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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

Next year will be 10 years since Australia began offshore processing – sending refugees that arrived by boat to places like Papua New Guinea and Nauru.

It would be easy to assume that with a change of government, and deals with the US and New Zealand to take refugees – that offshore processing was a thing of the past.

It’s not, and the Albanese government look like they’re on the verge of signing a multi-million dollar deal to keep facilities in Nauru running.

Today, National Correspondent at The Saturday Paper Mike Seccombe, on the ongoing moral and financial cost of Australia’s offshore processing regime.

It’s Wednesday September 21.

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RUBY:

Mike, I want to talk with you about the people who were put in offshore detention by the Australian government, and where it is that they have ultimately ended up as a consequence of that. So to begin with, how many people were placed in offshore detention, back when it was set up - and where were they from?

Mike:

Well, the background to it is that back in 2013 the Labor Government was facing a very uncertain election. They were under enormous pressure from Scott Morrison, who was then the relevant spokesman on immigration matters for the Coalition. And in response to this, Kevin Rudd made this vow that no one who came by boat would ever settle in Australia.

Archival tape -- Kevin Rudd:

Today the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea and I are announcing a major initiative to combat the scourge of people smuggling.

Mike:

So that was kind of the start of it.

Archival tape -- Kevin Rudd:

From now on any asylum seeker who arrives in Australia by boat will have no chance of being settled in Australia as refugees.

Mike:

So just over 3100 people who arrived after June 2013 were originally put onto Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. And these people, they largely came from Iran, Afghanistan, some from Sri Lanka. And the story of what's happened to those people since is soul crushing, frankly.

RUBY:

Ok so, they arrived on Papua New Guinea, on Manus island back in 2013, so what happens after that?

Mike:

Well, about 50 have gone to a small number of other countries, including Cambodia.

Archival tape -- News:

Cambodia has signed a deal with Australia to take refugees rejected by Canberra in exchange for money.

Mike:

Which was paid an estimated $55 million to resettle a grand total of seven people. Canada, which has for decades, allowed citizens to privately sponsor refugees. That's in addition to the official national intake. They've taken a small number as well.

Archival tape -- News:

I'm stuck here. I applied U.S. and then two time did that. And then I still waiting.

Archival tape -- News:

Myo Win. Who is Rohingya is one of nearly 100 refugees who will eventually be coming to Canada with the help of private donors.

Mike:

New Zealand has offered to take 450 over three years.

Archival tape -- News:

Australia has turned down an offer by New Zealand to take asylum seekers currently held in limbo in offshore detention centres in Papua New Guinea.

Mike:

This offer, I might add, was first made way back in 2013 but was only accepted by the Morrison Government in March shortly before the election.

Archival tape -- News:

To some breaking news now. Australia and New Zealand have signed a refugee resettlement deal that's been almost a decade in the making. New Zealand has announced it will...

Mike:

Because it felt threatened by a raft of teal independent candidates who are campaigning for better treatment of refugees.

Archival tape -- Karen Andrews:

Australia and New Zealand have jointly agreed today that New Zealand will resettle up to 150 refugees per year for three years from Australia's existing regional processing cohort.

Mike:

More than 900 of these people have been forced back to the country from which they fled, often to face significant danger. And in some cases I believe they have been killed. Another 14, I think it is, have died in detention and the biggest cohort, of course, is bound for the United States.

RUBY:

Okay. Well, let's talk a bit about the U.S. resettlement deal, because that was announced six years ago now in the final weeks of the Obama administration. So how has it gone so far? How many people have gone to the U.S. and what's happened to them there?

Mike:

Well, the deal was that there would be 1250 people subject to this resettlement agreement that was established with the U.S. in 2016. As far as we know, about 1000 have now been resettled. A further 230 have received notification of their provisional approval. So it's almost fully subscribed. But these figures are very hard to confirm or update with greater accuracy because the department is very secretive about the details. But, you know, more of them are going all the time. And the thing about the US resettlement plan, I should say too, is that it brings its own problems. Talking to various refugee advocates, you know, I've heard various sad stories.

One, for example, about a woman who suffered internal injuries during a difficult birth on Nauru. She was unable to access badly needed surgery here. And now has gone to the US and she's quite sure she won't be able to get the medical care she needs there either. But she's prepared to suffer for the sake of her children. Another man was flown without knowing where he was going and ended up penniless and lost in Las Vegas when the American caseworker who was supposed to meet him didn't show up. Fortunately, he was able to phone a friend who picked him up and looked after him. But, you know, he could of been just left wandering the streets otherwise. And I spoke with Pamela Curr, who's an indefatigable campaigner for these people and has been over many years. And she's got a litany of them. And she makes the point that America provides casework services for three months. And then these people who've been resettled are basically on their own. And as she says, some will survive, but many are ill equipped to survive. You know, they've come from countries that are nothing like the United States. They've had a long, unhappy interregnum in detention offshore, and there's already been at least three deaths. And she told me about one guy recently, she said was in a restaurant at night. Somebody shot him. Just one of those random shootings in America. So poor guy comes off Manus after a long stint there, suffering there, winds up dead in America, you know. So there is a big downside to the American resettlement plan.

RUBY:

That's awful Mike. So that's what we know of, how people have fared in the U.S. and, and the amount of people that have managed to resettle there for, better or worse. But what does that mean then for, the cohort of people who were in the Australian detention system - who is still left?

