Timor-Leste

Sovereign Wealth Funds rarely have the opportunity to be examined from their beginning concurrently with the installation of sovereignty for the country itself. This is the unique case of Timor-Leste (formerly known as East Timor), built up from information provided by all stakeholders in the establishment and ongoing operation of the country’s Petroleum Fund. With oil and gas fields in the Timor Sea plentiful and already extracted previously by Indonesia, the United Nations administration ensured the Norwegian model should be the basis for setting up the Fund. Thus, Timor-Leste began well by establishing a globally acknowledged well-designed Fund soon after gaining sovereignty. This chapter examines the Fund from the amity of its inception to the realities of a post-conflict society. These realities soon became apparent after civil disturbances resulted in Fund resources being used to “buy the peace.” Then emerged economic and social pressures of large infrastructure development where major projects were raising concerns as to whether the Fund is being used to construct white elephants. Together these two acute influences have the potential for the Resource Curse to emerge on the horizon if the big spending “peace and development” strategy fails.

The trajectory of Australia's foreign policy during the 2010s was set remarkably early in the decade. Over a period of just five months, beginning in April 2010, then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd abandoned his Emissions Trading Scheme, Rudd's Labour colleagues subsequently dumped him as leader in favour of Julia Gillard, and Hugh White's essay Power Shift: Australia's Future between Washington and Beijing was published.1 These events decisively framed three enduring and unresolved national questions that defined the past decade of Australian foreign policy: how should we respond to climate change?; are our political leaders still capable of delivering large-scale reform in the national interest?; and how do we navigate a world in which our key security partner and our key economic partner are not the same?

Leadership is indispensible to politics. Parties, governments, oppositions and electorates need leaders to take decisions, responsibility and deal with crises. Leaders however find it difficult to manage the power, particularly when such predominant leaders become entrenched in office. Prime Ministers in Power is about two leaders who became the central dominant figures in their respective countries. The ‘domineering leadership model’, as described by Walter and Strangio, emphasises this belief in leaders, rather than policy, as the transformative agent of change. This book considers how predominant leadership developed in Britain and Australia, analysing how the institutional and personal aspects of prime ministerial leadership empowered the individual incumbent. Before embarking on this task it is necessary to provide an introduction to the large and often ill-defined topic of political leadership. This chapter considers some of the classic approaches to the study of political leadership and the study of British and Australian prime ministers. These approaches range from those focused on the individual to the more institutionalised. The chapter also looks at current research trends and provides the rationale for researching prime ministers in Britain and Australia.

Business Regulation in Australia: Promises, Realities, Futures

Australian prime minister, John Howard (1996–2007), learnt the hard way that time and timing are crucial in achieving and exercising public leadership. He became leader of the Liberal Party at a time when it was internally divided, and much of the country rallied behind the popular Labor prime minister, Bob Hawke. Howard lost the first major elections under his leadership, and paid the price. He spent years in the political wilderness as a shadowy presence in the shadow cabinet, now run by his main rival. But Howard possessed a deep belief in his own capability to lead and an insatiable appetite for power. Riding out the rebuffs and derision, he never considered quitting. Instead, he waited in the wings. He never stopped campaigning, rebuilding connections with the grass roots and the party organization.

The 2001 Constituent Assembly Elections, which have dictated the political outcome in East Timor, were classified by the international community as 'free and fair'. Yet, the winning party relied on manipulation of indigenous values, symbols and the history of the resistance fight. The event was, in this sense, a 'totem poll'. Rather than being a vehicle of popular will, the outcome of a Western-oriented electoral exercise has resulted in indigenous values of unitary and hierarchical political authority reinforcing a one-party state. With the president and the prime minister in opposition to each other, there are stark options of either one-party rule or violent political competition. This should question electoral assistance as the ultimate expression of popular participation and democratization. The focus of the international community has to shift from the electoral event to long-term assistance in nation building with full attention to paradigmatic differences between liberal-style democracy and local concepts.

A Short Note on Telecommunications in the Kingdom of Swaziland

During the first year of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Australia and New Zealand were the envy of the world for remaining relatively COVID-free. Both New Zealand Labor Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Australian Liberal Prime Minister Scott Morrison received global praise for reducing case numbers, despite their differing approaches. How did each leader's response fare in the media? This chapter will compare print media coverage of both leaders at three different stages of the pandemic: the initial shock of March 2020, the start of the vaccination rollout, and the rise of the Omicron variant. Through a Feminist Content Analysis and Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis, I will examine the extent to which gendered bias is apparent at these various pivotal moments.

