Exceptions are well known and date back at least to early last century, and upheld by international courts and tribunals since, as stated in the 5th Edition of Oppenheim's International Law:

'It is a well established principle that a State cannot invoke its municipal legislation as a reason for avoiding its international obligations. For essentially the same reason a State, when charged with a breach of its international obligations with regard to the treatment of aliens, cannot validly plead that according to its Municipal Law and practice the act complained of does not involve discrimination against aliens as compared to nationals. This applies in particular to the question of the treatment of the person of aliens. It has been repeatedly laid down that there exists in this matter a minimum standard of civilisation, and that a State which fails to measure up to that standard incurs international liability.' 

As noted, international law in this respect has not retreated since that statement, though too commonly it is honoured more in the breach than in its observance. Given the increasing level of trade and investment between Australia and the UAE, most evidently recently in the field of aviation, it is vital that there be confidence in our respective legal processes.

We believe that the Australian community should be assured that its citizens, when faced with situations of this nature, will be assisted with the full diplomatic resources of their government, and if that fails the defaulting state should be made aware of its responsibilities and incur full international liability for its failures, a consequence that should have repercussions for its international standing more widely.

(H/t 3QD.)

As seems to be the rule for budget papers, the numbers hide the pain. Despite the partial reversal on job cuts, it appears around 140-150 positions were cut in 2012-13, or more than 10% of staff from an organisation of only around 1300 people. Word is that, on top of these savings, MFAT has made major organisational changes to achieve further efficiencies, scrapping the rotational system to make Wellington postings 'new' jobs rather than place-holders between overseas postings. In the words of opposition foreign affairs spokesperson Phil Goff:

We undermined our greatest asset in foreign relations, our skilled and committed workforce, all to save a miserable $12 million which after its backdown is all the Government got from its internal restructuring.

New Zealand is a tiny nation which has been extremely successful on the world stage. Its free trade agreement with China, signed in 2008, is the only FTA China has made in the developed world. As Goff points out, New Zealand's exports to China have more than doubled since the FTA commenced, and have insured New Zealand from the worst impacts of the GFC. Goff attributes this to the expertise of New Zealand’s diplomats:

Securing the free trade agreement wasn’t by good luck. It was the skill of our negotiators and the hard work in diplomacy we put in over a long period to develop a strong relationship of trust with China. 

MFAT is a small agency tasked with the large challenge of promoting New Zealand's interests in the world. There was little fat to be cut, and now there is even less. MFAT's 2013-14 budget looks to have arrested the swing of the hatchet. It remains to be seen whether the reprieve is temporary or permanent.

Photo by Flickr user juicyrai.

The Supreme Leader has the authority to overturn the Council's decision and thus to let Rafsanjani run. There is a school of thought that Khamenei may do so to lend greater legitimacy to the election while at the same time reinforcing the real power in Iran. The daughter of Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, has even written to the Supreme leader asking him to allow Rafsanjani to run.

It's unlikely Khamenei will choose this path, however. After the social unrest that followed the 2009 election, and given ongoing sanctions, on-again off-again nuclear negotiations and Iran's increasing support for the Assad regime in Syria, an orderly election without a candidate around whom reformists could coalesce might be exactly what the Supreme Leader wants. 

Photo by Flickr user Ali Ghazvini.

First, the uranium industry has a very good record of radiation protection (we always come in well below the limits for radiation exposure) and environmental performance, as industry regulators attest every year. The industry can meet the most challenging tests of environmental assessment. Commonwealth environment ministers have approved four uranium projects since 2008 on grounds including that the projects will operate according to world best practice and pose no credible threat to the environment. Eleven thousand shipping containers of uranium have been transported within Australia over 30 years with no incidents affecting the public.

Second, the industry makes a modest but valuable contribution to Australian prosperity. Uranium exports are worth $600-$700 million annually, which makes us a middle-sized export industry about the same in value as computers, paper and cheese. We employ about 3500 people. This economic contribution will grow as a direct consequence of the normalisation of the industry. While the industry faces challenging economic circumstances, government forecasters expect the uranium spot price to rise by 75% by 2018. The world's demand for uranium will exceed supply by then.

