Australia has spent $9.6bn in just four years on its asylum seeker policy – the majority on its offshore and mainland detention centres – according to a new report from Unicef and Save the Children.
The organisations found the current policy was expensive and unsustainable in its financial, human, and diplomatic costs. It noted Australia’s expensive policies of deterrence simply pushed the growing number of displaced persons elsewhere, and caused damage to its international reputation and strategic ability to hold influence with other countries.
Analysing government data and expenditure, the report At What Cost? found taxpayers would likely spend a further $5.7bn over the next four years if nothing changed, and children transferred to Manus and Nauru would continue to suffer mental health problems, abuse and neglect.
The Papua New Guinea supreme court in April found the Manus Island centre illegal and unconstitutional and ordered its closure but hundreds of men remain inside.
Last month the Guardian published more than 2,000 leaked documents detailing widespread mental trauma and abuse in the Nauru facility.
In the report released on Tuesday, Unicef and Save the Children called for the government to urgently reinvest the money to create a strong regional framework to support asylum seekers, which incentivised “orderly migration” and undermined the business model of people smugglers.
Nicole Breeze, Unicef’s director of policy and advocacy, said the $9.6bn included at least $3.6bn on offshore processing, at least $5.6bn on onshore mandatory detention, and at least $295m on naval interceptions and boat turnbacks. The remaining $112m was spent on other programs including the widely criticised Cambodia agreement and other efforts to find a third-party resettlement option.
The costs were based on the estimated 32,000 men, women and children in the asylum seeker processing system.
“The current system is unsustainable,” Breeze told Guardian Australia. “It’s extremely expensive, it’s causing grave harm, it’s complicated and it’s opaque and difficult to assess its efficacy, cost and value for money.”
Breeze said it was difficult to identify expenditures and attribute them because the total suite of “policies of deterrence” was spread across multiple agencies and lacked full transparency.
“I think we do have a particular issue here, and it’s one of the areas that organisations such as ourselves have been really encouraging government to increase their disclosure of information,” she said.
The report said the true cost was likely to be much greater than the $9.6bn, once the costs of the government maintaining and defending its policy in courts and parliamentary inquiries and of workplace compensation incidents were factored in.
“In combination, the opacity of the true human and economic costs of Australia’s policies mean that Australia’s taxpayers and voters are being asked to judge the merits of a policy response, without having all the facts on the table,” it said.
The human cost of Australia’s immigration policy, particularly the mental and physical harm to those held in detention, had been widely reported and subject to at least 10 inquiries, but there was very little known about what happened to people who were turned back, the report found.
The head of Operation Sovereign Borders, Major General Andrew Bottrell, argued in court last month that Australia’s policy of turning back boats at sea must be kept secret to protect the security of the commonwealth, because the information otherwise helped “educate … potentially illegal immigrants”.
Tuesday’s report cited estimates of as many as 7,000 children “trapped in transit” in Indonesia alone, “unable to access safe pathways to protection”.
“These children face the risk ongoing danger, persecution, discrimination and other serious harms and challenges while remaining in their home countries or countries of first asylum or transit,” said the report.
“The narrative in Australia often ends with that three-word- slogan around stopping the boats,” Breeze said. “But we’ve found there is very little information about what people are in fact being turned back to.
“We have growing concern around the situation and the safety of people who have been returned back to their place of origin or where their journeys commenced.”
Unicef and Save the Children called for the government to “pivot its policy framework away from bilateralism and towards the establishment of a durable regional solution”.
The report made nine recommendations for the Australian government.
It said the government should immediately:
- Publicly affirm its commitment to the UN refugee convention
- Publicly commit to a timeline of resettlement for those on Nauru and Manus Island in an “appropriate” third country
- Legislate against detaining children and find alternatives
- Normalise resettlement processes with Indonesia, including revoking the ban on resettling refugees who arrived there after July 2014
- Commit to fiscal transparency on the policy costs and hold a full audit
And within three years:
- Increase the humanitarian intake to a flexible 30,000
- Support the establishment of a regional refugee protection framework in south-east Asia
- Phase out boat turnbacks and reinvest offshore detention funding the search and rescue operations
- Improve access to non-humanitarian migration options for asylum seekers
“This report is building a case for serious investment in a regional refugee protection framework as a much more proactive policy measure than what we’ve got,” Breeze said.
