Foreign Minister Penny Wong said she discussed with Timor-Leste President Jose Ramos-Horta the Greater Sunrise, a $50 billion gas field beneath the seabed that separates their two countries.

Ramos-Horta said last month that he was prepared to turn to China to fund the Tasi Mane infrastructure project that would pipe Greater Sunrise gas to Timor-Leste.

Wong declined to say whether Ramos-Horta discussed bringing in Chinese partners, saying “I don’t tend to come out with a readout of everything we discuss.”

She said Australian development assistance came with a “spirit of wanting” Timor-Leste to be more resilient.

“We know that economic resilience can be effected, can be constrained by unsustainable debt burdens or lenders who have different objectives,” Wong told reporters Dili.

“We, Australia, we seek to help make your country stronger.”

Canberra and Dili have been arguing over how to share Greater Sunrise revenue since Timor-Leste became independent of Indonesia in 2002.

Under a maritime border treaty, they signed in 2018, Timor-Leste would receive 80 percent of the revenue if the gas is piped to Australia and 70 percent if it is piped to Timor-Leste.

A treaty signed in 2006 was canceled when Timor-Leste accused an Australian spy agency of bugging government offices in Dili to give Australian negotiators an unfair advantage.

Australia’s government pleased Timor-Leste in July by dropping the four-year-old prosecution of lawyer Bernard Collaery who was accused of attempting to prove the spying.

Wong said the existing joint venture partners in Greater Sunrise, Timorese state-owned company Timor Gap, Australian company Woodside Energy and Japanese company Osaka Gas, would need to reach an agreement for the project to proceed.

"This has been stuck for many years. I've said to the President (Ramos-Horta) and to others we need to unstick it. We need to see how the way through can be found," she said. "That would be best done respectfully and directly, not through the media."