By the 2030s, the capacity of the world's nuclear industry is forecast to expand by between 25% and 100%. Australia, with the world's largest endowment of uranium, is well placed to contribute to the supply of uranium required by that expansion, provided we become competitive enough. Measured by energy value, Australia's uranium industry is second only to coal in importance: Australia's uranium exports account for 20% of the energy value of the country's energy production. 

The third reason for change is that the negotiation of new export treaties has demonstrated to a wider audience that Australia's uranium is exported under strict safeguards and has only ever been used only for peaceful purposes. Australia's nuclear safeguards organisation reports this finding to parliament every year. Australia's treaty negotiators also take nuclear safety into account when negotiating treaties.

Fourth, our exports of uranium allow a dozen countries to produce electricity with no greenhouse emissions and without pollution.

The current state of uranium politics in a long way from 2007, when uranium development was banned in all but South Australia and the Northern Territory and when there was no uranium consensus between the two main national political parties. Now, there is broad-based Commonwealth and state political support for the industry's expansion. Now, uranium development is possible in some form in every state except Victoria. Western Australia, Queensland and New South Wales have all changed policies and changed laws.

Nationally, the ALP and the Coalition both support uranium development. Both have supported the making of new treaties for exports to China, Russia and the UAE. Prime Minister Julia Gillard championed a change in her party's and her government's policy on exports to India and initiated negotiations for a treaty which is expected to reflect the condition of all the other treaties Australia has made for uranium exports: that Australia's uranium will only be used for peaceful purposes. The Opposition supports a treaty with India.

Much has been done to reform Australian policy. Some work remains. But there is little doubt that the continuing evolution of uranium policy is towards normalisation.

Photo by Flickr user Alberto OG.

Instead, there should be a middle ground where Australians who end up requiring consular assistance get charged a specific amount based on type of assistance obtained (eg. welfare cases tend to be more resource consuming than passport cases) or whether the case is self-inflicted vs bad luck (eg. those who are arrested for a specific or group of crimes could be charged a higher fee than those who are hospitalised due to events outside of their control).

Prior to receiving consular assistance, where possible and practicable, the client could sign an undertaking to repay the consular fee. In order to incite the traveler to repay the fee owned as soon as possible, a 'freeze' could be placed on the client's passport preventing further travel until the amount owed is repaid to the government. This type of policy is best reflected in the current policy governing the issue of Traveller's Emergency Loans (TELs) where recipients of TELs cannot receive a new passport until the loan is repaid to the government.

The above would ensure that those Australians who are responsible travelers are not penalised for the actions of few, it will make potential consular clients think twice before engage in risky behaviour, it will make consular clients think twice before approaching the government as first point of contact, and lastly it does not penalise those clients who require consular assistance due to events outside of their control.

At the end of the day, while the taxes collected from the taxpayer are sufficient to make consular assistance available to those who need it, they are not sufficient to cover the provision of such service to Australia’s rising traveling population...and this is where both sides of the debate agree.

The stakes of our sovereignty have to be defended there, just as the security of our citizens exposed to climate hazards needs to be guaranteed, notably through the FRANZ arrangements (France-Australia-New Zealand). France contributes to the general protection of the peoples and resources of the Pacific Ocean. In this capacity, France develops cooperative relationships with a number of neighbouring states, in particular Australia, with whom France has agreed a strategic partnership.

I have argued elsewhere that, for confidence building and transparency, it is important for France to openly and directly articulate the value of its strategic presence in the Pacific. But it is also important in the specific context of instability in France's South Pacific entities. France is about to oversee a long-postponed and sensitive independence referendum in New Caledonia, and is managing calls from French Polynesia for more autonomy and even independence.

By acknowledging its strategic interests in the Pacific and its intention to play a constructive role, France will more easily convince regional island countries, and perhaps its own indigenous residents, of the value of its continued presence. To this extent, the 2013 French DWP is an advance on it predecessor.

But once again, in the Australian DWP, France remains a phantom. There is not one mention of France in the entire document.

