12 - Future Political Structures and Institutions in East Timor

Summary

How should East Timor try to combine ‘disciplined governance and democratic principles’? How might it best aim to create ‘a political order supportive of broad economic goals’ such as prosperity, social justice and national unity, and at the same time build political institutions that will be ‘conducive to good policy-making’ and insulate policy-makers from ‘capture’ by interest groups or industries or big business? These were among the questions I was asked to address, along with others about executive-legislature relations, a presidential or parliamentary system, and voting methods. None of them have easy answers, although all are vitally important issues.

If East Timor can succeed in reconciling these divergent objectives (or even come close to that), it will be the first country in Southeast Asia to do so – apart from the highly controversial case of far-from-democratic Singapore, with its utterly dominant single-party government under the Peoples Action Party (PAP), an almost ‘Leninist’ cadre party. The case of Singapore could provide useful lessons on economic policy, but would be an impossible and far from desirable political model for a country in East Timor's circumstances to follow closely.1 There are also salutary lessons to be learned from the political experiences of her other Southeast Asian and Southwest Pacific neighbours over the last half-century, some of them good, most of them bad; but I will refer to them only in passing. It is not my intention here to tell Dili's constitution-makers what choices they should make on these matters (though I will at times reveal my own preferences), but mainly to set out the general character of the options before them and provide some of the information most relevant to the decisions.

There is unlikely to be any simple constitutional formula or obvious set of institutional structures that will ensure ‘disciplined governance and democratic principles’ in the situation confronting East Timor today, no matter how desirable both these aims may be.