I'm Ruby Jones and you're listening to seven AM. At its height, in twenty fourteen, there were over one thousand people being held on NARU as part of Australia's off short detention system, but in the decades since that figure has shrunk to less than one hundred. Yet the Department of Home Affairs continues to pay outsized and exorbitant fees on contracts no longer fit for purpose, all in the name of keeping Manus Island and NHRU off the front
page and out of the minds of most Australians. Now, one of the men responsible for administering these deals, worth billions, has spoken out about the alleged corruption at the heart of our system and the bipartisan silence that allows it to continue. Today, Independent journalist Nick Fike on the whistleblower and the waste in the Department of Home Affairs. It's Monday, December one, Nick, Hello, welcome back seven AM.
Great to have you on the show.
Thanks Ruby.
So we're speaking today because you have been in touch with Derek Elias and he's someone that held a senior role at the Department of Home Affairs, but he hasn't stepped foot in that building for several years now, So tell me about why he wanted to speak with you.
Yes, So I wrote some pieces about the Department of Home Affairs as overseas contracts, for example the ones involving Paladin, and I followed Home Affairs for a long time. He read a piece that I wrote in Krike last year and had contacted me. He is a former Home Affairs executive.
From December twenty nineteen, I became the Assistant Secretary acting for visual processing contracts in Operations Sovereign Borders.
In fact, he was the Assistant Secretary for offshore processing contracts. He'd walked out on his role in Operation Sovereign Borders following what he described as a significant probity breach involving quite lucrative home affairs contracts in Naru. And he had had a terrible experience with Home Affairs and it was one that he was still living through. So I was all ears and we've been talking for a few months now on and off.
Okay, So he has this deep insider knowledge of what's going on with these offshore contracts, is actually in charge of administering them. So tell me more about this significant probity breach that he described, and the scale of what he was starting to see in the.
Department, well, he quickly learned that it was standard department procedure to avoid tender processes by extending existing contracts.
Their remit was shrinking with a number of people, but they were still charging lots of them money, and we had very little to negotiack with given that we had no other options.
By this point, the contracts that he was administering were for a vastly different situation even from when the contracts had been started, So essentially, by twenty twenty, the numbers of asylum seekers.
On Naru and Manus Island.
Were only a fraction of what they'd been before, So the service requirements had changed radically, But contractors in Manus and Naru were refusing to alter the basic terms of the existing contracts, and they knew that they had home affairs over at Barrel.
We were paying too much money for various things that could have been shut down years ago. We were paying for things that no longer existed.
And Elias is asking his colleagues why are we paying this, what's this for? And essentially he's being told, don't ask the whole idea was basically to make sure that the public didn't really know the amount of money that was going into these contracts. Now, just to give you one example, offshore processing on NARU would reportedly cost Australia four hundred
and eighty five million dollars in twenty twenty three. And this was even though there were only twenty two refugees and asylum seekers left at the regional processing center, So you're talking about twenty million dollars per person. These are the contracts that Elias is looking at, and for very good reason, raising.
Alarm bells about.
He's saying, why are we paying for entire medical centers? Why are we paying for pr staff when there's twenty two refugees and asylum seekers left in this processing center?
And it's because of the contracts.
Sure, I just wonder, I mean, this sounds off the idea that these contracts would go out and things are being paid for that are not necessary. But why do you think the federal government was in this way? Why do you think they had no leverage? Surely they could still have their policy on asylum seekers and then also renegotiate contracts.
Home Affairs were being told by the Australian Government that Nuru and Manus Island had to keep operating and the asylum seekers couldn't come back to the mainland. So now, essentially, if you're going through a new procurement process for a large contract in Australian government, procurement can take several years.
You have to go to market, do the market sounding, meet with the tenders, go through all of the documents, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, so that's a proper procurement.
And neither the Department nor the Government wanted to do anything that would risk having a delay of a year or two. So essentially they had these large contracts that they had to extend to ensure that asylum seekers wouldn't come back to Australia and to ensure that Nuru and Manus would keep being the host for our offshore detention centers. Now, over the years, I think a lot of people have come to question why we're still paying these massive amounts
of money. It was sheer political convenience, and I think part of that package was paying contractors who were milking these contracts because they knew that the government didn't have the political will to change, and they knew. They have known for a long time that a lot of this money was ending up in the pockets of Nuru and Manus Island politicians. It was being subcontracted out to friends of friends of politicians.
And nuin government interfeed with just about every fucking thing imaginable with what was happening on the island, just to melt money out of the government and bluntly say to us, well, you're not going to agree to continue these payments, then what's your option. That's when one of my supervisors at the time would say, well, we'll just give the contract to the government of Nauru, which was so obscenely roll.
So, for example, you know, the nine newspapers started looking at payments that included insurance premiums for fine arts and for luxury cars and a yacht. And in the case of Derek Elias, you have someone who's looking at all of these arrangements and thinking, well, my job is actually to make sure we're not wasting money, and that money is being paid for services that we require, not for
golf umbrellas, not for insurance contracts of sports cars. And the pressure was on was essentially on him, and eventually he cracked.