Even when it talks about the importance of the US and its allies, and NATO more broadly, DWP 2013 does not mention France, which the 2009 DWP at least did. And yet Spain warrants a special section of its own. As you would expect, the UK rates. But France doesn't, even though France and the UK both figure among the world's top five military spenders.

More significantly, the omission is puzzling since France is undoubtedly a Pacific power by virtue of its resident sovereignty backed by military power.

In its specific sections on the South Pacific, the Australian DWP makes no acknowledgment of the partnership with France, this despite tripartite cooperation in the FRANZ arrangements and joint defence cooperation and exercises. It is more of an oddity considering that the South East Asian section mentions the anachronistic Five Power Defence Arrangements. And when discussing the importance of helping Pacific Island states manage their exclusive economic zones, no mention is made of a possible cooperative role with France, whose Pacific territories give it the world's second-largest EEZ. 

One is left with the uncomfortable feeling that France might be assumed, in the Australian DWP, to be lumped into the general references to 'our neighbours' and 'these countries' in the South Pacific region. If this is what was intended, then it is a misrepresentation, as France's long-term status is not yet clear, and won't be until the New Caledonia referendum and France responds to calls for autonomy from French Polynesia.

The omission of France is a lost opportunity for Australia to recognise the strategic value of France's presence in the South Pacific, which will hopefully continue well after its status in its territories is re-defined.

But its also a lost opportunity in the context of the DWP's focus on the new Indo-Pacific strategic arc. France is as active in the Indian Ocean as it is in the Pacific, by virtue of its island sovereignty in Réunion and Mayotte, and the military presence this entails. The French DWP more than once asserts that France is a 'sovereign power and actor in the Indian Ocean and in the Pacific' and even makes a fleeting reference to its cooperation with Australia in the Indian Ocean — in marked contrast to our own DWP.

Image courtesy of the Australian War Memorial.

Blanchard released an update in April 2013 called Rethinking Macro Policy II: Getting Granular, and this was the topic of a seminar at the recent IMF meetings in Washington. In the latest paper, IMF staff note that while it is five years since the crisis, the contours of a new macroeconomic policy consensus remain vague. The relative roles of monetary, fiscal, and macro prudential policy remain unclear. Blanchard concludes: 'where we end up is likely to be the result of experimentation, with learning pains but with the expectation of more successful outcomes'.

The period of policy experimentation has been described as 'navigating by sight'. We may have a general sense of where we want to go, but there is no agreement on the right policy tools to get there, let alone the exact final destination. What this means is that in these uncertain times, policy makers have to be alert to developments and flexible enough to adjust policy as required.

This is also the case for international efforts to strengthen financial regulation. Notwithstanding new capital and liquidity standards with Basel 3, there is no agreed vision of what the future structure of the financial system should look like, and as a consequence, no agreement as to what the appropriate regulation should be. Blanchard notes that there is uncertainty and disagreement about the effects of the agreed measures to strengthen financial systems through higher capital ratios on funding costs and lending.

Some feel the new regulations do not go far enough, David Romer from the University of California believes that the changes to date are helpful but unlikely to be enough to prevent future financial shocks from inflicting large economic costs. Again, policymakers have to be alert and prepared to respond. And given the extra-territorial implications of many of the measures, close international cooperation is required.

The main risk when central banks eventually exit from unconventional monetary policies is a more-rapid-than-expected rise in interest rates. Central banks will start to increase rates and they may begin selling some of their bond holdings. Bond prices will fall. If markets respond by seeking to get out of bonds, prices will fall further and interest rates will spike. Central banks and financial institutions with large bond holdings will incur large capital losses. Higher interest rates may make it harder for customers to repay loans and may bring into question the sustainability of governments with large public debt levels. They may also lead to potentially large and disruptive capital flows and exchange rate movements.

Exit policies will need to be well planned and well communicated. As the premier forum for international economic cooperation, the need for close cooperation during this period of policy experimentation should be front and centre at the meetings of G20 finance ministers and central bank governors.

Photo by Flickr user practicalowl.

For instance, Wolf would no doubt argue that those who strive to reduce their personal carbon footprint are well-meaning but naive, since such actions have a minuscule global impact, and in any case tend to put the emphasis on sacrifice for the greater good, which for all the reasons laid out in his column will never be a universally attractive approach to tackling the problem.

