Oil in troubled waters - funding a Basic Income for East Timor

Still more impressive is what these figures represent in comparison with what East Timor is now spending on food imports: US$237 million per annum. This is about 62 per cent of an overall Basic Income of US$40. Social and economic life before the invasion was based on agriculture with a significant community-based component. The pilot project of rice cultivation with buffaloes in the isolated community of Uatulari (a problem zone because of the high degree of militia activity), financed by the Regional Government of Catalonia (US$142,680 in total), has proved that even the most difficult areas can achieve self-sufficiency in rice in a very short time with a modest financial input. In other words, the saving of US$237 million per annum in food imports could eventually cover about two thirds of a substantial Basic Income.

To look at the figures another way, a Basic Income of US$40 per month for everyone in a hamlet of 20 eight-member families represents US$76,600 per annum compared with the annual average of US$47,560 that the much bigger community of Uatulari has received from the Catalan Government over the last three years, a contribution that has completely transformed economic and social life in Uatulari.

Furthermore, given the nature of East Timorese society, stable food production means restoring the social fabric that was destroyed with the killing of livestock and general havoc of the occupation years and especially the months after the 1999 referendum, as Uatulari has also demonstrated. This “social capital” is a necessary though not sufficient condition for resettling the 280,000 people who were displaced from East Timor during the militia violence, including militia members themselves.

Another aspect is that there was a massive migration to the capital, Dili, in 1999, a problem of population imbalance that is yet to be solved. In particular, there are many unemployed, traumatised and disaffected youth with a great capacity for violence, who are especially susceptible to the attempts of diehard former militia and pro-Indonesia elements to create instability. Another group that needs urgent consideration is that comprised by the former FALINTIL guerrilla fighters, men (and some women) who renounced their youth, and any educational and employment possibilities they may have had, in order to fight for their country’s independence. These people, their widows and dependents, account for some 40,000 people today. They are the country’s heroes and yet are economically, and therefore socially, excluded. In short, a revived economy on the basis of a Basic Income would favour many processes of reconciliation besides improving the democratic processes that the East Timor government so desires to make a reality.

We are also asking whether the Australian government will continue to deny East Timor this option of real socioeconomic development on a nationwide scale and to deny itself the long-term advantages of having a stable and self-sufficient neighbour. Finally, we are wondering whether it really wants to keep projecting this unflattering image of the nasty old man who snatches sweets from a child, or the future from the children of East Timor.