Coming up.
What happened when Derek Elias finally blew the whistle? So Nick, Derek eli starts to notice these huge problems in the contracts that he's overseeing between the Department of Home Affairs and NAU to house these asylum seekers. So what happens when he starts to raise his concerns within the department.
Well, he says that as he raised them, he found that his colleagues and superiors were alarmed by his question. So he found a culture that just didn't want to upset the government.
You'd ask, what's going on? What are we doing about this? Why are we paying this?
Because I was a newcomer, because I'd come from the un system, because I'd come from in from outside the public service, I just naturally walked around and asked these questions because they were so fucking obvious, and people would literally stare at you like you had three fucking heads.
You know.
It became evident that he was going to report his concerns, and it was made pretty clear to him that he was on his own. No one wanted to question their political masters. The department wasn't interested in redrafting contracts or trying to get back into these things. And at this stage he was just exhausted.
I would be working until very late hours, turning around hundreds of pages of documents I had no chance of reading in order to keep the book the extensions on track. Otherwise it was my deck.
Okay, So he's working incredibly hard doing a job that he thinks, you know, isn't even the right thing to be doing. So how does that affect him?
He was just in terrible physical and mental shape.
I had insomnia, social withdrawal, I was drinking heavily. I took up smoking again.
And I think wisely, he went on stress leave, on extended stress leave, and then he put in a calm care statement for compensation for his mental health and the fact that he couldn't go back to work, and in some that's where.
The real trouble started.
What happened next, Well, his comcuare statement was disputed by the department. Instead of accepting that his ill health might be resulted from his job, they blamed it on alleged pre existing conditions, including his drinking. And they also allad that he was bitter at not getting a promotion. So he's a guy who's in charge of administering billions of dollars of government contracts. He's raising alarms about the working conditions.
His initial statement had mentioned the fact that there was a toxic workplace culture.
It alleges that he'd experienced pulling.
These were by no means unusual responses about Home Affairs as well. Home Affairs has for years been rated among the very worst departments in the government to work for, with the highest compensation claims. But instead of accepting his claims and working with him, Home Affairs threw all its efforts into discrediting him. His case ended up at the aat the Administrative Affairs Tribunal and it's been dragging on
for literally years. He's repeatedly raised his concerns with the Omitzman, the Attorney General's Department, Ministers with Comcare, the Australian Government solicitor. He sent allegations to the NAK, the National Anti Corruption Commission. He contacted the Human Rights Commission and the AFP who These latter two organizations he says, have engaged with him, but with the others, including the KNACK, he had no headway at all. He was put in an impossible situation.
He spent four years he's been privately trying to raise his concerns. It's only now that he's come out and gone public.
And so speaking out for him is a last resort. And after hearing his story, Nick, and the way that various bodies have responded to what's happened, where are you kind of left in terms of thinking about the level of accountability and transparency here?
Well, I was under the impression of this is why you had a National Anti Corruption Commission that could look at these things independently. I would have thought this is what the AFP are looking at. I think it's very easy to say this stuff is in the past.
These are old contracts.
It's not like that anymore, and this is what the Department is now saying. But the fact that they will not engage just demonstrates that they're still not ready to have this conversation. And I don't think it's likely to change. I mean, there's clearly a bipartisan consensus about operations sovereign borders and the use of NARU and Manus Island. But I have serious concerns about the actions of the KNACK of it that they're inaction of the KNACK over this.
It would take an inquiry, a royal commission of some sort to actually figure out how much money has been blown. And I think what it indicates is that the political forces behind this shameful arrangement, let's face it, because these billions of dollars are being spent on punishing people who came to Australia to seek a better life. These are asylum seekers who were put on these dreadful Pacific Island facilities. They've been stuck there indefinitely and now they're the locusts
of incredible amounts of government funded corruption allegedly. And the one person who's best placed among anyone we've ever come across, he's the most senior whistleblower in home affairs that we've ever come across. He has receipts and he's been trying responsibly to raise these things and he's getting no traction. I mean, it tells me that the rots aarded at the top and they're just not interested.
Wee, Nick, thank you so much for all of your time today.
Thanks very much. Ruby.
Also in the news, childcare centers across the country will be made to close early five days of the year for mandatory staff safety training. Federal early Childhood Education Minister Jess Walsh made the announcement as part of reforms to TITAN regulation after numerous scandals plague the sector. National's leader
David Little Proud has back to the plan. The government is also trialing the use of CCTV incentives and introducing a national register of childcare workers, and Opposition leader Susan Lee says the coalition is considering tougher values and language tests for aspiring migrants as the party settles on its migration policy. Susan Lee says the coalition's approach to immigration will be announced by the end of the year, but said tensions in Australia over immigration was the fault of governments.
Not migrants themselves.
I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven am.
Thanks for listening.