Similarly, Wolf would probably argue that grassroots political activism is also well-meaning but misplaced, since the record shows that politics will not solve this problem. When politicians are forced to choose between tackling climate change and economic growth, they always choose growth, with all its deleterious environmental consequences.

Perhaps I'm extrapolating too much from a single column, but it seems that, for Wolf, there is very little for concerned citizens to do. They just have to wait for the clean energy technology to come along that will solve the problem. Their role is to be consumers, and that's all.

So here's my question: if political activism is pointless and 'greening your lifestyle' is tokenistic and sends the wrong message about how the climate change problem will ultimately be addressed, what options are left for concerned citizens? What's the most meaningful thing an individual can do to tackle climate change? Email your suggestions to blogeditor@lowyinstitute.org.

Photo by Flickr user Kris Krug.

In round figures, DFAT's 2013/4 budget is $1.6 billion compared to AusAID's budget of $5.5 billion and Defence's $25 billion and counting. Given that diplomacy is a country's first line of defence (talk is more effective than war), we could buy more national security by diverting the cost of even a pair of Lockheed Martin F-35 semi-stealth fighters towards more professional representation abroad. But do the Canberra bean-counters see this? Certainly not, it seems in Treasury or on Russell Hill.

But how lacking in influence really is DFAT? Last week, senior officers came to Sydney and had a day of consultations at the Intercontinental Hotel with what they termed 'civil society'. On the agenda were some of Australia's key overseas concerns: Afghanistan, DPRK, the Middle East, Africa, and then workshops on key partners, including Korea, Japan, India, Indonesia and China. All sessions were well attended by members of the business community in Sydney and NGOs. Energy levels were high, a bit like Lowy luncheons but more so.

Then, also last week in Canberra, DFAT had another all-day session at Casey House with civil society, this time on what we should be aiming to achieve during the next two years as a non-permanent member of the Security Council. More high energy discussion with another crowd of NGOs (not so many business people). Very good and productive vibes everywhere. At a reception at Parliament House, Bob Carr later told us that all these meetings were an initiative of the Department, not his. The meetings are being replicated around Australia, presumably at the initiative of the Department's new Secretary, Peter Varghese.

At a separate session a couple of us had with the Deputy Secretary for Strategy at Defence at Russell Hill, he repeatedly deferred to DFAT as the people to talk to about Australia's nuclear policies.

Despite its chronic budget problems, none of this supports the contention that DFAT is out of the policy loop, or behind the policy eight ball.

When even the former Chinese Premier describes the growth model as 'unsteady, unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable', it's easy to agree that things need to change. Indisputably, there is always a challenge in transition. 

But China has often confounded its critics, avoiding foretold disasters and diverging from unsustainable paths. As already noted, the export-driven growth model has been replaced. The current-account surplus has been reduced from over 10% of GDP to 2.5%. The real exchange rate (adjusted for inflation to give a measure of international competitiveness) has appreciated by around 25% in the past five years. Comparing real wages would show an even larger adjustment of competitiveness. Despite sclerotic banks and a shambolic shadow banking sector, China has so far avoided a financial implosion.

Boosting consumption can't be done overnight (and so far the transformation has hardly registered in the macro figures, even though real wages and disposable income are both rising faster than GDP). But arranging for the population to increase its consumption seems a less daunting task than those faced by Europe (where the talk is 'austerity, from here to eternity'), the US (where taxes have to rise and social security and health-care spending have to fall), or Japan (where official debt is well over 200% of GDP and rising).

It's worth noting that this transition has been done before, famously by Japan, but more recently by Singapore, which adjusted from a similarly investment-dominated growth model. Moreover, China doesn't have to stop investing. With annual GDP growth at around 7%, China would need investment close to 30% of GDP just to keep the capital/output ratio stable, and on top of this has to narrow the huge shortfall in its capital-per-worker compared with advanced countries.

Any realistic forecaster would accept that there are many potential mis-steps ahead for China. China will have to do something about pollution, and this will be costly without adding to output. No doubt a good proportion of past investment projects wouldn't pass a rigorous cost-benefit test. But then again, neither would the Sydney Harbour Bridge, with its grossly-excessive capacity when it was built in 1930.

