‘I am hopeless now’: Australia’s $9.65 billion torture camps
As the Albanese government prepares to finalise a Nauru contract with an American prisons operator, the cost of the brutal enterprise has stretched into billions of dollars.
Last year, the Morrison government spent at least $3.4 million making Ali’s life miserable. In the eight years prior to that, many, many more millions were spent imprisoning the young man who, as a 17-year-old fearing for his life, fled Afghanistan and took a boat to what he hoped to be a better future in Australia, only to end up on Nauru.
The outcome of all that cruel spending is clear in his flat, uninflected voice, coming down the bad line from the island on Tuesday. He says he wants to end his life but, in a way, his words suggest it has ended already. For what is life without hope?
“I am hopeless now,” he says.
Ali has given up on joining his uncle, who made it to Australia in 2001 and now is an Australian citizen. He has given up on his aspirations to go to university and find a job. He has given up on the prospect of resettlement in any third country, given up imagining any future different from his present.
Putting aside the human cost of this system, the financial cost involved in the policy is extraordinary.
Since 2013, when then prime minister Kevin Rudd declared no asylum seeker who came here by boat without a visa would ever be settled in Australia, enormous sums have been spent on the offshore detention of people such as Ali.
Analysis of federal budgets by the Refugee Council of Australia shows total spending from July 2013, when Rudd made his vow, up to and including this year’s budget, is $9.65 billion.
The true cost is likely several billion dollars higher, according to analysis by the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at UNSW Sydney, because it is unclear to what extent, if at all, it covers things such as aid and development assistance provided to Nauru and Papua New Guinea to secure their ongoing offshore processing agreement.
Nor does it appear to include the expense of detaining or meeting the needs of the more than 1100 people who have been transferred back to Australia on a temporary basis for medical or other reasons, charter flights and escorts between countries, and so