Asylum seekers stay at luxury Pacific Island resorts

Well obviously they must have been staying in 5 star luxury, given the estimated cost of the government’s “Pacific Solution” of $1 billion to process some 1,700 refugees.  A report, prepared by Oxfam and A Just Australia, which oppose the offshore-processing scheme, calculated it cost more than $500,000 per person to process fewer than 1700 asylum seekers in Nauru, Manus and Christmas Island … thats $1,830 per day.  For that I’d be expecting total luxury for those detainees.  And I thought the government was treating them poorly …must have been wrong!

“The Pacific solution is neither value for money nor humane,” said Andrew Hewett, the head of Oxfam Australia. “In six years since Tampa the cost of the Pacific solution to the Australian taxpayer has been $1 billion. We are calling on the Australian National Audit Office to investigate the full financial cost of the Pacific solution.”

By comparison, it costs $238 per day to keep someone in the Villawood detention centre in Sydney …still the price of a reasonable hotel, but not the complete luxury that our tax dollars are paying for in the Pacific.

Seriously, you have to wonder where the money goes.  Was it truly worth a billion dollars to keep a couple of thousand refugees from the middle east and south Asia out of Australia?  I can’t honestly see how any rational analysis could possibly argue it has been money well spent.  The Government has highlighted the deterrent value of the Pacific solution. However, the report quotes the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, showing a corresponding drop in the number of people seeking asylum in other Western countries due to “improved conditions in some source countries” including Afghanistan.

So not only has Australia’s treatment of refugees since the Tampa incident been absolutely shameful - its also been a fucking huge waste of money.  I wonder how much per redneck vote the cost works out at.