Susan Connelly writes; What might that threat be?

Well, to me it looks like that threat is people like herself & Bernard Collaery !

Good on you Susan, more power to your writing.
Australia sold out the Timorese people to a brutal regime just as it sold out the people of West New Guinea.
The lesson is, if you back up Australia in a war then expect to get stabbed in the back when you need assistance from a supposed friend.

Let's hope that Australia "sells out" PNG and tells the Indos they can have it. That will save The Good Old Aussie Taxpayer $500 million a year.

Like the aborigines and the Africans, the Pacific Islanders, need whites or Asians to tell them what to do because they can not run a chook raffle. Colonialism was the best thing that happened to all of them, and "Independence" (meaning "dependence") just created failed states.

I had to laugh when I read a book about the history of PNG and learned that one good reason why the PNG natives held the white District Officers in such high respect was because the DO's clamped down on headhunting, cannibalism, and tribal warfare. The author of the book noted that "there was much relief among the natives for that."

To Ise Mise.

I have always been astounded by the blatant double standards and contradictions of the loony left.

There are 10,000 islands in the Indonesian archipelago and East Timor represented one half of one of them. There was no way that East Timor could ever be a viable country by itself, and the fact that they have been supported by The Good Old Aussie Taxpayer since "Independence" validates that premise. East Timor is now Australia's Haiti. It was madness to even think that they could be viable.

But you know lefties. They were conditioned to hate colonialism since the crib, so they supported the East Timor rebels against Portugal. It never occurred to the lefty halfwits that East Timor being a colony of Portugal was good for both Portugal and East Timor. Nor did it ever occur to the left that the East Timor rebels were just like the "big men" in aboriginal settlements, just a bunch of sticky fingered crooks who could not wait to become the bosses, so that they could get their hands either in the till, or up the dresses of the local girls.

After "Independence" from Portugal, the Indonesians, who also hate every form of colonialism except their own, colonised East Timor before the Chinese could exploit the anarchy and the power vacuum. They shot a few ABC journos who were in Dili at the time sneering at their soldiers, earning Indonesia the never ending hatred of Indonesia by the left luvvies in the ABC.

So naturally, the left, usually the ones who oppose war, actually supported the Australian military invasion of East Timor. Even sillier than that, by doing so they were acting against Indonesian multiculturalism, a social ideal they normally support. But the stupidity did not end there. They were doing the bidding of the Pope (sorry "the Bishop of Rome" as us Prots have said since Henry VIII.) Normally, the left hates the Catholics because they are competitors for the same religious demographic. The Catholic religion promises heaven after death, while the left socialist religion promises heaven on earth

The Australian government's acceding to Samoa's request for help shows that the dumbos have learnt nothing. Off they trot again to do the job of people incapable of fending for themselves.

LEGO,
So despite the Timorese having helped our soldiers against the Japs we should leave them to the mercy of Indonesia.
Fair enough if you think that that’s what friends are for.
I have a different outlook.