Migration experts say it is unlikely closing camps on Nauru and Manus Island would restart boats – ‘We are beyond that point’

After the Nauru files, how can Australia go about ending offshore detention?

Migration experts, including former senior officials in Australia’s immigration department, have urged the government to close its offshore detention camps after the extent of abuses in the detention regime were revealed by the Nauru files.

The publication by the Guardian of more than 2,000 leaked incident reports – detailing systemic physical and sexual abuses, humiliating treatment and harsh conditions, and widespread self-harm and suicide attempts – has refocused public attention on conditions in detention, sparked calls for a royal commission, and led Labor and the Greens to promise a new Senate inquiry into offshore detention.

Peter Dutton v the Nauru files: how do official statements compare with leaked reports? Read more

Migration experts, including church leaders, academics, and former heads of Australia’s immigration department, have argued that offshore detention serves no purpose in deterring boat-borne asylum seekers, and continues to inflict severe physical and mental harm on people who are not alleged to have committed any crime and who, overwhelmingly, have been found to be refugees legally owed protection.



The government has consistently maintained that offshore detention is necessary to act as a deterrent to people smugglers and asylum seekers who might try to come to Australia by boat.

“What we we are not going to do is enter into an arrangement that sends a green light to people smugglers,” the immigration minister, Peter Dutton, told ABC’s 7.30 last week in defending offshore processing. “Because we will end up with people drowning at sea again and the vacancies that we create by taking people off Nauru and Manus would quickly be backfilled by new arrivals.”



John Menadue, the former secretary of Australia’s immigration department, rejected the argument that boat arrivals were linked to continued detention offshore.



“It is very, very unlikely that bringing those 2,000 wounded souls to Australia would restart boats. We are beyond that point. And at this stage, the only humane option is to bring people to Australia, or perhaps allow them to go to New Zealand, as has been offered by that country. It’s the only option that is humane and defensible.”

Realistically, the only option is Australia and New Zealand Peter Hughes, ANU

Menadue said where processing took place was not the critical issue: “What is important is that processing is efficient, humane and fair.”

Australia had to work much harder, he said, to forge strong and trusting relationships with other countries in the region – particularly the transit countries of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia – to be able to build a genuine “regional arrangement” for addressing irregular migration flows.

Menadue said the 2011 refugee transfer arrangement with Malaysia, ultimately defeated after it was opposed by the Coalition in opposition and the Greens, and then struck down by the high court, could have been the “building block” for more effective regional cooperation.

Under the deal 800 boat-borne asylum seekers in Australia would have been transferred to Malaysia for processing under the auspices of the UN high commissioner for refugees in exchange for 4,000 registered refugees in Malaysia being flown to Australia for resettlement.

Late last week, after the revelations of the Nauru files, the Malaysia arrangement’s most vocal opponent, the then opposition leader Tony Abbott, questioned whether he was wrong to oppose the deal, saying:“Letting it stand would have been an acknowledgment of the government-of-the-day’s mandate to do the best it could, by its own lights, to meet our nation’s challenges.

“It would have been a step back from the hyper-partisanship that now poisons our public life.”

Menadue said the defeat of the Malaysia transfer arrangement had been “a tragedy, because that has given us Nauru and Manus Island”.

Peter Hughes from the Australian National University’s Crawford school of public policy – formerly the deputy secretary of the immigration department and the official who negotiated the ultimately blocked refugee transfer arrangement with Malaysia – has written that the Australian government now needed to find a way to resettle those now held on Nauru and Manus.



“Realistically, the only option is Australia and New Zealand,” he said.

Offshore detention’s callous, brutal bureaucracy damns itself | Ben Doherty Read more

Hughes argued that, at best, only a handful of refugees might be able to stay on Papua New Guinea and Nauru, and that efforts to find a suitable “third country” for resettlement had foundered.

In three years since the reinstitution of offshore processing, only one country, Cambodia, has agreed to accept refugees from Australia. At a cost of more than $40m to Australia, it has resettled one person.

