Secret refugee deal with Nauru just moves the problem out of sight.

When it was announced late on Friday that Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke had locked in a new deal with Nauru to take Australia’s unwanted migrants, it felt like Groundhog Day. Another secret deal, another truckload of money, another attempt to abandon people offshore and rid the government of a political problem.

In the wake of the High Court’s ruling in NZYQ in late 2023, the government has been trying to remove about 350 “undesirable immigrants” from the country. In that case, the court held unanimously that it was unconstitutional for Australia to keep people in indefinite immigration detention. The Australian government doesn’t want them in our community, but for $408 million up front, and a further $70 million per annum, Nauru has agreed to take them.

This is contingent on a new bill passing federal parliament that would strip away all due process rights to get around a series of other legal challenges. As the Human Rights Law Centre says, if the bill passes, the government could send people offshore without it needing to consider whether they would face a real risk of persecution, torture, death or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment; whether they would suffer there without adequate medical care; or whether they would be permanently cut off from their family. Furthermore, the bill applies not just to the NZYQ cohort, but potentially to anyone the government wants to deport. It is the latest bill in a long line of legislation that strips away the rights of non-citizens.

The irony is that it wasn’t all that long ago that Australia was offering for the population of Nauru to move here. In the 1960s, Australia offered Nauru an island off the Queensland coast as a relocation option. Scientists predicted that Nauru would be uninhabitable by the mid-1990s due to the extensive damage wrought by phosphate mining carried out by Australia, New Zealand and Britain. That plan never eventuated because the Nauruans did not want to become part of a racist White Australia and lose their distinctive identity as a people.

The original White Australia Policy came about because Britain shipped off unwanted criminals to a distant colony at the other end of the world. Now Australia is following suit. Stripped of due process, a right to be heard, a right to challenge their removal, today’s unwanted are to be transported to a small island nation whose government will seemingly do anything for a buck.

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In 2001, the Howard Coalition government established the first iteration of Australia’s offshore processing regime, the Pacific Solution, in Nauru and Papua New Guinea. It was suspended in 2008 but then revived by the Gillard Labor government in 2012. Experts have consistently documented concerns about serious human rights violations, a lack of durable solutions and coerced repatriations; UN bodies have found that conditions do not comply with international standards.

The corruption of a number of officials and contractors engaged over many years in Australia’s offshore processing regime has been well documented. Behrouz Boochani, an Iranian refugee who was detained on Manus Island, says “hundreds of millions of dollars have been wasted in the detention centres on Manus and Nauru” and that every company working in Australia’s offshore regime “have been instruments of oppression and subjugation for the Department of Immigration”.

“What is clear,“ he writes, “is that when a political institution acts covertly on a remote island, they create the conditions for corruption and human rights abuses.”