The missing element from the low growth narrative is that unemployment would rise, provoking a stimulatory policy response. China would extend the transition and put up with low-return investment (recall that when unemployment was the issue, Keynes was prepared to put people to work digging holes and filling them in) rather than have unemployment rise sharply. To be convincing, the low-growth scenario needs to explain why this policy response will not be effective.

Somehow most countries muddle through with sub-optimal policies, bumpy transitions and more corruption and incompetence than is optimal. Doom merchants and drama queens can be wrong again and again, and then claim clairvoyance if their bottom-line forecast eventually comes to pass, for whatever reason.

Growth-sustaining reform is underway. The frustration for policy-makers everywhere is that they have to be right all the time to silence their critics. The Chinese may feel that the bar is being set higher for them than for others in a very imperfect world.

Queensland is the state that does the most business with Papua New Guinea and is at the pointy end of Australian interactions with PNG's health crisis. Campbell Newman's visit, with its focus on business, health and police cooperation will probably have more immediate practical impact for Papua New Guineans than the agreements signed by the two Prime Ministers. The memorandum signed between Premier Newman and PNG Prime Minister Peter O'Neill calls for face-to-face meetings between PNG and Queensland every six months, something that Prime Minister Gillard could not promise.

Newman's commitments on behalf of Queensland are a good thing because they serve to further broaden and deepen the relationship. They should be seen as an integral part of the bilateral relationship, even if not driven by Canberra.

To her great credit, Prime Minister Gillard seized the opportunity in Port Moresby to champion the rights of women in Papua New Guinea, raising it during her state dinner speech and announcing a PNG Women in Business initiative. As I've argued previously in these pages, the first female Australian Prime Minister has responsibility to advocate for PNG's women, who endure appalling levels of domestic violence. 

Australian women are themselves standing in solidarity with PNG women, holding events to coincide with protests by women in Papua New Guinea itself. Encouraging more Australian women politicians on both sides of politics to provide personal support, with the assistance of the aid program, to their counterparts in the PNG parliament and to aspiring women politicians could be beneficial. More regular opportunities such as these meetings of women parliamentarians would help.

Papua New Guinea also has a responsibility to build momentum in the relationship. Prime Minister O'Neill is a frequent visitor to Australia and has demonstrated he knows us well and feels comfortable being frank with the Australian Government. He needs to maintain the high level attention he's captured from Canberra by staying in regular touch with the Australian prime minister and senior ministers. O'Neill's own children study in Australia, part of the next generation of PNG's friends of Australia, and representing the Prime Minister's personal stake in the bilateral relationship.

PNG's investments in Australia total $1.8 billion, which interestingly far exceeds the amount of annual Australian aid given to PNG ($463 million). Australia is also the most popular destination for PNG students completing their tertiary studies abroad, with 1268 students from PNG studying in Australia, mostly at post-graduate level, in 2012. Leveraging these elements of the bilateral relationship will help the PNG Government strengthen its influence in Australia.

Investing in this new stage of the relationship with Australia will help PNG establish itself as a modern and reputable partner and increase opportunities for PNG to broaden its bilateral relationships with other countries.

Photo by Flickr user UN Women Asia & the Pacific.

The recent meeting between the UK prime minister and the US president was friendly but ended as two friends agreeing to disagree. Cameron wants intervention in Syria to make the situation better, while Obama is of a mind that intervention will make things worse. In some quarters of the UK press, there is growing disquiet over the UK's robust stance regarding the rebels, as this cartoon shows.

The opposition is no longer winning the information war

One thing that has assisted the recent uprisings in other Arab states is the democratisation of media; anybody could be a reporter and the state could no longer monopolise information. The same held true in Syria, and the Assad regime was particularly poor in the social media space earlier in the conflict. Some pro-government footage did appear on YouTube if you looked hard enough, but Western journalists embedded with rebel groups portrayed a picture of a violent regime using heavy weapons to kill lightly armed opposition forces. Accusations of government atrocities and unverified scenes that supported the rebel narrative dominated social media.