The Roundup

On August 30, 2009, East Timor's Prime Minister, the former resistance leader Xanana Gusmão, quietly authorized the release of a man directly implicated in one of the country's most notorious massacres. Maternus Bere, a commander of the pro-Indonesian Laksaur militia group, had been indicted for his role in the September 1999 killing of as many as 200 unarmed supporters of independence who had taken refuge in the Catholic Church in Suai. Of the 40 victims whose identities could be determined, three were priests, ten were under the age of 18, and more than a dozen were women. The Suai Church massacre was part of a shocking campaign of violence that followed a United Nations-organized referendum in which Timorese had voted overwhelmingly for independence from Indonesia.

Introduction. All is not as it appears in Dili, that “pestilential place,” as described early last century by Joseph Conrad in his classic novel, Victory. The question posed by Bob Broughton is certainly valid, namely, how did one man – Alfredo Reinado – hold hostage the fortunes of this young nation? The answer is certainly murkier than the standard democratic elections narrative which, remarkably, saw in 2007 a constitutional crisis leading to the reversal of roles of the President and Prime Minister in East Timor. As Boughton highlights, it is important to pay attention to personalities and politics.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyse the pre-adoption phase of budgetary reform. Perspectives on the introduction and use of performance information in budgeting are obtained through interviews with current and former senior politicians and civil servants in Malta. Institutional theories are used to analyse the pressures that are perceived as promoting or inhibiting reforms.Design/methodology/approachThe research followed a qualitative approach, using data gathered from documentary sources and empirical evidence collected from semi-structured interviews. Documentary sources were used to provide knowledge, obtaining an understanding of budgeting processes in the Maltese central government. Two categories of interviewee are identified in the analysis: political interviewees, consisting of 7 politicians; and administrative interviewees consisting of 13 senior civil servants.FindingsThe authors find that the current line-item budgeting system is deeply embedded into government practices. Malta’s membership of the European Union and its adoption of the Euro support coercive pressures for reductions in fiscal deficits. Normative pressures appear to be significant and may have a longer-term impact in promoting budgeting reform.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to existing performance-based budgeting literature by studying the pre-adoption phase which has rarely been the focus of previous studies. The study delves into the interaction between institutional and economic forces, an aspect which has been inadequately studied. The access to current and former Prime Ministers and other Ministers of State in this study is unusual. As such, the researchers have been able to obtain the perceptions of political decision makers in a way that might be more difficult to do in larger countries.

Rainbow Blindness: Same-Sex Partnerships in Post-Coalitional Australia

The metaphor of the glass cliff is used to describe patterns whereby women are more likely to be selected for challenging leadership positions that have a higher risk of failure. This paper explores how the glass cliff metaphor contributes to a narrative of woman's fall that individualizes a leader's responsibility to avoid risks that may lead to failure. As an alternative, we introduce the leadership of refusal as a feminist resource for remaking the narrative of woman's fall. Refusal is understood as an embodied political and ethical stance that declines to recognize, rather than resists or simply opposes, masculine leadership norms. Through analysis of how three women leaders were represented by the media, former Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, former Australian of the Year, Grace Tame, and climate change activist, Greta Thunberg, we analyse key moments of refusal where these leaders breached the masculine order through their embodied performances. We argue that leadership of refusal enables an understanding of how women leaders exercise power in agentic, non‐sacrificial ways. We therefore urge leadership researchers to position refusal centrally, because first saying no in order to take risks towards achieving transformative action is, we suggest, a defining feature of leadership.

Since Chile and Australia began to promote their bilateral relationship in the context of the Chilean transition to democracy and the increasing speed of globalization, between 1990 and 2012 three of five Chilean presidents have paid official visits to Australia. 1 However, no Australian prime minister has made a state visit to Chile in the same period. 2 Notwithstanding the Chilean regional leadership and its openness to worldwide trade, Australian minister of foreign affairs Stephen Smith and his Chilean counterpart, Alejandro Foxley, signed the 2008 Australia-Chile FTA in Canberra, not in Santiago. While the Chilean press gave extensive coverage to the FTA signing in Australia, the Australian press paid limited attention to it. 3 Despite the fact that the agreement shows that the Asia Pacific Region has become a new center of economic power, the FTA has not represented a dramatic geopolitical shift either for Chile or for Australia.KeywordsAsia Pacific RegionFree Trade AgreementSymbolic PowerEconomic EliteEconomic DiscourseThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.