“If there was somewhere else ‘acceptable’, it would have been found by now and the refugees would have moved there,” Hughes wrote. “Regional countries will be wary of helping out, given the propensity of Australians to drag them into our domestic disputes and make them the target of criticism for getting involved.

“The pressures of asylum seeker and refugee populations faced by many countries around the world mean that the price that Australia would have to pay (in whatever form) for any country taking even small numbers would be very high.”

The director of the Kaldor centre for international refugee law at the University of New South Wales, Jane McAdam, said those held in detention offshore should be brought to Australia, as the majority of those held under the first iteration of offshore processing, between 2001 and 2007, ultimately were.

Protection must be front and centre. We need policies founded on respect for human dignity Jane McAdam, UNSW

“Transferring asylum seekers to offshore processing centres was never going to be a durable solution,” she said. “As the former secretary of the immigration department, Andrew Metcalfe, said in Senate estimates in 2008, other countries were very reluctant to resettle refugees from Nauru ‘essentially for the reason that those folks are seen as Australia’s responsibility and Australia is a country with sufficient resources to deal with the issue’.”

McAdam said other elements of Australia’s asylum policies, such as boat interdictions and turnbacks, did not comply with international law. She argued that Australia should reorient its policies to comply “with both the letter and the spirit of international law”.



“Protection must be front and centre,” she said. “We need policies founded on respect for human dignity and the premise that every person should be able to live a safe and dignified life.

“If we did this, many of our current policies simply could not continue – mandatory detention, turnbacks without proper screening, offshore processing without rigorous oversight and durable solutions in place.”



McAdam said, historically, Australia had had one of the best refugee status determination systems in the world, and could be an exemplar again.

“Australia could show principled international leadership on refugee protection at a time when this is sorely needed. By modelling good practice and ‘protection in action’, we could help to develop the regional protection space.”

Father Frank Brennan, professor of law at the Australian Catholic University, described the Manus and Nauru detention centres as “ticking time bombs” and said that for the government to continue to hold people in indefinite detention was “morally reprehensible”.



They have no mandate to make these people suffer more, in our name, for no appreciable benefit to anybody Father Frank Brennan, Australian Catholic University

He told the Guardian the Australian government should impose a time limit – proposing the end of this year – to facilitate third-country resettlement or bring people to Australia.

Brennan argued the indefinite warehousing of people in offshore detention was not necessary to stop boats, and that moving people out of those detention centres would not restart boats coming to Australia, because Australia was capable of successfully interdicting boats leaving from Indonesia.



“The Houston panel saw only three purposes to be served by holding people on Manus and Nauru: a temporary circuit breaker; a standby for any future influx; a part of the jigsaw for a regional solution with regional processing centres,” he said.

“The ticking time bombs on Nauru and Manus meets none of those purposes.

“It’s time for the major parties to commit to a timetable for resettlement in appropriate countries. If proven refugees are still being warehoused on Nauru or Manus Island at the end of the year, they should be resettled in Australia.”

Brennan told the Guardian that while some in the refugee advocacy community would oppose any position that maintained boat interdictions and turnbacks, it was a solution that would allow for the camps on Nauru and Manus Island to be emptied.

He said while the government had a mandate to “stop the boats”, it had no mandate to publicly punish people – not accused of any crime – as a deterrent to others.

Nauru files: how you can help people held in detention by Australia Read more

“They have no mandate to make these people suffer more, in our name, for no appreciable benefit to anybody.”

Several migration experts who spoke anonymously to the Guardian have said that within the immigration department there was widespread, and growing, realisation that the offshore detention regime was failing and unsustainable.

Some suggested the government needed to find a way to close the Manus and Nauru camps in practice, while still retaining the policy of “offshore processing” – even if only in theory.

It was suggested to the Guardian that opponents of offshore processing needed to allow the government a “face-saving” option to close the camps while still ostensibly retaining its policy, heeding the advice of Sun Tzu who counselled leaving opponents a way to escape, usually quoted as an entreaty to “build your opponents a golden bridge to retreat across”.

