Australian governments of all stripes have long maintained a commitment to secure borders and an orderly migration program.

Utilising the benefit of being an island nation-continent, our governments over the last 30 years have taken expensive steps to stop boatloads of asylum seekers reaching Australia and to remove those who do manage to arrive at our former colonies, Nauru and Papua New Guinea. Labor and Liberal are as good or as bad at it as each other, depending on your point of view.

Not having a bill of rights, our governments have been at liberty to treat asylum seekers without visas oppressively, using detention both as a deterrent and as an efficiency measure, ensuring that persons without a visa are not readily absorbed into the community, making their removal more difficult and less acceptable to the Australian community.

However, the High Court of Australia has set some limits on the government’s power to detain persons long term. If detention is not being imposed as a lawful punishment for a proven criminal offence, it is permitted only for the purposes of visa processing or pending removal. In response to each High Court decision restricting the government’s capacity to detain or remove, Parliament has usually been asked to legislate to fill what are labelled gaps in the migration regime.

Last December, Tony Burke, the Albanese Government’s Minister for Home Affairs and Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, introduced a new measure to Parliament allowing the government to negotiate financial agreements with third countries, so that persons without visas who could not be returned to their home country for fear of persecution, could be removed from Australia and settled in the third country for the long term. In shorthand, it’s people trading.

Early this year, Burke and his officers negotiated one such third-country reception arrangement with Nauru in relation to three people without visas who had committed serious criminal offences, been convicted, served their prison terms and been returned to life in the Australian community. If these three were Australian citizens or persons with visas, they would continue to live in the community unless, and until, they committed further offences, were convicted and imprisoned. Given they had served their prison terms and given that they had not committed any further criminal offences, the government was still anxious to withdraw them from the community. The stated rationale was the need to keep the Australian community safe. The unstated political motivation was to spare the government political embarrassment in the lead-up to the 2025 election. Former Opposition leader Peter Dutton was the past master at invoking fear and prodding Labor for its failure to keep the community safe.

Under the terms of the agreement with Nauru, it has to ensure “freedom of movement, with no separation from the Nauruan community solely as a result of an individual’s status” and “no imposition of detention, except in accordance with ordinary Nauruan law” for the three people removed to Nauru. So we’re paying Nauru to create conditions for these people which we are not prepared to create for them in Australia. Presumably, if these three men were a threat to the Australian community, they would be even more a threat to the Nauruan community where they have no family ties whatsoever and where job and training prospects are minimal.

Nauru undertakes to ensure that there is no risk of “chain refoulement". Under the Refugees Convention, Australia is obliged not to refoule or send back any person deserving protection from their home country. This obligation includes an obligation not to send such a person to a third country where there might be a risk of that country sending the person to a fourth country from whence there will be no guarantee of non-refoulement to the persecuting home country.

In return for an initial down payment and the payment of an annual fee, Nauru agreed to grant the three persons a long-term visa for 30 years. Having worked out the details for the placement of these three, Tony Burke last week decided to extend the third-country reception arrangement with Nauru to cover all 280 people without visas in the Australian community who could no longer be detained in the wake of the 2023 NZYQ decision of the High Court. He introduced legislation to the Parliament making “clear that any actions or things done in relation to third-country reception arrangements are not conditioned on an obligation to afford procedural fairness to an affected person". He told Parliament: “The Australian community rightly expects that our immigration laws are upheld and that those with no legal right to remain in Australia will depart or be removed as soon as possible. This bill is an important step in ensuring that this expectation is met without unnecessary and avoidable delay.”

The Australian Government will now pay Nauru a down payment of $400 million and pay an annual fee of $70 million. There is nothing to stop the Australian Government then extending the arrangement beyond the NZYQ cohort to include all other people without visas who cannot be returned to their home countries. Presumably, the Nauruan Government would consent to such an extension, provided the cheque was big enough.

It’s only a first-world country with an ongoing colonising mentality which could contemplate such an arrangement. It is only a mendicant dependent state with a government unconcerned about social cohesion in their small population which could contemplate accepting such an arrangement. The Albanese Government, with a thumping majority in the House of Representatives and with assured support from the Coalition in the Senate for such a measure, is not subject to any political constraint. We are left to our cabinet ministers to decide what is moral, and what is in the national interest. Over time, this arrangement will cause massive disruption to the social cohesion of Nauru. Whatever disruption this cohort would have caused in the Australian community of 27 million pales into insignificance when compared with the disruption they will cause in the Nauruan community of only 12,000. Having stripped Nauru bare of its phosphate in previous generations, the Australian Government, in our name, is now going to engage in regular people dumping. The deal stinks.

Republished from Eureka Street, 3 September 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.