The Australian government was prepared to pay out to stop the shame of Manus Island being aired in court. But the ultimate cost is borne by the refugees and asylum seekers who have had their lives ruined

Brutal truth of Australia's detention regime can't be written off. Not even for $70m

This is settlement, but no solution.

The announcement that the Australian government has agreed to pay $70m in compensation to 1,905 refugees and asylum seekers illegally held in offshore immigration detention on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island will bring a measure of comfort to those held in that place – in the words of one refugee still held there, “a little bit of justice”.

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What it will not do is resolve the Kafkaesque limbo the refugees and asylum seekers find themselves in.

The indefinite confinement of 900 men continues after four years, with no definitive way out yet apparent.

Eight months after a much-vaunted deal with the US to take refugees from the Australian detention camps on Manus and Nauru was announced, not a single person has been resettled. Even if the US does take some refugees, Australia concedes it can never resettle all of those who remain under its offshore bailiwick.

It is alleged the government agreed to settle the class action, and to compensate 1,905 refugees and asylum seekers held on Manus, in order to avoid the scrutiny that an open court hearing would bring: that the government will pay any amount of money, contort itself to any legal sophistry, to keep unexamined what it is doing in those secret islands.

The Australian government, through the immigration minister, Peter Dutton, contends its settlement was a “prudent” act, designed to head off potentially far greater costs. It was settled with the condition that the government does not admit liability, and Dutton said it “strongly refutes and denies the claims made in these proceedings”.

In one sense, that this case never made it to court hardly matters. The government cannot say it didn’t know of the abuses in that place and nor can the Australian people.

Since the Manus Island detention centre was reopened by Australia in 2012, offshore detention has suffered the indignity of a thousand exposures – from the United Nations, courts foreign and domestic, Australian Senate inquiries and government reports, public whistleblowers, media investigation, human rights and legal groups – but it carries on still. It is bipartisan policy still, indefinitely detaining still.

All of it has been laid bare: the children accidentally sent to adult men’s only detention where they were abused, the systemic sexual assault, the violence by guards against detainees, the repeated suicide attempts, the mass hunger strikes, the seriously ill neglected until it was too late and they died, the public servants who ignored the pleas of doctors to move patients because it was “policy” refugees stayed in detention, so again, they died.

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On Manus, the brutality reached a zenith in February 2014, when, over three days of rampaging violence, the detention centre was invaded by police, security guards and outsiders. Refugees and asylum seekers were shot, had their throats slit and their eyes blinded. Iranian Reza Barati was murdered by detention centre staff who were supposed to protect him. Repeatedly struck with a nail-barbed piece of wood until he fell over, a rock was dropped on his head.

And all of this is known, all of it uncontested.

A court case would have laid it out in painstaking detail once more. But there is nobody who can honestly say they didn’t know.

The settlement, when it is ultimately paid, will go some way to offering redress to those wronged, even if the government maintains its acquiescence is no admission of liability, nor concession of wrongdoing.

But the question remains, what happens next?

The men remain on Manus, with no clearer sense of what their futures will be.

As ever in this debate, the politics poisons the policy.

The issue of irregular migration by boat to this country is presented as a simplistic dichotomy: either open borders and endless boats or the brutality of offshore detention and the violence, abuse and torture it has entailed.

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Only the wilfully ignorant would accept such base reductionism.

Surely it is within the power of a country of Australia’s wealth, influence and resources to create a reasonable policy that assisted people fleeing persecution so that they didn’t have to make boat journeys but that didn’t punish those who felt they had no other option.

Of course, sovereign nations have a right to impose a measure of control on their borders, recognising that migration can never be completely controlled, that there will always be people who need to flee in difficult or dangerous circumstances.

But it is legal to seek asylum and to arrive by any means to do so. And it is unprincipled, immoral and indefensible to punish one group of people who have committed no crime in the name of deterring others from doing the same.

The cost of learning that lesson is much more than the $70m agreed to in court this week, or the nearly $14bn Australia has spent on its border protection policies.

The true cost lies in the lives ended and irreparably damaged in those places, in the diminution of Australia as a country that defends the rule of law and in the dangerous example it sets.