850 How much does Offshore Detention cost?
How much would you guess it costs to
keep asylum seekers in offshore detention?
Let’s look at the costs with beginning at
the other end … handing out a bridging visa with support for people staying
anywhere in Australia costs around $90 per day.
But it
costs $658 per day to detain asylum seekers in Australia; that’s with
putting them in a detention centre, not allowing them into the community and
not allowing them to work. In comparison, it costs about $300 per day to keep someone locked up in prison.
Would you say that $658 is an outrageous
amount? After all that’s nearly a quarter of a million dollars per annum per person … more than I
have ever earned in my best year. And remember the figure for putting them
into the community and allowing them to work while their asylum applications
are processed is $90 per day.
So back to my original question: How
much would you guess it costs to keep asylum seekers in offshore detention? Here goes ... the
answer is around $1,200 per day, $440,000 per year ... that’s how much.
$1,200 per day for every
single asylum seeker. Are we mad to put up with this? Yes.
This is the article in the SMH I got
the numbers from ...
The appalling
mathematics of offshore detention
by economics editor Peter Martin
What kind of person cuts people off
income support and gives them weeks to leave their homes?
What kind of person locks them up
indefinitely without even processing their papers?
It isn't Trump. Here's the US President,
trying to get
sense out of Malcolm Turnbull: "Why haven't you let them out? Why have
you not let them into your society?"
Here he is again, in the same
24-minute phone call earlier this year: "Maybe you should let them out of
prison."
Australia's prime minister had to
attempt to explain a policy that looks crazy from the outside and not much
better from the inside.
More asylum seekers have arrived by
plane than by boat over the past 20 years, and yet it's the ones that arrive by
boat who are almost always genuine. Ninety per cent of boat arrivals are found
to be real refugees when their claims are processed, compared to less than half
of those who arrive by air.
Yet we only make life impossible for
the ones who arrive by boats.
Here's Turnbull trying to explain it
to a disbelieving US President: "The only people that we do not take are
people who come by boat. So we would rather take a not very attractive guy ...
than to take a Nobel Peace Prize winner that comes by boat."
Trump: "What is the thing with
boats? Why do you discriminate against boats? No, I know, they come from
certain regions. I get it."
Turnbull: "No, let me explain
why.
Turnbull's explanation was that
asylum seekers who come by boats are likely to pay people smugglers, and people
smugglers let asylum seekers die at sea.
Stopping boats saves lives, in ways
that stopping planes do not.
Because lives are very valuable,
whatever we spend to stop the boats ought to be worthwhile, as ought whatever
damage we inflict on people to do it.
It's a cost-benefit calculation of
the kind made all the time by governments planning new roads or railways or
anything else that will cost or save lives. Yet the calculation has never been
made explicit for offshore detention and the
renewed onshore cruelty that accompanies it.
Nor has a calculation compared it to
alternative policies that might be able to achieve the same thing with fewer
financial and human costs.
The Opposition isn't much use. It
has broadly
supported what the government is doing up until this week, when it has
begun to make tiny noises about the plans to end
support for the Australian-based asylum seekers who've come from Nauru and
Manus Island for medical treatment.
So Melbourne University economist
Tony Ward has stepped into the breach.
His new book, Bridging Troubled Waters,
sets out the costs and the benefits of what we are doing and what we could be
doing instead.
Calculations from Save the Children
Fund and UNICEF put the total financial cost of our current suite of policies
at $9.6 billion over the past four years and up to $5.6 billion over the next
four. Offshore detention accounts
for 95 per cent of the cost.
The Coalition's Commission of Audit
found it costs $440,000
per person per year, around $1200 per day. It costs only half that, $658
per day, to detain someone in Australia, and only about $300 to keep an
Australian prisoner in an Australian prison, which is about what it costs to
put someone up in a luxury hotel.
Processing someone's papers in the
community is cheaper still, at around $250 per day. Handing out a bridging visa
with support is even cheaper, at around $90 per day.
And offshore detention has other,
harder to quantify, costs. You can't easily put a price on mental health, but
you can work out which kind of detention damages people the most. The United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees found 88 per cent of the residents in
offshore detention suffered from a depressive or anxiety disorder or
post-traumatic stress. Among asylum seekers living in Australia while their
claims are processed the figure is
as low as 52 per cent.
Ward concludes that the extra
billions spent on offshore detention didn't buy us less damaged people, they
wrought greater damage.
But what about the benefits? As far
as we know, in recent years we've had not a single death at sea. Under Labor there
were 1100. But the saving of lives mightn't have been due to offshore
detention, it might have been due to the (much cheaper) program of boat
turn-backs that accompanied it. Few boats try to come to Australia now, even
after offshore detention has been softened by the prime minister's announcement
that some of those detained will be taken by America.
Ward reckons a much cheaper way of
saving lives would be to ditch offshore detention (saving $1.7 billion over
four years) move locally-detained asylum seekers into the community more
quickly (saving $1 billion), to spend more on turn-backs ($11 million) and more
on regional co-operation ($150 million).
It's a human and financial saving
worth having. If it fails, and deaths at sea resume, we can always reconsider.
Peter Martin is economics editor of The
Age.