Kaya Selby
RNZ Pacific journalist
Johnny
Blades RNZ Pacific senior journalist
An Australian
senator says the release of terms for a controversial
deportation deal between Australia and Naoero (formerly
Nauru) raises more questions than it answers.
The
Australian government has released an agreement to deport
more than 350 refugees and asylum seekers to Naoero, known
as the “NZYQ cohort”.
Shrouded in secrecy, the
government has been hesitant to release the deal, offering
details in bite-sized pieces over the course of last year.
Once such revelation came from Home Affairs Minister Tony
Burke in August 2025, when he said the deal gave Naoero
AU$2.5 billion over thirty years.
Green Party Senator
David Shoebridge, who has led efforts to hold the government
to account for grievances over the NZYQ affair, told RNZ
Pacific the release only scratches the surface.
“The
government has been far from forthright”, Shoebridge
said.
“[It has] resisted and made multiple privilege
claims for basic information that we have sought about not
just this agreement: there’s another whole memorandum which
sets up the financial arrangement … they are continuing to
resist producing that document.”
Australia turned to
Naoero and its long-standing offshore processing
arrangements with the Pacific country to solve a problem
created for it by a High Court ruling in late 2023.
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A
stateless man who had been in Australia for more than a
decade – known anonymously as NZYQ – had sued the Federal
Government for his treatment in a detention centre where he
had been held indefinitely.
The court found that the
government had no legal right to detain a stateless person
within the country: that was the job of the judicial branch.
It resulted in around 150 detained refugees being
automatically freed – the “cohort”.
The deal with
Naoero thus became a work-around: keep the cohort off
Australian streets, without the use of detention.
The
Australian Human Rights Law Centre (HRLC), which represents
deportees traumatised by their experiences in offshore
processing, said the deal was not worth the paper it was
written on.
“The Nauru deal has been in effect for
just over a year, and we have already learned about the
involvement of organised crime in propping it up,” HRLC
director Sanmati Verma said.
“[Australia’s]
willingness to scapegoat migrants shows they have no real
solutions to offer.”
The details
As per the
agreement, signed in August of last year, Naoero is under
obligations that can be sidestepped only with Australia’s
consultation. But as the only country contracted to process
Australian detainees, Naoero may have some
leverage.
Under the terms, Naoero is only able to
unilaterally refuse a “proposed person” under exceptional
circumstances, accepting them “without any reservation in
relation to age, past offences, health conditions or other
characteristics”.
If somebody is declined, it has to
be due to “a serious and immediate risk to the public health
or national security” of the country.
Once there, it
is agreed that the person would not be detained, separated
from the community, or generally restricted in movement,
with the right to leave at any time. They are given work
rights and an oligation to “modest” cost of living
support.
Once they have received a long-stay visa,
which has a 30 year term, they would become a “settled
person” with a commitment from Naoero not to send or return
them to another country where they would be in danger or at
risk of chain refoulement.
But their status as a
“settled person” depends on their having that visa, which
Naoero could work with Australia to amend.
Shoebridge
said if Naoero had a change of heart, this could kneecap the
protections as given.
“[Deportees] are just protected
as long as Nauru feels it’s in their interest to protect
it,” he said.
“As soon as another Nauruan government
comes in and decides they want to remove work rights, or
they want to take away any obligation to provide basic
sustenance, or they want to create a detention camp to put
people into … it just has to give the Australian
government notice and an opportunity to consult.”
He
said the lack of connection that the deportees have with
Naoero could make this more likely.
“The idea that
we’re deporting people who we’ve found to be refugees to a
country to which they have no connection, which has almost
no economic capacity to to deal with them, and which gives
them almost no future to hope for: this is a new level of
bastardry from Australia.”
Nothing new
The
released document reveals nothing new about the broader
arrangements outside of NZYQ
Environment Minister
Murray Watt wrote last week that the government had
reconsidered withholding the document “due to recent
events”, with it being an “action to mitigate the potential
harm.”
“The Minister [Burke] is now satisfied that the
public interests weigh towards releasing this document,” he
wrote in a cover letter, the government having argued the
opposite for months.
Officials have been scrutinised
by the Senators, including Shoebridge, under an inquiry into
offshore processing that kicked off earlier in the
year.
It canvassed the legacy of the old Manus Island
offshore detention facility in Papua New Guinea, and the
long-running opaque arrangements with Naoero that continue
today.
The inquiry heard testimony from traumatised
detainees, who recalled the harassment and constant danger
they faced in these offshore processing centres throughout
the 2010s.
“It’s disastrous for their physical health,
or their mental health, we’ve seen man epidemic of self-harm
and tragically some people taking their lives,” Shoebridge
said.
“We know what happens because past experience
has told us this, and in order to deal with a political
problem that the government thinks it has here, they’re
willing to do that harm to yet more people.”
Australia
also deports individuals to New Zealand under Section 501 of
the Australian Migration Act.
Prime Minister Anthony
Albanese told reporters at the Pacific Islands Forum leaders
summit in Palau last week that that this, and the NZYQ
deportations, had in no way contributed to a transnational
organised crime crisis in the region.
“If people who
aren’t Australian citizens commit crimes in Australia, we’re
entitled to implement Australian law, just as other
countries are,” he said.
“The objective here is to do
everything we can, working with out partners and neighbours,
to reduce crime… including with our
friends.”
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