Refugee Dunghills: Australia Makes Another Nauru Deal

Over the last two decades, Australia has made a name for itself by pursuing barbaric policies towards refugees and asylum seekers arriving by sea. Priding these moves as noble and humanitarian, cruelty born of kindness, these have entailed attacking the right to seek asylum guaranteed under the United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951 and the obligations of a state signatory not to penalise, discriminate or return (refoul) those to a place which would imperil them.

From these policies grew the Pacific gulag – offshore refugee centres where desperate human beings were treated like hunks of undifferentiated meat to be “processed”. In such centres, sexual abuse, self-harm, mental ruin and suicide flourished with weedlike vigour, described by the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre as “cruelty by design”. The final, rather damagedproduct was never to enter Australia, to be resettled in less than accommodating places as the Pacific Island state of Nauru, or Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. Fractious locals in either case were not impressed by cultural incompatibilities. Periodically, Australia mightalso get a helping hand from New Zealand, always more willing to pull its weight on the issue of accepting desperate boat arrivals.  

Over time, the number of people finding themselves in indefinite detention grew. As Australia lacks any constitutional protections against indefinite detention without charge, judges once saw fit to see this outcome as perfectly appropriate for refugees and asylum seekers. The shameful 2004 High Court case of Al-Kateb v Godwin saw the Commonwealth Solicitor-General argue, successfully, that a stateless Palestinian born in Kuwait, having arrived in Australia by boat without a visa, having also failed to get a protection visa, and having no prospect to be returned to Gaza or Kuwait, could be detained indefinitely.  

This was a remarkable finding, enabling the Commonwealth to exercise punitive functions normally associated with the judiciary. The cold words of Chief Justice Murray Gleeson are worth remembering: “A person in the position of the appellant might be young or old, dangerous or harmless, likely or unlikely to abscond, recently in detention or someone who had been there for years, healthy or unhealthy, badly affected by incarceration or relatively unaffected. The considerations that might bear upon the reasonableness of a discretionary decision to detain such a person do not operate.”

Then came the NZYQ decision in November 2023, in which the Australian High Court reversed itself. The judges found it unlawful for the government to continue detaining people in immigration detention where there was no real prospect of their practicable removal from Australia in the reasonably foreseeable future. To do so contravened the Constitution as such detention was not reasonably capable of being seen as necessary for a legitimate and non-punitive purpose. As such individuals could not be returned to their countries of origin for reasons of persecution or because of a refusal to accept them, release had to be granted.  

A feverish panic broke out in the Albanese government. The government had lost one of its most important, sadistic weapons in the policy armoury. Hysterical demonisation followed regarding some 200 non-citizens who had to be released into the community. They were seen as exceptional in their defects, remarkable in their criminality (murderers, rapists, child molesters). They were to be treated as singular offenders, bound to reoffend and therefore in need of some form of permanent invigilation, incarceration or both. That recidivism remains a feature of Australians who are also released did not merit discussion, nor did the fact that many in the cohort in question had never been convicted of an offence.  

The Albanese government, egged on by a yapping conservative opposition, went about the business of subverting the High Court’s decision as best it could. In November 2024, new laws were introduced permitting payment to third countries to accept unlawful non-citizens. Those refusing could be returned to detention. With utmost secrecy, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke reached out to Nauru, yet again, as Canberra’s favourite refugee dunghill. A bribe was in the offing.  

In February, with sketchy details, the Albanese government revealed that it had reached an agreement with the Pacific nation to resettle three members of the NZYQ cohort of non-citizens, one of them convicted of murder, for an undisclosed sum. All had been granted 30-year resettlement visas and “would reside in individual facilities with a shared kitchen space, be free to move around the island and would have working rights.” They were deemed good enough for Nauru, whose government was keen on ruddy cash but not good enough forAustralia, a country founded, most ironically, as a penal colony.

The transfer was also arranged despite the findings by the UN Human Rights Committee in two cases the month prior that Australia remained responsible for asylum seekers arbitrarily detained in offshore facilities in Nauru. Committee member Mahjoub El Haiba stated at the time that State parties cannot avoid their human rights responsibilities “when outsourcing asylum processing to another State.” Obligations remained “firmly in place” where states exercised “effective control over an area […] and cannot be transferred.”

The small arrangement was a taster of things to come. On August 29, timing the matter with the end-of-week lull in political interest, the Albanese government and Nauru signed a memorandum of understanding allowing the deporting of 280 members of the NZYQ cohort. Burke, who signed the MOU with Nauru’s President David Adeang, had done so after meeting the cabinet and the country’s entire Parliament. A wretchedly brief statement from the Australian Home Affairs office promised that the MOU contained “undertakings for the proper treatment and long-term residence of people who have no legal right to stay in Australia, to be received in Nauru.”  

The staggering cost of the agreement involves the immediate payment of a vast and seedysum of A$400 million, with A$70 million to follow in annual payments for associated costs. The enticing nature of these sums for Nauru’s government becomes even clearer given that this small state of under 12,000 people has an annual GDP, according to 2024 figures, of US$160 million. The misery of some can prove to be very profitable for others.

Jana Favero, deputy chief executive of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, had an appropriate response to the latest arrangements. “This deal is discriminatory, disgraceful and dangerous.” The Albanese government had “launched yet another attack on migrants and refugees. An attack that will result in the most significant of outcomes – mass deportation.” Greens Senator David Shoebridge also remarked that the government, instead of “building partnerships in the Pacific based on equality and respect” had preferred to force “our smaller neighbours to become 21st-century prison colonies.” For Nauru’s venal politicians, seduced would have been a more accurate word.

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