of the country's one million people experience severe food shortages.
East Timor is mired in poverty. On the most recent Human Development Index it ranks at 162, coming in between Benin and Cote d'Ivoire, giving it the inauspicious title of the 20th poorest country in the world.
While Nauru was the base for the Howard Government's Pacific Solution, East Timor is a very different proposition. In Nauru the vast majority of people have plenty of food to eat, and get access to an education and health services. This is not the case in East Timor. Prime Minister Gillard's plan to build an asylum seeker processing centre there needs to be understood in this context.
A regional approach to managing the complex issues associated with asylum seekers is long overdue, and Australia can't manage the problem alone. Yet as one of the largest and most affluent players in this region it is crucial we play a proactive and generous role.
Many East Timorese seem at best hesitant about the proposal. Yet, even if we can convince the Timorese Government and its people to house the centre, the logistics of developing such a facility are manifold.
The immigration laws in East Timor are at present particularly weak. Currently an 'irregular entrant', in the new Gillard-speak, has just 72 hours to lodge their application and have the matter dealt with by the Minister. If the claim is rejected, the applicant has a further eight days to get the matter heard in a court. If this does not occur, the fate of the applicant is unclear. Reports suggest some asylum seekers are living in East Timor without recourse seemingly interminably.
Yet President Jose Ramos-Horta says he wouldn't want Timor-Leste to become an island prison for asylum seekers and such people 'will have to have certain freedoms'. This is not the kind of language we are used to hearing from Australian leaders.
In Australia there have been many allegations of abuse by privately contracted detention centre staff. While few of these allegations have made it to court, the Cornelia Rau and Vivian Solon affairs illustrate how wrong this process can go even here in Australia. In East Timor where the infrastructure and oversight is far less developed, enormous assistance would need to be deployed to avert these kinds of disasters.
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