But something has changed these past few months, and opposition elements are increasingly being portrayed in as bad a light as the regime. Be it summary executions or the now infamous rebel mutilation of a Syrian soldier's body, footage of such atrocities is doing untold damage to the opposition's cause as audiences begin to wonder if there are any 'good guys' in the conflict. This plays into the government's narrative.

People want accountability of weapons

There are reports that the opposition is demanding the provision of serious arms before it will consider attending any talks with the regime. At the same time, there is a widely held belief, particularly in London, Paris and a number of Middle Eastern capitals, that simply by arming 'the good guys', victory is attainable. 

There are, of course, some significant problems with this line of thinking. First is the simple fact that unless the West provides people to account for the weapons at point of use (ie. inside Syria), you lose control over them as soon as you sign them across. Western governments won't provide people to do this work ,yet their constituents will demand accountability for the weapons they are paying for.

This piece illustrates the shallowness of the analysis regarding the weapons issues by some in the UK. The unnamed Foreign Office official cited in the article says supplying weapons to vetted groups is necessary because 'everyone except the good guys' have weapons. But later the official claims he was 'not saying that the answer to that is necessarily throwing a bunch of arms in there'.The fact that he could advocate weaponising elements of the opposition while saying that weapons were not the answer really illustrates why supplying arms to the opposition doesn't make sense.

And even if these states did provide weapons to some as yet unnamed rebel groups, there is a very strong argument that this will increase, rather than reduce, the death toll. That was the argument used by Europeans governments against the UK PM when he was all Rambo about arming the 'vetted' rebels. And this blog post with accompanying graph gives further pause for thought regarding the impact that more weapons could have on Syria. 

This excellent Foreign Policy piece gives further reasons why arming rebels hasn't worked particularly well in the past for the US, and why Obama is much more cautious on the issue than Cameron.

To some extent DFAT brings this down upon itself, both avoidably and unavoidably: avoidably since it seems to me that too many of its ministers and secretaries have not wanted to engage in the infighting that other departments see as their meat and drink. Unavoidably since both DFAT's ministers and its personnel spend so much of their time abroad, which automatically sets them apart from their fellow ministers and from the rest of the public service. There are exceptions to this generalisation, but to start justifying my comments in detail would probably be actionable.

Too often ministers have either had no heart for pushing the Department's barrow or have become so consumed with particular projects that fighting the Department's corner was something they neglected to do. When I joined what was then External Affairs in the pre-Cambrian age (1958), RG Casey was the minister and there were so few of us trainees (five) that we all spent a week in the minister's office in the first year of our training. It was during my week that Casey said to me (and my memory is clear on this quote) after complaining about the budget that 'I'm not going to argue with (Treasurer) Fadden; the man's not a gentleman.'

Of course there have been exceptions, but there has always been a tendency on the part of DFAT officers to feel that they are different — as indeed they are, in many ways. But particularly at lower levels, this sometimes exacerbates dislike and disdain among other public servants.

Photo by Flickr user R/DV/RS.

In Theory of International Politics, Waltz turned from destruction to construction and tried to do two things. First, he argued that the behaviour of states was best explained by the third 'image'. The structure of the international system, he argued, conditioned and thus explained state behaviour. Because that structure is anarchical, lacking a sovereign to make and enforce the law, cooperation between states was difficult and competition endemic.

Because the states that make up the system are equal in formal terms, but very unequal in their capabilities, being rich and strong or poor and weak or somewhere in between, they do however sometimes cooperate to balance against particularly powerful states that threaten others. Because of anarchy, states seek to maximise their power to provide for their own security; because of hierarchy, they sometime ally to maintain the balance of power.

Second, Waltz tried to show how international relations theorists ought to do their job. He argued – much to the continuing disgust of many political scientists – that theories are not built by painstakingly testing hypothesis after hypothesis. Even if a hypothesis is proved true (or at least, statistically most likely), the result, Waltz insisted, was a description, not an explanation. Theory must go further, and explain why regularities or correlations occur. 'To form a theory', he wrote, 'requires envisioning a pattern where none is visible to the naked eye.'

