Nauru is back in the Australian news which can only mean one thing - Australia is about to exile some more refugees there. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke went to Nauru last week for a series of meetings that culminated in a deal for Nauru to provide permanent residence for up to 280 asylum seekers. In return, Australia has agreed to pay the Nauru government a one-off $400m and then $70m per year thereafter. It's not clear how long this nonsense will continue but if we assume it will last for five years, it will cost the Australian government a total of $750m, or $2.7m per asylum seeker.
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| Nauru from the air. |
This 'open' regime had not made the asylum seekers very happy. Mental health problems were rife, as were protests. There were also a lot of complaints about the poor quality of housing and facilities. None of them wanted to be there.
It was easy to see why. Nauru is a very small place - it has a total land area of just 21 square kilometres. The strip of land around the coast is pleasant and all the Nauruans live there. The rest of the island is a barren, rocky wasteland. When I was briefed about my visit I was warned not to go walking on my own as the island was infested with feral dogs. Roads were pitted and pot-holed, there were abandoned houses crumbling in the tropical humidity, the power went off regularly and most of the commercial buildings looked as if they had seen better days.
The island has an official population of about 13,000 but it seems that many of them don't live there because there is nothing for them to do - the various companies that ran Australia's detention operation were the biggest source of employment outside the Nauru government, and many Nauruans head overseas to work, sending some of the money to family back home. All the food on the island has to be brought in from outside and it is hideously expensive.
All this made any further restriction of movement pointless, Where would they go? The island itself was their prison, as impregnable as any fortress. Its nearest neighbour, one of the islands of Kiribati, is 300km away across the open ocean. The only way off the island if you don't own a boat is a thrice-weekly plane to Australia. A few of the asylum seekers were working, either within the detention system or for local businesses, but most lived on a meagre allowance from the Australian government. Some had made friends with Nauruans but there was also a level of hostility and mutual suspicion. Some refugee women had been raped, and some of the men subjected to violent robbery. So for the most part the communities stayed separate.
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How it got to be like this is a sad (or perhaps anger-inducing) tale of colonialism*. People have called Nauru home for something like 3,000 years, with the island originally settled by some of the Micronesian explorers who fanned out across the Pacific during this period. Its isolation meant that its people didn't have a lot of contact with other peoples and they developed their own unique language and culture. The island was, and remains, divided between its 12 clans in the way you would divide a pizza, with each clan owning a stretch of coast and its associated hinterland.
They were self-sufficient in food, living off fish caught in the waters off the island and fruit and vegetables grown in the lush, fertile interior. In a good year there was abundance, although a dry year could lead to food and water shortages and tensions between clans. John Fearn, captain of the British ship Snow Hunter, was the first European to see it in 1798 and was so impressed he named it 'Pleasant Island'. The locals paddled out to welcome him, but he couldn't navigate his ship past the fringing reef and didn't permit his men to go ashore.
Over the next century Nauruans had increasing contact with Europeans. A few lived on the island, including escaped convicts from Norfolk Island. An increasing traffic of ships would call in on their way across the Pacific. Their influence was not exactly a blessing - the Nauruans traded food for palm wine and firearms, meaning that long-standing tensions between the clans were exacerbated by drunkenness and made more deadly by the use of guns. A fierce civil war broke out in 1878 and continued on and off for the next ten years.
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| This is what much of Nauru's interior looks like now. |
The mining was brutal. The vegetation would be bulldozed out of the way and the phosphate stripped from the land until all that was left were sharp pinnacles of coral and limestone. Then the miners would move onto the next spot, leaving behind a barren wasteland. Meanwhile effluent from the processing plant polluted the reef and waters surrounding the island, killing most of the fish. Up until independence, the main beneficiaries were the multinational miners and Australian and New Zealand farmers who got ultra-cheap fertiliser. The Nauruans got a token royalty in exchange for the desecration of their home. By 1963 the damage was getting so bad that the Australian Government proposed moving the entire population to Curtis Island, off the coast of Queensland.
Instead Nauru became an independent country in 1968 and their new government drove a harder bargain. For the next two decades their per capita income was second only to that of Saudi Arabia. Ordinary Nauruans saw precious little of it, with their government pissing most of it up against the wall. Few Nauruans worked in the phosphate industry, most either working for the government or living off their royalties. When the extraction began to decline in the 1990s, they were left with a small strip of usable coastal land, a badly polluted fringing reef, an interior of barren rocks, a half-abandoned processing plant and workers camp, and a nation with no alternative source of income.
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Once it achieved independence, Nauru started seeking compensation from the Australian, New Zealand and British governments for damage done during the colonial period. None of these nations was eager to pay up and negotiations stalled. Finally, in 1989 Nauru took the Australian Government to the International Court of Justice. In a negotiated settlement, Australia agreed to pay $50m per year for 20 years, with the UK and New Zealand eventually sharing this cost. This was hardly enough to sustain a viable nation and to make up the difference they went into business as a tax haven. Over 400 banks had registered offices in Nauru, and people could be granted citizenship and a passport for a substantial fee without even needing to set foot in the country. The money flowed, both dubiously legal and plainly illegal, with no official oversight, and Nauru's elites once again had a source of income but also attracted the ire of their powerful protectors and were forced to apply the brakes.
