In late August, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke quietly visited Nauru to sign a $408 million deal to allow Australia to deport potentially hundreds of migrants and refugees to the prison island. While official figures have not been revealed, media reports indicate Nauru has prepared close to 300 of the 30-year visas.
Australia will pay Nauru another $70 million a year for 30 years to cover the costs of confining them to the island. Now the Nauru agreement has been triggered with the first non-citizen being successfully sent to Nauru on 24 October.
Nauru is already holding 105 asylum seekers intercepted and sent there by Australia, with the government paying a notorious US company MTC $157 million a year for “garrison and welfare services”.
Labor’s ICE-like deportation laws, first introduced in December 2024, have now been backed up with even more draconian measures that remove fundamental legal rights of review as Labor tries to speed up the deportation process.
Albanese ignored the Labor-dominated parliamentary human rights committee to ram the laws through relying on Coalition support. Its report, said bluntly “the government does not have a legitimate objective in denying fair hearings to those set to be deported to Nauru and could place Australia in breach of international human rights obligations.”
The committee went on, “Administrative convenience, in and of itself, is unlikely to be sufficient to constitute a legitimate objective for the purposes of international human rights law”.
In November 2023, the NZYQ High Court decision ended indefinite immigration detention. However, instead of welcoming the end of one of perhaps the most draconian and racist elements of the Migration Act, Labor has spent the last two years trying to find ways to subvert the decision.
Three hundred and fifty eight people were released from Australian detention by the NZYQ decision in 2023. All of them are now at risk of being re-detained and sent to Nauru. And the wording is so loose, that thousands of others on bridging visas are also vulnerable if the government chooses to expand the net.
Not only do the new laws remove any right to procedural fairness from the decision to deport to Nauru, they also retrospectively “correct” any mistakes that Home Affairs had made in the past. This means that even if a mistake has previously been made in their cases, they have no right of review.
Ripping away rights
The new laws mean that the government can completely ignore whether or not the people being removed have Australian citizen children, partners, parents or siblings.
There is also no requirement to consider the lack of medical treatment available on Nauru. A Federal Court case in May confirmed that an Iranian refugee, suffering from a severe asthma condition for the last 37 years, could be sent to Nauru even though the court accepted that “the medical services available in Nauru are inadequate to manage the applicant’s condition of severe asthma on an ongoing basis.”
Burke has told the media that up to 20 people have already been issued with Nauru visas. At least eight are currently in detention in Australia with legal processes in place preventing their immediate deportation.
In raids reminiscent of Trump’s ICE raids on migrants in the US, people are being picked up without notice, usually by Border Force raids at 4am. Migrant families are being ripped apart overnight.
And Labor is keen to peddle the “Australian Solution” internationally. Burke was recently in London to meet UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood and other Five Eyes countries “to exchange tips and devise ways of stopping illegal migration”.
In a London interview, Burke said, “I start with the principle that we don’t refoule people, so you don’t send people back to a place of persecution. The second principle is, if someone has no right to be in your country, they should leave, and a third country option becomes the only way of being able to do that.” But that is just an excuse for trashing human rights and implementing racist immigration law that allows non-citizens to be sent to offshore prisons.
The UK is now looking at a possible agreement with Kosovo to replicate Australia’s offshore deal with Nauru.
Labor is also vigorously implementing “Operation Sovereign Borders” with 13 asylum seekers reportedly being intercepted at sea in August and returned to their home countries.
With its massive parliamentary majority, Labor has no excuse for continuing the same border protection policies as the Liberals. It’s racism pure and simple and it has to be fought.
By Ian Rintoul
