I'm Daniel James and you're listening to seven AM. Back in twenty twenty three, Australia's top Court made a landmark ruling that it was against the law for the Australian government to definitely hold people in immigration detention. That ruling had massive implications for our country's border policies. It overturned twenty years of precedent and it led to the release of people into the community who have been held in immigration detention after having their visas canceled but weren't able
to return to their home country. After that, the Albanesi government struck a controversial deal with NIRU worth two point five billion dollars. The tiny Islan nation would be paid to settle the detainees in exchange for money over a thirty year period. This week we learned that the deal has now begun and at least one person has now
been deported to Nheru. Today journalist Denim Saddler on the former immigration detainees Australia is now deporting and were the Offlating them to Naru is a breach of our legal obligations. It's Sunday, November two. This episode was first published in September. Then, now let's start with this deal that was signed between Australia and NARU. What do we know about it?
Yeah, so we first heard about this deal through a post on the Home Affairs website about a week ago. It was late on a Friday night, basically just saying that the Home Affairs Minister had been over there had signed a deal that will involve Australia paying Nharu a sum of money in exchange for a group of asylum seekers that are currently in Australia receiving thirty year visas to go live and stay live in the community in Naheru. So at the time it was announced, we didn't have
a whole lot of information about it. The actual deal, the memorandum of understanding wasn't revealed to the public and we saw kind of ministers and the Prime Minister batting away questions about it.
Why is so much secrecy around that deal?
Hardly secret? You're just asking me about it on National do you know.
I will contest that there was no release put out. It was quite little website. Well, well, okay, it was out there and it was wasn't easy to find.
Albanezy was asked about and I kind of just talked about complexities and details without revealing much.
There's complexities and detail here, including the number of people who go. There's arrange of provisions as part of.
It, particularly in terms of how many people were going to be taken by NHRU.
So do they get the four hundred million even if they take no asylum seecrets?
There are arrangements in place, Patricia, And we have an arrangement between.
How the payments would actually work and whether the payments were kind of based on how many people were there.
Like does it just keep going or is it a timeframe?
No, it doesn't, Patricia, And it's an arrangement between our government and then No Room government.
But will you make the details of the payments clear for how long they get seven million a year?
It's an arrangement between that's not government run government.
And then we found a lot more information at a send inquiry last week that revealed the actual financial cost of this deal. So we found out there's an upfront payment that's going to be more than four hundred million dollars going to NORU once the first person is deported from Australia TONRU, and then also payments of up to seventy million dollars per year after that. So the whole deal over the thirty years is worth potentially two point
five billion dollars. There's huge amounts of money going towards NARU in order to take some people from Australia on thirty of visas.
Can you tell me more about the group that this arrangement is targeted at. This is a group of former immigration attorneys that were released in the community in twenty twenty three year.
Yeah, so this stems back to the High Court decision from November twenty twenty three. So it is the end z YQ case.
The High Court has tonight revealed all seven of its judges agreed in definite immigration detention is unlawful. They're surprised to see.
Yeah, these are people that were in immigration tension, but they were never actually going to go back to their home countries, so they were basically in indefinite detention and it was ruled that Australia can't do that, so they have to be released.
Over thirty five pages ruling imprisonment was penal or punitive that could only be used by courts adjudging and punishing criminal guilt. Claiming detention pending removal was legal as long as removal through deportation was possible.
So I think all up, there's about three hundred and fifty people that are caught up in that group, and basically over nearly the last two years, it's been a
huge political problem more than anything for the government. The oppositions kind of targeted a lot and blamed the government for these people being out in the community, and there's been a lot of rhetoric around the danger of these people being out in the community, and I think the fear that if any further crimes happened that it'll be blamed on the government too.
The Opposition is calling on the Prime Minister to sack his Immigration minister immediately following revelations he was worn about a controversial direction that has allowed foreign born criminals to stay in Australia.
Anthony Albaneze needs to stop running a protection racket for Minister Giles and start protecting.
