Huge cost of housing detainees at Carlton’s The Park Hotel

A Melbourne hotel where Novak Djokovic spent several nights in detention is being slammed as a “waste of money” as the cost of housing refugees is revealed.

Taxpayers are forking out more than $56,000 a night to house 32 refugees and asylum seekers at Carlton’s The Park Hotel. Picture: Luis Enrique Ascui

Taxpayers are forking out more than $56,000 a night to house 32 refugees and asylum seekers at a Melbourne hotel.

The Park Hotel, where Novak Djokovic spent several nights in detention, is being slammed as a waste of money by the federal Opposition.

Labor immigration spokeswoman Kristina Keneally is among critics, saying it would be $19m cheaper for occupants to be in community detention.

Home Affairs Department officials will be grilled over the detention facility, as well as the Djokovic saga, at a Senate estimates hearing on Monday.

The average weekly cost of maintaining capacity at The Park Hotel was revealed in a question on notice to be $394,000 last year. Picture: Getty Images

“This is gross incompetence by the Morrison-Joyce government, spending $56,000 a night to detain people in the Park Hotel when it only costs $104 a night for anyone else to stay there,” Senator Keneally said. “This is an unbelievable waste of taxpayer money.”

The average weekly cost of maintaining capacity at the Park Hotel was revealed in a question on notice to be $394,000 last year. It means the yearly cost of keeping each detainee in the accommodation is more than $640,000.

The average annual cost of holding a person in community detention was $46,490 in 2019-20. Senator Keneally has argued that if all 32 detainees were held thus, taxpayers would save about $19m.

During an estimates hearing on Monday, she will raise the plight of Park Hotel detainee Mehdi Ali, who arrived by boat aged 15.

Protesters outside the Park Hotel when Novak Djokovic was being detained. Picture: Andrew Henshaw

“Many of these people have been found to be refugees and some, like Mehdi Ali, have been accepted for resettlement in the United States,” she said.

“If there are no safety, or national security concerns, they should be living in the community.”

Former home affairs minister Peter Dutton has previously said it was “cheaper for people to be in the community than it is to be in a hotel”.

Asked earlier this month why people who don’t pose a security risk are stuck in hotels, Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews said: “We’re at various stages in the process of determining how and when these people will be resettled.”

She said some who posed a risk needed to remain in detention, although the government was comfortable with others being in the community.

Almost a month after the legal spat over Djokovic’s visa, Labor will seek to uncover whether there was any political interference between the hours of 6-7am on January 6, when Djokovic was being held for questioning at Melbourne Airport.