The Budget, Christmas Island and a cauliflower

This year’s “tough budget” theme is about to be replayed over and over to get us in the mood to accept cutbacks.  It is as good a time as any to ask about certain expenditures made in our name which are without merit or reason.

Two thousand asylum seekers are being locked up on Christmas Island where the cost of processing their claims is exorbitant compared to mainland Australia and is financially and emotionally burdensome.

Australians watching their own household budgets might care to consider how the government is using taxpayer’s money to feed thousands of people on Christmas Island. They might be tempted to ask if it makes good sense to keep asylum seekers locked up in a place where the basic necessities of life are so costly.

Food for example has to be sent thousands of kilometres by boat or air in bad weather.  Cauliflowers at $14.65 and Bok Choy for $15.85 each are two examples of food prices which makes the detention of people on Christmas Island a threat to any budget.

Many asylum seekers arrive with war injuries and medical problems as a result of torture, beatings and shrapnel injuries. Medical care is required to care for broken bodies and broken minds of the sick and injured people who have fled for their lives.

Nurses are the least expensive of medical personnel on Christmas Island, – contracted at $45,000 per three months. If you think $180,000 per year for one nurse is scary, imagine a medical bill which includes doctors, psychologists and ancillary personnel.

The detention gravy train involves a number of multinational conglomerates which must be laughing heartily as they pocket Australian taxpayer’s money. IHMS is the medical member of this lucrative club who recruit and employ the personnel to provide a contracted medical service which has as its core value that no asylum seeker will receive a level of care which is of a higher standard than that of the most basic care in the community.

Under this standard, people who arrive with painful shrapnel injuries are told that as they incurred these before arrival in Australia, that they will not be treated.  Australians who feel aggrieved at the medical care given to asylum seekers need not trouble themselves. The medical care is costing a fortune while providing a limited service.

The SERCO guards are at the bottom of the gravy train. However even here there are scales of pay depending on the nationality of the workers.  Australian guards work 12-hour rotating shifts which can pan out to 20 hours as needed. They are paid at a higher rate than their UK colleagues who only find this out after they arrived on Christmas Island.

Everyone gets a per diem of $100 a day on top of weekly pay and penalties. Mind you the cost of living is such that little change would be seen from this. The only cheap activities on Christmas Island are drinking and smoking which are tax free.

Conditions of work are so tough that increasingly SERCO is unable to recruit Australians so are flying in ex- prison guards from their UK gaols and ex-army soldiers who find these SERCO conditions not too onerous after two years hard slog in Afghanistan. Pay rates for Serco guards are between $10,000 and $20,000 more on Christmas Island.

Added to these costs is the cost of flying in all the lawyers, immigration staff, and interpreters to process the claims.  Lawyers have no access to the internet, appalling phone lines, limited and disorganised transport as they try to get to their clients in camps all over the island battling bad roads and the red crabs who have right of way. Currently 50 per cent of refugee claims will be refused at the first decision by the immigration department officers… People will then wait up to one year before an independent review of the decision where the current success rate is 96 per cent.

The discrepancy between the immigration department and an independent assessment of a refugee claim is so far unexplained.   This is an expensive year for taxpayers and a year of abject misery to asylum seekers and their children as they wait, locked up in  detention centres.  Some will become sick waiting in this isolation without information or any idea when their claims will be processed.

No matter how you look at it everything costs more on Christmas Island. Examined only through an economic lens, detention on the island 2600 kilometres from Perth has no merit and makes no sense. How much money will be wasted before reason, good economics and perhaps a little humanity cause an abandonment of this insane policy?

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