Australia defends ‘expensive’ refugee deal with Cambodia

By Lauren Crothers

PHNOM PENH

Australia’s immigration minister has defended his country’s $AU55-million ($33.5 million) refugee resettlement deal with Cambodia after two Iranians transferred last year to the Southeast Asian country from Australia's South Pacific detention center chose to return home.

Peter Dutton’s office on Wednesday released the transcript of an interview he gave earlier in the day to an Australian TV show, in which he was asked about the “expensive stop-over”, which referenced the departure Feb. 12 of an Iranian couple who volunteered to come to Cambodia last year.

Dutton countered with the reiteration of his government’s boat-turnback policy, stressing that arrivals by boat “will never settle” in Australia.

Instead, the Australian government runs offshore processing and detention camps on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea and on the remote, South Pacific island of Nauru.

The deal between Australia and Cambodia relates directly to refugees detained on Nauru.

To date, just five people have taken up the offer.

The Iranian couple were part of a first group of four who came over, including another Iranian and a Rohingya man.

That Rohingya man returned to Myanmar last year, while another Rohingya man was also transferred from Nauru to Phnom Penh late last year.

“We have entered into an arrangement with Cambodia,” Dutton said Wednesday.

“There are two elements to it. One is a AU$40 million aid package to try and provide support to local communities there, to make sure that we can provide support to elections, to crop production and then there is a AU$15 million component which talks about trying to help people resettle.”

When the deal was inked by Dutton’s predecessor, Scott Morrison, and Cambodian Interior Minister Sar Kheng, it was on the premise that it was worth AU$40 million.

The second installment of AU$15 million only became public shortly before the arrival of the first group last June.

They were swiftly sequestered in a gated villa in southern Phnom Penh, where staff from the International Organization for Migration—which won the tender to facilitate the refugees’ arrival and resettlement—provided orientation and Khmer classes.

Cambodian immigration department spokesman Kerm Sarin confirmed to Anadolu Agency on Tuesday that the couple had decided to return to Iran on February, and that the two governments helped prepare the documents for them to do so.

With their departure, there are just two refugees from the Nauru deal still in Cambodia.