$55m Cambodia asylum deal ‘a pretty good outcome’, says Peter Dutton

Peter Dutton hails $55m asylum deal that risks resettling only two refugees. Richard Marles calls it “ridiculous”.

Peter Dutton said the Cambodia program contributed to preventing deaths at sea and reflected “a pretty good outcome”.

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has hailed a $55 million asylum-seeker resettlement deal with Cambodia that risks resettling only one or two refugees as “a pretty good outcome”.

The Australian revealed today that at least three of the five asylum-seekers who opted to leave Nauru for a new life in Cambodia last year remain there, eight months after the start of a resettlement deal that cost taxpayers $40m in aid and $15m in resettlement costs.

Late last year one of the refugees, a man from Myanmar, opted to leave Cambodia and go home. An Iranian couple, known to asylum-seekers on Nauru as Sam and Feridah, left in recent weeks as they did not adapt well to life in Phnom Penh.

Mr Dutton said the Cambodia program contributed to preventing deaths at sea and reflected “a pretty good outcome”.

“We have been very clear about the fact if you come to Australia by boat you will never settle here,” he said.

Mr Dutton said the number of children in detention had dropped to below 50 from more than 80 a few weeks ago.

Richard Marles, the opposition immigration spokesman, said Mr Dutton was “living on another planet”.

“The idea that $55m being spent on trying to build some kind of resettlement capacity in Cambodia for what has turned out to be a single person represents value for the public’s spend is absolutely ridiculous,” he told Sky News.

“It has been an expensive joke and it was that from the day it was first mooted.”

Mr Marles said the Cambodia deal was emblematic of the government’s failure to find credible third-country resettlement options for the roughly 2000 people detained on Manus and Nauru.

The government has rejected New Zealand’s offer to resettle up to 150 refugees from Nauru, saying it would not “give an inch to the people-smugglers” by allowing resettlement in the affluent country.

With AAP