Albanese won’t say how long Nauru will collect $70m a year to rehome deportees

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has refused to say if the government will indefinitely pay $70 million a year to the Nauruan government in exchange for the long-term harbouring of former immigration detainees who cannot be deported to their home countries.

While the government has confirmed the plan, little detail has been made available on how many detainees – some of them murderers and paedophiles – will be transferred to Nauru or what the ongoing cost to Australian taxpayers will be.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke on Friday inked a deal with Nauru’s President David Adeang, committing an upfront payment of $408 million, followed by annual payments of $70 million to cover ongoing costs of resettlement. A statement on the Home Affairs website said the detainees’ residence on Nauru would be “long term”.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke (right). Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

“It’s an arrangement between the Australian government and the Nauruan government,” Anthony Albanese said on ABC Afternoon Briefing on Monday. “There’s complexities and detail here, including the number of people who go. There’s a range of provisions as part of it.”

Albanese said the details were “made clear between our government and the Nauruan government in a respectful way, as you would expect, rather than just on a program in an interview”.

Specifics on the cost of the program were included in a transcript from the Nauru parliament’s session on Friday and were seen by this masthead. The Australian government has yet to officially release or confirm the cost of the program.

The deal with Nauru was signed after a controversial move to strip deportees of fair process was rushed through the House of Representatives less than an hour before the prime minister announced Iran had backed antisemitic attacks in Sydney and Melbourne.

A statement on the Home Affairs website said: “Australia will provide funding to underpin this arrangement and support Nauru’s long-term economic resilience”.

“In announcing the [memorandum of understanding], the president and minister referred to further long-term visas to be granted by Nauru to people who no longer have a legal right to remain in Australia,” the statement read.

It is unclear how many detainees could be sent to Nauru, but more than 350 people have been released from indefinite detention so far in the fallout of the NZYQ High Court decision in November 2023.

The High Court ruling that people could not be held in indefinite detention after serving sentences sent the government scrambling to find new ways to police a cohort of offenders who could not be deported back to their own countries and whom other nations would not accept.

Laws rushed through parliament to impose curfews and electronic monitoring were challenged in the courts while legislation to lock up those at risk of reoffending was never used.

Attacks on the government by the Coalition under former opposition leader Peter Dutton were intense enough to lead to the only major reshuffle of the last parliament, as Clare O’Neil and Andrew Giles were moved out of the home affairs and immigration portfolios.

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