Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is visiting Timor-Leste this week. Here are five things you may not know about one of Australia’s closest neighbours.
Wed 28 Jan 2026 13.00
Timor-Leste’s President Jose Ramos Horta Photo: AAP Image/Mick Tsikas
Only 650 km off Australia’s north coast, the Republic of Timor-Leste is situated at the geopolitical intersection of Asia and the Pacific. Despite having a population of just 1.3 million people, and being roughly a quarter of the size of Tasmania, Timor-Leste is an integral part of regional diplomacy.
After almost 450 years under Portuguese colonial rule, Timor-Leste declared independence in 1975. But, just nine days later, the Republic of Indonesia invaded and annexed the territory. After the collapse of the Suharto regime – which ruled Indonesia for more than thirty years – an independence referendum was held in 1999. Seventy-eight percent of the population voted to become independent from Indonesia, but the vote was marred by violence. This led to the deployment of over 5000 Australian troops as part of an international peacekeeping mission. In 2002, Timor-Leste became the first new sovereign state of the 21st century.
Despite this fraught history, the Timorese have since achieved what some thought impossible: a pragmatic reconciliation with Indonesia. The two nations now collaborate on shared development targets including infrastructure, human capital, economy, clean energy, and digital transformation. To this day, Timor-Leste shares a land border with the Indonesian Province of Timor Barat
The nation’s struggle for independence has allowed Timor-Leste to take an active role in shaping how the international community engages with countries affected by conflict and fragility. Timor-Leste is a founding member of the g7+, an organisation that represents the interests of 20 nations including Haiti, Papua New Guinea, and South Sudan., with Dili hosting its headquarters. By combining their efforts, the g7+ has successfully challenged the top-down approach to foreign aid, in which funding, planning, and implementation are controlled by external donors. The g7+ has negotiated as a bloc with major international organisations including the IMF and World Bank, and established a set of principles for how the international community engages with conflict-affected states.
In 2023, the Albanese government passed legislation that allows Australian companies to trade carbon pollution internationally. This has led to concerns that the Northern Territory could become a dumping ground for carbon produced overseas, particularly by Japan. But the more immediate beneficiary is Australian oil and gas company Santos. Santos plans to pipe carbon pollution from its new Barossa gas project, which is in Australian waters, to depleted oil and gas fields in Timorese waters. If it were not able to export carbon from this highly-polluting project to Timor-Leste, Santos would have to pay significant costs under the Australian Government’s Safeguard Mechanism. The viability of carbon capture technology is highly questionable, and research from the Australia Institute argues that this kind of carbon trading accelerates the expansion of fossil fuels. There is also an important question about the fairness of dumping Australian carbon into Timorese waters.
This comes as the climate crisis poses significant challenges to Timor-Leste, despite its negligible contribution to global emissions. In 2024, the country emitted less than 0.002% of global carbon emissions. For comparison, Australia emits nearly 600 times more.
In the past decade Timor-Leste has achieved a number of public health milestones. The nation has increased life expectancy, improved maternal and child health, eradicated infectious diseases like polio and measles, and improved immunisation coverage. Its dedication to improving public health is exemplified by its fight against cervical cancer. In just three weeks in 2024, 90% of girls aged 11–14 received the HPV vaccine (which protects against the viruses that ultimately cause cervical cancer). This is even better than Australia’s current HPV vaccination rate of 81.1%.
The Timor Sea, which is between the northwest of Australia and Timor-Leste, is rich in oil and gas reserves. In the years following independence, Australia and Timor-Leste were involved in a long-running dispute over national boundaries in the Timor Sea.
During intergovernmental negotiations intended to determine a maritime boundary, the Australian Government bugged government offices in Timor-Leste. This led Timor-Leste to file a case with the International Court of Justice, which in 2014 ordered Australia not to spy on Timor-Leste. In 2016, Timor-Leste became the first nation ever to successfully use a UN-led process (known as the Compulsory Conciliation mechanism) to establish a permanent boundary between Australia and Timor-Leste. Timor-Leste’s victory is proof that small nations can effectively use international legal frameworks to defend their sovereign resources against much larger neighbours.
During the UN-led process, the Australia Institute polled over 10,000 Australians, more than half of which supported Timor-Leste’s rights to its sovereign resources, even if they received a larger share of oil and gas reserves.
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