The Albanese government signed a deal with the government of Nauru, population 12,000, to “resettle” the so-called NZYQ cohort. The acronym doesn’t stand for anything but is used as a placeholder for the 354 people that were subject to a 2023 Australian High Court case that found indefinite immigration detention unlawful.
Basically, the government stripped them of their right to stay in Australia for some law violation but couldn’t deport them because they have nowhere else to go. The High Court case means they were released into the community, no doubt with considerable police resources being used to keep track of them, and the government isn’t too happy about that.
So, what has the government decided to do? “Resettle” them in Nauru (see, it’s not detention!) “by removing the requirement to provide procedural fairness in cases where there are third-country arrangements”.
Dodgy? Certainly looks that way, but I’m no lawyer. But what I want to look at is the cost: $408 million upfront and $70 million a year afterwards, for up to 30 years. If all 354 people are “resettled”, that’s a total of around $7 million a person.
Now, that seems like a lot. But looking after people, whether in prison, detention, or as part of a dodgy “resettlement” in a foreign country isn’t cheap. According to the Justice Reform Initiative, it costs taxpayers around $150,000 annually to keep an adult in prison. A child is a cool million, but let’s just assume the NZYQ cohort are all adults without dependents.
$150,000 * 30 years ≈ $4,500,000.
That’s a fair bit under the roughly $7 million that’s going to Nauru to “resettle” a single person for the same amount of time. But remember that a bunch of the cash is up-front to set up the totally not-a-detention facility. Looking at only the annual portion, it’s not far off housing an adult in an Australian prison:
$70,000,000 / 354 ≈ $200,000.
It’s still a little bit more expensive—approximately $50,000 a year, or around 33% extra. But the estimate for an Australian imprisonment above doesn’t include the infrastructure setup costs, and we also don’t know all the details of the Nauru deal. For example, whether more people will be sent over time (which would reduce the per-person cost, given the fee is supposedly fixed), and of course there needs to be a little something in it for the people of Nauru.
So, all up I don’t think the Albanese government has overpaid. Whether it has done the right thing legally and morally, well that’s a separate question.