Base costs
The department says you cannot split the numbers. The cost of suffering on Nauru is not divisible by the refugees held there.
“I think as we’ve given evidence before, the costs for maintaining the facility are not attributable to the number of individuals,” Stephanie Foster, an associate secretary in the department of Home Affairs, told estimates this week. “There’s a certain base level of cost which is required to maintain that capability. You can divide it, but that’s not the basis on which the costs are calculated.”
The numbers are these: Australia will spend $485 million this year running its prison camp on Nauru. It will do this to maroon 22 refugees, about half as many people as there are seats on a school bus. Divided, it costs
$22 million per person, per year to continue this gruesome charade.
It is not hard to imagine how many people could be helped with this same money, how many thousands of refugees could be shown compassion. Instead Australia has chosen the ugly expensiveness of torture.
Perhaps it is fitting that the longer this goes on the more costly it becomes. These are the tariffs of barbarism. This is the money paid to ensure Australia’s worst secrets are kept on foreign atolls. This is the high price of depravity.
In the same session of estimates, it emerged some of this money was paid to a man guilty of bribery. Even after he was charged, the government contracts continued. Perhaps it doesn’t matter: one crime is like another. Perhaps it’s fitting, even: an illegal system of detention, for which this country pays a foreign criminal to assist.
The department says that by next year it expects there will be no refugees left on Nauru. It will continue to spend $350 million a year to maintain the facility. It calls this “contingency”.
It doesn’t yet know exactly where the refugees will go. It pretends not to know how many refugees remain in Papua New Guinea, falsely claiming Australia is no longer responsible for these people and sends them no money.
All of it now is trickery: numbers that cannot be divided, people on the streets of Port Moresby who they pretend do not exist. Offshore detention has become a monstrous shell game of jurisdictions and disappearances. It is people being wiped off balance sheets.
The government pretends this is not its problem. It forgets that many of these people were sent to these islands when it was last in power. “Our government has been on the record for a long time, including in opposition, that we would have preferred the legacy case load, for want of a better term, on Nauru to have been dealt with well before now,” says Murray Watt, representing the Home Affairs minister. “It wasn’t by the former government. We are now dealing with it.”
A year after winning office, it is inexcusable that anyone should still be in offshore detention. It is inexcusable that the people on Nauru and in Papua New Guinea were not immediately brought to Australia.
It is inexcusable that they were not given settlement for what they now are: refugees fleeing Australia’s system of torture.