The Australia because what he is doing to Australia is quite quite scary, and that's why the Prime Minister should show leadership and sack him. But he's not and I think that is but I think It is important to note not all of them have done crimes as well, but the people that have served a full prison sentence, if they were Australian citizens, they'd be in the community like normal and people are released every day for similar
crimes normally, and it's not a big political issue. The only different thing here is these people are non citizens.
You mentioned last week, Danan, that we learned a bit more about the arrangement when Home Affairs officials appeared before a Senate committee. Particularly, we learn a fair bit about the price tag. What are the questions did they face.
There was a lot of kind of questions about the amounts of people that would be accepted, and part of the deal was NURU taking everyone in this cohort, and it was kind of a real that it's not it's still kind of neuru's discretion to issue these visas to people, so it's not necessarily going to take that whole cohort.
The memorandum of understanding that was signed last week YEP doesn't specify the number of individuals. It is an agreement pursuant to the provision in the Act to consider applications from the Australian Government for people in this cohort and for NARU to grant visas pursuant to that based on their decision about whether they would.
So there's no figure, so they could take zero, they could, right.
I found out a bit about how the payments will work. That was obviously the big question, and I think people were very shocked to find out it can be up to two point five billion dollars. You kind of had David Pocock saying it was bonkers, like, I.
Just want you to know, like the people out there, this sounds like totally bonkers, right, this is an extraordinary amount money. We all know it's expensive to house people, but.
I think people genuinely really surprised that it was this much money going to this very tiny nation to take a group of people that is about kind of, yeah, three hundred people. And often it is the financial side that gets across people more than the human element. There's a very real human element here. But I think getting that figure has helped people be a bit more outraged by it than they were just when we found out there was a deal in place.
And this deal is being paired with new legislation that expands Australia's deportation powers. Those laws passed the set at the end of last week. So what exactly do these new powers entail and how do they relate to this new arrangement with the route.
There's are pretty extraordinary new powers, and that legislation that recently passed serves to constrict the rights to natural justice to this group of people in Australia, which is basic rights in the criminal justice system that have been taken away from these people.
This horrific, monstrous bill.
You've never seen us people of color, migrants of color as equals. There's been huge backlash from a range of human rights groups, refugee advocates and legal organizations about this plan to deport people and around the stripping of these really basic and fundamental rights.
Australia's immigration regime is so brutal that even Trump points to it and said that's a good idea, we should do that too.
There's concerns around these powers the government have given themselves to. You can be deported based on a decision that was wrong, and then the pact government has the power to kind of overall that and they've taken away all your avenue to appeal as well. The government have kind of justified it by saying that a lot of people are using
procedural fairness to kind of slow the process. I think these exact words was kind of to frustrate their removal, to delay things, and I think the government has been frustrated by court proceedings around this. But that's also how it's meant to be functioning. So it's a lot of people being remove these basic rights to kind of speed up the process. I think is basically the aim and to get people out of Australia as quickly as possible.
So what's the problem that the government is trying to solve for you? I mean, what do they think the process needs to be split up and that essentially these groups should have the legal rights denied. I mean it's pretty extreme.
Yeah, I think it's just basically been that political problem that they've had since these people were ordered to be released by the High Court. It's kept popping up every time there has been another crime committed by someone that was released as part of that decision. It's become another political issue and it's just not going away. And I've tried. It's almost been a bit of kind of a whack a mole game with the courts. They've tried a few
other things. They've tried electronic monitoring, they've tried getting people back in immigration detention, and it keeps either getting knocked back or stalled by the courts. So I think they're just looking a way to really completely wash the hands of these people and this issue and send them off to another country actually on visas. So it's really out of Australia's hands.
Coming up what life on Naru will look like for this group. And you've been reporting on Australia's off sure immigration detension for some time there and you've examined what life is actually like on LaRue for this group who will be sent there. They will have visas, the right to work, freedom of movement. So what can you tell me about what life might be like once they arrive.
