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27.5.15

costs of Nauru and Manus Island detention centres

The federal government has spent $2.4bn over two years maintaining offshore detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island, including the detention of 90 children on Nauru, a Senate committee has heard.
A total of $403m was spent operating the immigration detention centre on Manus Island from July 2014 to the end of April 2015, representatives from the immigration department told a Senate estimates committee on Tuesday.
A further $229m was spent on capital expenditure on Manus.
Nearly $359m was spent at the same time operating the Nauru facility, and nearly $57m on capital expenditures.
The total figure of $1.1bn in the 2014–15 financial year is down slightly from the previous financial year, when the government spent $1.3bn maintaining the two offshore facilities.
About 173 unaccompanied minors have travelled to Australia by boat since 2012, the committee heard. Most of them – 95 – were 17 years of age, but the youngest was just six. The children either embarked on the boat trip alone, or their parents perished while making the journey to Australia.
Ninety children remain on Nauru, with a further 136 kept in onshore detention centres. Seventy children live in Darwin’s Wickham Point facility.
The average time a child remains in detention is 345 days, but one child has been in detention for 1,774 days – about 4.8 years.

The majority of asylum-seeker children – nearly 1,100 – are in community detention, following the government’s promise to remove children from Christmas Island by Christmas 2014, as long as the Senate passed its omnibus asylum legacy caseload bill.

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