Then in 2001 the Howard Government made the Government of Nauru an offer they couldn't refuse. Australia would pay substantial aid to the Nauruan government in exchange for permission to establish an immigration detention centre on the island. The Government of Nauru had little choice. Their sovereign wealth fund, which should have invested mining profits to ensure a sustainable future, was almost out of money. There was no Plan B. Over the next six years Nauru hosted 1,000 asylum seekers diverted from Australia in exchange for millions of dollars each year to keep them afloat. The traffic stopped in 2007 but restarted in 2012.
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| It sure looks like a prison! |
If you thought there could not be a more dispiriting and degrading economic future for Nauru, you were wrong. The people sent there from 2001-2007 and 2013-22 were not criminals. They were refugees, unfortunate pawns in a brutal political game. Most were eventually able to gain acceptance in countries including the USA, Canada and New Zealand. This time it's different.
The new deal is intended to allow Australia to deport members of what has come to be called the 'NZYQ cohort', a group of refugees who have had their visas revoked after being convicted of serious crimes. There are around 350 people in this group. It is not clear what crimes all of them have committed because this information is carefully guarded - government statements tell us that some have been convicted of rape and murder but not how many. The standard practice after non-citizens have committed crimes in Australia is to cancel their visas, send them to prison and then deport them when their sentences are complete. However, Australia is prevented by the UN Refugee Convention from sending refugees back into danger. Officially our government's aim is to deport them to third countries, but what third country will take such immigrants?
Up until 2023, these people were subject to indefinite imprisonment in immigration prisons** while the government pretended to look for a country to send them to. However, in 2023 a Sri Lankan refugee known by his code, NZYQ, won a High Court ruling that indefinite detention is illegal. This meant that all the convicted refugees languishing in indefinite imprisonment had to be released. Cue much hand wringing from both government and opposition. What could we do with these dangerous people?
It's a problem, but not one we are unfamiliar with. People who are convicted of serious crimes are released into our community every day. We know how to handle this situation. Prisoners commonly experience various personal issues - histories of trauma, mental illness, addiction, poverty. These underlying issues don't excuse their crimes but increase the risk of offending and of re-offending. There are attempts at support and rehabilitation both in prison and on release. For some classes of offence there is also ongoing surveillance and reporting obligations. Some prisoners reoffend and return to prison on new sentences. We wish there was no crime, but that's not reality. Others succeed in rebuilding their lives and making positive contributions to their communities. Nobody is a lost cause.
Refugees who commit crimes are no different. They have often been multiply traumatised - in their country of origin, and again at the hands of Australia's anti-immigration system. As a result, many struggle with poor mental health and addictions. They are isolated from their families and often poor. All of these things are amenable to support - counselling and rehabilitation programs, medication, training and employment programs, and so on. We know how to do this. $750m would go a long way to doing it better. Our toxic, racist immigration politics have dictated instead that we deport them, no matter the financial and human cost.
I have no doubt the Government of Nauru drove a hard bargain in negotiations to accept this cohort, which is why the price is so high. But what will happen to them on Nauru? There is not much employment, so they will be perpetually poor. The Nauru health system is rudimentary, as you would expect in a poor country with 13,000 citizens, so they will not get much in the way of mental health and addiction support. They will be cut off not only from their families and home countries, but from their expat communities back in Australia. Isolated, poor and unwell, their risk of reoffending will be magnified. What damage will they do in their already struggling host country? What will happen to them then? How will the struggling Nauru legal system deal with them? Will they be re-imprisoned, and if so where?
I suspect the brutal truth is that nobody cares. The Australian government will have officially washed its hands of a tricky political problem. The Government of Nauru will have a flow of money to keep it afloat. As usual the poor refugees, who are never mentioned by name, are mere pawns in someone else's political game.
I live in hope that here in Australia within my lifetime we will return to treating asylum seekers as human beings and stop pretending that if we make their lives hell they will somehow disappear. But where would this leave Nauru? After destroying their island for our own profit, then exploiting it again to score political points in a toxic exercise in barely-concealed racism, would we simply forget them? I fear it would be all too easy for us to do so. Now that they can no longer supply us with cheap fertiliser, if they do not house our unwanted refugees of what use are they to us? They would simply be another dot in the Pacific that we can't place on the map. That's how colonialism works, folks.
*You can read more about the history of Nauru here.
**Note - officially these places are referred to as 'detention centres' and their inmates as 'detainees'. I have followed Behrouz Boochani in referring to them as prisons. The only difference between prisoners and immigration detainees is that prisoners have a sentence with an end date, while immigration detainees do not.
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