The Pacific Solution

A fabulous plan

The first Anglo-Celtic settlers in Australia arrived in boats.  The First Fleet was a huddle of 11 small ships which contained 230 English soldiers and 730 convicts.  The Empire’s most wretched were cast on a land which had, until then, been kept safe by its geography.  The indigenous Australians were subjugated, and their land was taken.  They were not recognized under Australian law as citizens until 1967. 

With a perverse atavism, the Anglo-Celtic citizens of contemporary Australia live with an unnatural dread of being invaded by foreigners in boats.  This dread has had various manifestations, notably the White Australia policy and our treatment of asylum seekers. 

The Pacific Solution was hastily cobbled together during the Tampa "crisis".  Under this plan, the asylum seekers were deposited on the tiny, impoverished island of Nauru in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  In exchange, the Australian government paid Nauru’s telephone bill, and provided uncounted millions to prop up its failing economy.  Australia actively recruited other Pacific island-states to perform the same service for later arrivals of asylum seekers bound for Australia.  It seems that, in order to qualify for participation in the Pacific Solution, an island-state must be poor, remote and not a signatory to the Refugees Convention.  In an odd reversal of history, the end-point of this bizarre policy may be Fortress Australia surrounded by a flotilla of prison-islands: a mocking equivalent of the hulks which lined the Thames and tipped their human cargo into the First Fleet.

The Pacific Solution is probably the most absurd and expensive way of winning an election in the history of democracy.

Dysfunctional Nauru

Nauru is poor.  It is not ideally equipped to handle an influx of refugees.   Its trade balance is likely to improve when the Deep Holes market improves.   It has very few phone lines to the outside world, so phoning in is extraordinarily difficult.  It regularly has communication blackouts for weeks at a time.

The postal system is slow, because Air Nauru (i.e. one plane) is so frequently grounded that the "airmail service" would be more efficient with carrier pigeons.

They do not have an adequate water supply, so bottled water has to be brought in.  This tends to put a dampener on such excesses as washing.

Food has to be brought in, too.  When the seas are high and the plane is grounded, it gets a bit tricky maintaining life's little necessities.

Getting to Nauru can be fairly difficult, unless you happen to be an asylum seeker.  The visa system of this sovereign state is run by the Australian government, oddly enough: probably some sort of out-sourcing arrangement, nicely reciprocal with Australia's refugee program being run by Nauru.  Or it may be run by Nauru, using DIMIA staff; it may be it is th IOM.  Terribly hard to know really, because the answer depends on who you ask.  The only thing which is fairly clear is that the visa system won't be run by the person you are currently asking.  Perhaps they move it around in a global game of pass-the-parcel.  If this sort of international cooperation keeps up, we may soon see our international trade portfolio farmed out to Zimbabwe, whilst Vanuatu looks after America's Defence effort.

You can't get a visa unless you have a hotel room booked.  The hotel tends to be fully booked, with DIMIA people and the security people and all the other out-sourced types.  And especially you can't get a room if you are trying to help one of the Afghans in Topside camp come into Australia as a sponsored migrant.  Any hint of a migration application tends to fill up  the hotel register fairly fast.  They do have rooms at the inn for World Health Organisation people, which is probably a good thing, given the prevailing circumstances.  Your more prominent Nauruan tends to come to Australia for his regular check up and valium script.

Electricity is in short supply too.  Australia sent over a generator in a spontaneous gesture of electoral goodwill, but it caught fire tragically, leading to spectacular candle light effects for those lucky enough to be close by, and ordinary candle light effects for everone else.  Still, if you are hungry, thirsty and unwashed, a reliable electiricity supply would seem a bit eccentric.

The cost

1.  It looks like we will spend between $500 million and $1 billion on the Pacific Island detention over five years.  After five years there will be a permanent population of some 4,000 people with 1,300 of them there for over 2 years.

2.  The cost per day per detainee varies according to how many asylum seekers are taken there.  The more that go, the lower the daily cost ( because of all the fixed overheads).  If no more asylum seekers come, it will have cost $400 per person per day.  (There are currently 1,676 people there).

If they continue to come at about 4,000 per year, then it will have cost about $200 per person per day.  Either way, a lot more than Australian detention and a lot lot more than community release.

Read the full report on the cost of the Pacific Solution.