Evidence to UK House of Commons

The first is an unwavering commitment to deterrence as the core objective. Australia is in a different position from the UK geographically, but for Australia this commitment meant it had to be willing to subject people to conditions worse than those they were fleeing. If Australia wanted to deter people from coming by boat to seek asylum, it had to be promising them that what they would meet in Australia would be worse than the situation they were in.

You would have to be willing to deport and detain children, pregnant women, the elderly, disabled, victims of trafficking. There can be no exceptions, because if vulnerable people are exempt then its core objective of deterrence will fall down.

You would need to have, like Australia, no national or regional human rights framework, and no national or regional court that could adjudicate claims based on violations of human rights.

You would need to introduce laws and policies that impose strict secrecy requirements. For example, in Australia if somebody working in one of these offshore centres were to talk publicly about what was going on there, they would risk two years’ imprisonment. That is not speaking about classified national security information; it is talking about the comings and goings of the day. These laws also originally covered doctors who might raise concerns about what they were seeing with patients there.

You would need a place that could accommodate an unlimited number of arrivals, otherwise you would get the problem Australia did 12 weeks in: if people come in too large a number they will outstrip your capacity.

Finally you would need to have a lot of money. A conservative estimate is that this costs Australia roughly $1bn a year. For the financial year 2020-21, it is estimated to be above $1bn – for 300 people.

Any country considering this policy would need to calculate how many people it was going to be for and what the taxpayer cost would end up being for a policy that still might not work.

It did not work in Australia. In the first 12 months we saw more people arrive in Australia by boat seeking asylum than at any other time in history or since. We only saw the number of people arriving by boat drop once Operation Sovereign Borders, the boat turn-back policy, was implemented. That policy also has very serious legal and humanitarian concerns, but the main point on offshore processing is that it did not deter people from arriving in Australia by boat to seek asylum.

This policy should never have been introduced in Australia. It is long overdue to end, and Australia’s mistakes should not be repeated elsewhere.