Our foreign aid budget, it seems, is a convenient hollow log for a government desperate to keep its chances of delivering a surplus intact but facing soaring costs from a huge surge in asylum seekers arriving by boat.
Offshore processing of asylum seekers is expensive — extraordinarily so compared to processing here in Australia. In the case of the revamped Pacific Solution, the goal is not processing of any kind but delay — long delays. This makes Australia’s current policy even more expensive.
By funding this exorbitant cost from the foreign aid budget, the government makes the nonsensical argument that looking after refugees in Australia is the same as foreign aid “providing support for refugees in Jordan, Lebanon and Sudan”.
Instead what it reflects is that beneficiaries of our foreign aid program have no political clout, and that unlike most areas of the budget there is little political cost to cutting programs intended to help those well below Australian standards of living. For once, Scott Morrison is correct in suggesting this is merely “robbing Peter to pay Paul”, although perhaps the names are a little inapt given what we are describing.
Labor’s asylum seeker policy has led it into some morally dubious areas. Combined with its determination to maintain a surplus, it produces outright absurd outcomes like this.
This article originally referred incorrectly to Nauru and PNG, and has been amended.
True, but even so the Rudd Government has increased Australia’s foreign aid substantially.
Most of foreign aid only help corrupted governments to create more refugees anyway.
If they want to use the money effectively, use the money to raise an army for the UN to take over one country at a time to fix it. Economic development “teach them how to fish” projects are better than charity, but is is hard to get any of these programs going where there is chronic violence and corruption.
There is no government ‘robbery’ here. Dealing with asylum seekers is a very expensive imposition on our foreign aid budget. Coping with refugees is foreign aid. It is the asylum seekers who are robbing our foreign aid budget, not the government. They force their way into our territory using criminal organizations that specialize in the abuse of UN refugee conventions, force their way in front of already processed refugees waiting to come here and hack into budgets that would be better used for vital resettlement programs that ensure that those who come here are successful. The ‘progressive’ high moral grounders do not seem to have the capacity to see just how disgracefully poor their moral and political judgment has become.
Both major parties have taken a hard line stance surrounding asylum seekers. The Liberal Party continually beats down on ALP’s policies, fueling the misguided notion that asylum seekers are ‘illegal non-citizens’ and boat operators are ‘people smugglers’. These terms are contrary to the international covenant for refugees and their right to seek asylum. The UN protocol defines ‘people smuggling’ as women and children who are sold into sexual slavery or people who are smuggled across borders against their will. Australia only shares 0.6 percent the world’s burden of refugee’s equivalent to two weeks population growth for Australia. In comparison Italy, Spain, Greece and Malta share the burden of 72,000 asylum seekers arriving along their coastline each year.
Current management creates a huge burden to tax payers, particularly surrounding offshore detention which costs around $110,000 per year, per asylum seeker. In comparison community detention would cost as little as $20,000 in centrelink payments. Other costs include legal representation and charter flights costing between $20,000 and $100,000, used to ferry asylum seekers to and from island detention and for emergency medical evacuation. Increased aid packages to Nauru and PNG may be short lived due to the government’s intention to pull back aid to other countries to use for asylum seeker management in Australia. So the government will now conveniently takes ownership of the ‘illegal non-citizens’ in a deceptive bid to save money. It takes $2000 to save one refugee overseas, so do the sums for the lives that will be lost.
I agree with Christopher Nagle. There is only ONE bucket of money to go around here. Unless the do-gooders are willing to pay a levy/increased taxation to pay for the very expensive asylum seeker program. NO, didn’t think so.
This business of on shore processing being much less expensive may well be true, but the MAJORITY of Australians do NOT support this way of dealing with the problem. Mainly because it leads to no control over our own borders, and handing over our refugee program to the people smugglers. Now you can argue forever over the meaning of this description, but in the current situation, it means those who make a lot of money from transporting asylum seekers with the said money, on boats and into Australia. That situation cannot be allowed to continue.
I don’t have a problem with the foreign aid funds being used to house and feed the boatpeople, who are essentially “foreigners”. Apparently this is done by many other western countries including the USA, Canada and some countries in Europe. Why is it a crime when Australia does it?
And baabaa… The UN has absolutely no powers to invade a sovereign country, regardless of what might be happening there. As far as I am aware, that is one of the founding conventions of the UN. If it were otherwise, we would not have a UN, as no country would join an organisation that had the capacity to vote for invasion of its territory.