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News > World

Australia Is Spending $400,000 for Every Refugee It Locks Up

  • Demonstrators hold aloft placards during a rally in support of refugees that was part of a national campaign in central Sydney, Australia, Oct. 11, 2015.

    Demonstrators hold aloft placards during a rally in support of refugees that was part of a national campaign in central Sydney, Australia, Oct. 11, 2015. | Photo: Reuters

Published 13 September 2016
Opinion

A new report reveals the Australian government is spending US$400,000 for each refugee imprisoned in its offshore detention centers.

Australia has spent almost US$10 billion over the past three years to fund its controversial offshore detention centers for refugees, according to a joint report by the United Nations and Save the Children.

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“Our analysis reveals that financial costs of at least US$9.6 billion were incurred by Australian taxpayers between 2013 and 2016 in maintaining offshore processing, onshore mandatory detention and boat turn-backs,” said the report, "At What Cost," prepared and released by UNICEF Australia and Save the Children.

The report, released Monday, added: “Offshore processing alone is estimated to cost over $400,000 per person, per year.”

In a policy that has been for years slammed by international aid and human rights organizations as inhumane, successive Australian governments have used two offshore processing facilities, on Nauru and on Manus Island, off the coast of Papua New Guinea, to detain asylum-seekers.

When refugees arrive on Australian shores, they are arrested and sent to those islands and kept in detention centers indefinitely in conditions human rights groups have denounced as abusive.

The report said Australia could use the amount spent processing one refugee “to support 12 refugees with housing, health care and basic living expenses here in the community.” Ending the detention practice would save Australia up to US$4 billion by 2020.

“Australia’s immigration policies are expensive, inhumane and blunt,” Save the Children Australia chief executive, Paul Ronalds, said in a press release. “They have caused significant harm to some of the most vulnerable children and adults on the planet, and have eroded the hope, dignity and safety of people fleeing persecution and war in places like Iraq and Syria.”

Ronalds further slammed the Turnbull government for repeatedly seeking to hide the massive costs of its immigration policies “through secrecy laws which criminalize whistleblowers who disclose human rights violations, protocols of operational secrecy and a refusal to establish adequate independent monitoring mechanisms.”

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According to the report, from 2012 to 2015 the number of asylum seekers and refugees resettled in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand rose by 36 percent. In the same period, Australia decreased the number of refugees it resettled by 30 percent.

“These findings will allow the Australian people to understand the full effect that the actions being carried out in their name have on the lives of vulnerable children and their families, the budget bottom line, and our broader strategic interests in the region and across the globe,” Ronalds added.

Beyond the financial cost, the report says the Australian refugee policy is the country’s “most dangerous export” as some European countries have shown interest in the Australian immigration model amid the biggest refugee crisis since World War II.

The report said there are many better alternatives to the current system Australia implements and defends.

The aid agencies called on the Australian government to take up “New Zealand’s offer to settle 150 refugees a year from Nauru and Manus Island” as well as to “proactively support the establishment of a regional protection framework for asylum seeker and refugee children and families across South East Asia.”

The report also called on Australia to increase its annual humanitarian intake to 30,000 people by 2018-19 “to further encourage people seeking refuge to embrace safe and regulated resettlement pathways.”

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