The raids on two houses by the Australian Federal Police, searching for information on who leaked secret files on East Timor, have shown yet again the real basis of Australian foreign policy: lying to the Australian people and to the world.
The raids, on the Canberra home of Philip Dorling, an adviser to Labor foreign affairs spokesperson Laurie Brereton, on September 16, and on the Sydney home of Captain Clinton Fernandes, an army intelligence officer, in the days before that, are part of an investigation launched by the government last year. Coalition justice minister Amanda Vanstone has admitted she was briefed on the raids before they occurred.
The raids have their origins in Canberra's murky East Timor policy. Throughout 1999, Prime Minister John Howard and foreign minister Alexander Downer championed a diplomatic strategy which handed the Indonesian military (the TNI) responsibility for ensuring security during East Timor's ballot on independence.
From the beginning, representatives of the East Timorese, media commentators, analysts, anyone who cared to look, argued that such a strategy would lead to a human rights disaster, because it was the TNI which was arming, training and protecting the militia gangs terrorising the country.
This the federal government denied. Downer and his bureaucrats claimed that the militia gangs were the work of "rogue elements" within the TNI, not of the military's hierarchy.
The bloodbath which followed the August ballot proved Downer's claims to be false: pictures beamed across the world showed Indonesian soldiers participating in the carnage, while leaked TNI documents proved the scorched-earth policy was meticulously planned by the military's high command.
The Australian government files, mainly from security agencies like the Defence Intelligence Organisation, were leaked to media institutions and opposition politicians between January 1999 and June 2000.
The files revealed that the federal government was lying all along. It knew the TNI hierarchy was behind the militias but pursued its diplomatic strategy anyway, at the costs of thousands of Timorese lives.
The leaks were a serious embarrassment for Downer and Howard, because they revealed the depths of the government's deception. The two raids by the AFP show the government is determined to wreak vengeance on whichever public servants were behind the leaks.
The raids also show just how thin and hypocritical was the government's claimed commitment to openness and accountability when it released, not two weeks ago, files showing the extent of the Whitlam Labor government's foreknowledge of, and support for, Indonesia's 1975 invasion of East Timor.
Both the federal Labor opposition and the media are outraged by the raids.
Labor leader Kim Beazley has written to the speaker of the House of Representatives, Kevin Andrews, calling the raid on Dorling's house a "grave breach of parliamentary privilege" that could be deemed contempt of parliament.
The Sydney Morning Herald, in a September 21 editorial stated "No amount of embarrassment can justify intimidation of politicians in parliament or journalists outside, under the pretext of tracking down the sources of leaks said to threaten national security".
Both Beazley and the Herald miss the point.
The greatest crime here is not the abuse of power by this particularly loathsome government or its will for revenge against those who have stung it. It is far worse.
The people who have been violated and held in contempt by the government's actions are not politicians or journalists; the real victims are the people of Australia, of Indonesia, of East Timor, of all countries.
Why exactly where these documents kept secret in the first place? Who were they being hidden from?
Not from the government or military of Indonesia, which made no serious attempt to hide its involvement with the militias and was certainly aware that Canberra knew of it. Not from other governments — Australian security agencies shared their intelligence on this matter with their US and other allied counterparts, just as they always do.
These documents were being hidden from us, the people, so that we wouldn't know the truth that our government was complicit, before the fact, in the destruction of East Timor.
Secret diplomacy is not so much about the deceits governments perpetrate against each other as it is about the far grander deceits they perpetrate against their own citizens, their real enemies.
The whole secret archive of documents and transmissions and intelligence, on East Timor and everything else, should be opened, so we can learn the full truth about those who rule us. When that happens, they won't keep ruling us for long.