These arguments have provoked almost as much debate over the past thirty years as Waltz's 'structural realist' explanation of international relations. Equally controversial was his claim, made in a famous monograph published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, that more nuclear weapons 'may be better'.

This argument captured the provocative, sometime contrary, always rigorous essence of Waltz. If the advent of nuclear weapons had led to more than three decades of peace between two implacably-opposed superpowers, Waltz asked, why not let other states acquire them? Perpetual peace could be achieved not by federation, as Kant thought, but by proliferation. A few bombs each would be enough, Waltz thought, to deter even the most fervently ideological, reckless or feckless leader from attacking their neighbours.

It was this logic that drove him last year to champion – in the august pages of Foreign Affairs, no less – an Iranian bomb.

There is much in Waltz's work to disagree with, and many have dissented from his theories. But there is no questioning the power of his thinking or the sheer weight of his contribution to the field, which was truly extraordinary.

For example, in one of the chapters in the book, which emerged from another Interpreter article, I write about Rogerio Lobato, a gregarious polyglot former Minister of Interior and ex-jailbird. Despite his fall from grace, I show just how connected (and thus influential) he is by kinship and history to many in the small and tightly bound Timorese elite. This byzantine tangle of family relationships, friendships, romances, and antagonisms render the application of concepts such as 'good governance' extremely difficult.

A case involving Rogerio's niece will be a test of one central objective of Australia's development assistance: the rule of law. The woman in question, former Justice Minister Lucia Lobato, seems to be waging a campaign from inside prison to undermine the justice system over which she used to preside.

The story begins with her mislaying her mobile phone in 2008, the phone eventually landing in the hands of Jose Belo, a crusading investigative journalist and Dili's answer to Bob Woodward. The phone contained chummy text messages between Lucia and the head of a company that won a series of contracts being tendered by her Ministry. Although probably a cause for resignation in many other parts of the world, Lobato threatened Belo with jail for defamation, a case that was eventually dropped. She remained Minister of Justice for another three years, loudly denying the allegations before her immunity from prosecution was eventually taken away.

Last year, Lobato was found guilty of pocketing money relating to the contracts. A succession of appeals were unsuccessful and she was sent to prison for five years, giving her plenty of opportunity to check out the couture of the prison guards' uniforms, the very contract which had landed her there in the first place. 

The conviction seemed a validation of the Timorese justice system's ability to try a case involving a member of the political elite. But now, only a few months into her sentence, Lobato is doing her best to cut short her prison tenure. She's written to the bishops, and an opposition MP alleged she has been calling and SMSing Timor's chief justice (you think she would have learned her lesson about mobile phones by now).

She's been rushed to hospital in Dili complaining of high blood pressure and there are reports of her needing to go to Singapore for treatment. Last week, rumours swirled on a prominent Timorese blog that her family was lobbying for her to be pardoned.

Severe allergic reaction to incarceration in Timor-Leste's jails is something of a family condition. Her uncle Rogerio himself was flown out of the country in 2007 courtesy of a Lear Jet lent by the government of Kuwait. Former president Jose Ramos Horta subsequently pardoned him.

To be sure, Lucia Lobato has, like many Timorese, led a life of almost inconceivable tragedy. She once told an interviewer that she had lost her mother and all her siblings during the occupation; they were rounded up, flown away in an Indonesian helicopter and never seen again. She was a dogged campaigner for Timorese independence for many years.

But what happens in this case will be a test of the strength of the institutions that she as Justice Minister committed herself to strengthen. Wiggling out of jail time hardly seems to square with the lofty statements attributed to her office in the 2011-2030 justice sector strategic plan:

The justice sector plays a crucial role in the efforts made to consolidate peace and stability, guarantee the Rule of Law and promote accountability and transparency. 

Were these words dreamt up just to satisfy donors or were they what she really believed?

It's too late to add these latest shenanigans to my book but there are many ways to follow the story. Jose Belo still acts as a one-man accountability machine with his boisterous Tempo Semanal newspaper and website. The Diak ka Lae blog is always thoughtful and the news aggregating website Timor Hau Nian Doben, which publishes in English, Tetun and Portuguese, is also worth checking.

Photo by Flickr user scratchpost.