Yeah, So Naru is a tiny nation. It's about twelve thousand people and there's a lot of poverty and the cost of living is extremely high. Basic bedgears, bottled water is very expensive. It's not an easy place to live. So there still are about one hundred asylum seekers in offshore processing on NRU at the moment, and they obviously are under different conditions and this cohort will be they don't have the right to work and other rights like that.
But I'm in contact with some of those people and yeah, they just describe it extremely hard to get buy over there, and a lot of them are going without three meals a day. And they also say that people are very aware of what's happening with this deal. They're aware of who these people are and who the government have kind
of described them as being too. Obviously, a big part of this is these people being described as dangerous and appalling, and there are people in the script that haven't even committed a crime, but there's been a lot of rhetoric about just how dangerous they are. And now you're kind of sending them off to a very small country to just live amongst the community. You can see a lot of issues with that, and issues with finding work as well to survive when you've kind of been described like
that by the big government nearby. Can see a lot of issues around that.
So what kind of support will they have once they arrive and in your estimation, does have the ability to support them.
We don't know a lot of detail about the support on office. Similar to a lot of things about this deal. We do know that some chunk of the payments Australia sending is going directly to the new government to support these people, but beyond that we don't know. There have been huge problems in the past with a lot of the huge amounts of money that are in the immigration detention system over there being misused and corruption issues. So
there's always going to be ongoing concerns around that. And it's just a very low socioeconomic country that will struggle with a new group. I think there's about one in four people in Nuru live below the basic needs poverty line. Already,
healthcare is a massive concern. There's have been ongoing issues in Australia with bringing people onto mainland Australia who need medical treatment, bringing asylum seekers, there's not really established healthcare offerings there, and I think there's already existing problems and you're bringing potentially hundreds of new people there. I think there's huge concerns about being able to support them properly and what sort of.
Questions does this phrase about Australia's obligations to these people. Australia won't resettle them, but they also can't return them to their country. Of origin for fear of being harmed. So do we still have a responsibility for their welfare even if Australia offloads them to a third country.
I think it's a great question and I think it's one that will be tested because I think Australia will very much argue that they don't after this. I think they'll say they've satisfied their obligations by finding a new country for them to live in. They've on a visa for thirty years, they've got rights to work. But I think there's a very strong argument that Australia does have a responsibility. We forcibly sent them over to this very
small nation. There is some obligation there, and it's as part of a deal where we're sending a lot of money. So I think there are going to be a lot of arguments that Australia does still have a very strong responsibility for their welfare. We're kind of following the rules around non refilments, so we can't send them back to a country they're going to face persecution, and that's why they found a fix in terms of Nuru and paying
a country to take them. But I think that just raises massive questions about the responsibility of Australia and I think they're quite likely to be tested and in some way or another, I think it raises really important questions about the prison system as well. I think people and help serve their prison sentence EAT eight people are coming out of prison having done worse crimes and a lot of people in this group and that scene is okay.
But for some reason it's different, purely because these people come from different countries. So I think Australia has an obligation to help with the rehabilitation and reintegration sort of process with these people, rather than just offshoring them to a different country and washing our hands.
Danian, thank you so much for your time.
Thanks for having me.
Tomorrow on the show. I'm bringing you a fascinating interview with the woman responsible for exposing the child abuse rampant in the tild care sector last year. After hearing complaints from parents about what was going on in daycare centers, New South Wales, Green's MLC Abigail Boyd started investigating and what she found was horrific. In thousands of documents Abigail read about the ways house system fails children.
I can't explain or described just how awful it was, spending hours reading and not just one We're not talking just one incident. This is incident after incident after incident, across so many centers.
She worked with Four Corners to expose these stories, and she spent the year sharing a Parliamentary inquiry into the multi billion dollar sector, grilling CEOs from the industry, hearing from workers, and I'm picking what's gone wrong at the regulator. She tells us what needs to change to protect Australian children. Don't miss that conversation tomorrow on seven am. See you then,