Mike:

Right. Well there are still quite a few people left as we speak. There's about 1100 of them who are actually onshore in detention in Australia as we speak. They're the ones who are transferred back here under the medivac scheme or family members of people who became sick or what have you. They were brought back on allegedly temporary basis, but they're still here, according to the most recent official figures. There were 104 asylum seekers left in Papua New Guinea and 112 on Nauru a few months ago. There's probably rather fewer than 200 now at a guess, a well-informed guess, because they keep being, you know, sent off to the US in little dribs and drabs. So that's essentially the figures, 1100 odd here and a couple of hundred offshore.

RUBY:

Right. Okay, so as we speak then offshore processing is still being maintained then by the Australian Government.

Mike:

Oh yeah. Yeah. And there's every sign it will continue.

No one has actually been sent to offshore processing since 2014. There's only a couple of hundred people left in PNG and Nauru. And yet the latest last budget of the Morrison government allocated 482.5 million for offshore processing in 22-23. I mean, it's extraordinary. That's almost half a billion dollars for a couple of hundred people. Obviously, there's an enormous human cost of this policy. But the fact is there's also an enormous, staggering financial cost still.
The Labor Government is in the process of entering into a contract with a new organisation, a US based prisons outfit called Management and Training Corporation, to take over the provision of quote “facilities, garrison, transferee arrivals and reception services” in Nauru, which is frankly bizarre.

RUBY:

We'll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

Mike, can you tell me a little more about this deal that it seems like the Albanese Government is about to sign with a U.S. company to run facilities on Nauru? What does it mean for us? Does it essentially lock us into keeping a detention system running there?

Mike:

It looks like it does, yes. I've got to say they're being pretty secretive about it. I made enquiries to the Office of the Minister for Home Affairs, Claire O'Neill, and I got a very terse emailed response and I'll quote it to you “as the tender is yet to be finalised, we are not able to provide any further details related to the process. So, you know, yeah, it's in train. Stop asking questions essentially. Is the message there? I also asked the department. I got a slightly longer response from them, but no more informative. And it referred to the contract as being quote “proposed”, unquote, and also claimed that there were no transferees in detention because they all lived in community accommodation, which is kind of a red herring because we're still paying for them to be held over there. And as to the new company that looks to be the future operator of these detention facilities, they operate private prisons in the United States. They're the third largest provider of such services. And an investigation by Guardian Australia earlier this month detailed what they called a litany of security breaches and custodial failures, unquote, by the company which led to murders, alleged rapes, and wrongful detention of people. So they're big questions about the suitability of the new contractor. So that's one issue. Then there's just the cost of the contract. You know that's another issue and a very big one.

RUBY:

And Mike, it does seem strange to sign a new contract with a company to facilitate offshore detention when, as you said, there is only 100 or so people left on Nauru. And presumably those numbers, that number will go down as people leave to either go to the US or to New Zealand. So, I mean, what is it that this company is really actually doing on Nauru?

Mike:

Well, you're quite right. The number is going down all the time, so the relative cost per capita keeps going up as to what the company is doing. It seems not much really, frankly, except for continuing this long exercise in performative punishment. Both major political parties have long argued that offshore detention of asylum seekers deters people smugglers. That's the line. Despite all evidence to the contrary, what the evidence actually suggests is that the measure that actually stopped the flow of asylum seekers was intercepting and turning back boats. Now that's problematic, too, in terms of international law, but it appears to have worked. And that being the case, you have to ask the question why do we continue with this scheme of offshore detention?

RUBY:

And can we talk a little about the financial cost Mike - how much money has Australia spent not only on this contract but on maintaining this entire system for years?

Mike:

All right, well, let's talk about the cost not just of this contract, but of the entire system, perhaps for the past eight years to keep a person in community detention that's here in the country without work rights, that costs almost $47,000 per person per year. So not cheap. Right. But it costs vastly more. It costs more than 360,000 per person per year to keep people in onshore detention centres. You might recall until recently we were housing some in hotels which the government called alternative places of detention or APODs that cost taxpayers $450,000 per person per year to keep them there. But all of this pales when compared with keeping them offshore. It cost $3.4 million per person last year to hold someone on Nauru. So when you tally up the costs of this policy over the years, it's just astronomical. An analysis of the federal budgets by the Refugee Council of Australia going right back to the start of the policy back in July 2013, when Kevin Rudd vowed that he would no one would ever settle in this country back to 2013. The total cost up to and including this year's budget $9.65 billion. That's a big financial cost for the Australian taxpayer.

RUBY:

And what about the moral cost Mike, of putting the system in place, of locking people up indefinitely, thousands of people.

Mike:

Well, that's just incalculable. As one of the refugee advocates said to me, You know, the current system is quite a moral and financial black hole. Since 2013, he said, there have been 14 deaths as a result of offshore detention. There's overwhelming documentation of serious abuses, including child sexual abuse, medical negligence, high levels of self-harm under the offshore detention system. And yet we persist.

RUBY:

Mike, thank you so much for your time.

Mike:

Thank you.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today,

In a fiscal update, Australia’s Treasurer Jim Chalmers said that the end of the fuel excise reduction next week shouldn’t cause a spike in petrol prices.

The fuel excise was halved almost six months ago by the former Morrison government after the invasion of Russia by Ukraine, and is set to end next Thursday, September 29.

And...

The island of Puerto Rico has been hit by Hurricane Fiona, leaving much of the island flooded and without power. It’s the largest storm to hit the island since Hurricane Maria, almost exactly five years ago.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See you tomorrow.

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