Because our Commonwealth occupies nearly 90% of the Australian continental land area, we have a moral obligation to speak up for the civil and human rights of our fellow Australians. Especially the West Papuans who help save Americans and us from WW-II Japanese and Javanese colonial ambitions of the Pacific war.

Sage. No, not at all.

I am asking, was there some other quiet arrangement between our two governments (to which we were not privy) - which is now being breached by our team?

If there was such an arrangement, wouldn't the threat of it's existence be tantamount to leverage (blackmail). I am trying to figure out why everyone is being so coy.

Or maybe I am just turning into a suspicious old fart.

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Indeed Australia has an obligation to West Papua: to prevent the use of Australia by barbaric separatist terrorists to launch their campaign of intimidation, murder and human rights violations upon West Papuan people. Only by cooperating with the Indonesian government to crush the violent and barbaric separatism, can eternal peace, justice, law, and order can be guaranteed in West Papua. Long live peace and justice in West Papua! Crush barbaric and lawless separatist murderers!

West Papuan is not a viable independent political entity (even PNG is a at great risk as a nation state). When things fall apart, historically there has always been one option for flight (to PNG). If there is a real blow up in West Papua, Indonesia would happily encourage mass flight to Australia. That is not in the long-term interests of Australia, an Australian Government of any tilt knows that. The responsibility of the Australian Govenment is to look after Australian long-term interests. We can see from East Timor that to take adventures is a high wire act. Iraq is a pretty simple by comparison.

I think we should actively encourage Indonesia to produce a flood of West Papuan refugees to Australia. That way we can train them up as first rate soldiers, equip them well, and send them back to teach these tin pot Javanese racist thugs some respect for human rights.

I had every reason to respect the Indonesian people but if Proud tb Indonesian is any measure of ordinary Indonesians then this bunch of scum are a problem that we should deal with sooner rather than later.

The appeasers of Djakarta's abuses of power are deluding themselves if they think that injustice, piled on injustice, will eventually produce peace, good order and liberty for all. All it will do is fester into a bigger and more costly boil that will need to be lanced anyway.

We saw what an indigenous leader with basic Australian Army Officer training did in Bouganville. So lets give these Indonesian clowns a few hundred like him with a well drilled platoon of his own people each, and a dozen more trained to staff level, and let them do what should have been done in 1969.

West Papua is not PNG, East Timor, nor any other state.
West Papua had been absorbing western physical and social sciences since 1860s which is why there were West Papuan mechanics and a skilled workforce from the 1930s. It is also the reason that college graduates in the 1930s started talking with coastal and highland communities about a need to form a unified national identity and government to protect their cultural interests.

During the Pacific war the Japanese and MacArthur landed across the northern coast of New Guinea, for the people in the Eastern half the Japanese were a supprise. But in Western Papua the arrival of an aggressive colonial power with automatic weapons was what they'd been concerned about for the pass decade, almost fullfillment of prophecy. The only supprise for the West Papuans was how savage and brutal the Asian invaders were. Macarthur choice for headquarters was easy, in the west the people said he was welcome to build twenty US bases to help free neighboring islands from the Japanese, and there was a workforce able to help with construction and malaria control, and most important were quickly able to provide food for a half million Americans from their network of foodgardens spread across the island.

That is also why West Papua was able to elect a national Parliament in 1961.

West Papua has the social skills, history, and resources to help itself and the region. That is also why Jakarta has been unable to defeat the West Papuans for forty years, and why Jakarta is so disparate to hold onto Papua's resources so that Indonesia could double its size and power.