70 Nauru refugees reject US resettling

More than 70 asylum-seekers in detention centres on Nauru have knocked back an offer to resettle in the US.

George Newhouse of the Nat­ional Justice Project at the Supreme Court in Sydney. Picture: Adam Taylor

More than 70 asylum-seekers in detention centres on Nauru have knocked back an offer to resettle in the US when they heard they would have to work and would not receive welfare.

In a report in The Daily Telegraph today, Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said the refusal by a sizeable number of people on Nauru to resettle in the US indicated they were not genuine ­refugees. Rather, they were more likely to be economic refugees and not truly desperate for a safe home.

“I would say millions of refugees have gone to the US and may have died trying because it’s the land of opportunity and one of the greatest countries in the world,” Mr Dutton said.

“People who have refused to take a place in the US aren’t genuine (refugees).”

He also warned that resettling refugees from Nauru in New Zealand would risk restarting the smuggling trade to Australia, where new refugees would end up in Nauru regardless of whether they had children.

“Now is exactly the wrong time to be sending people to New Zealand because we don’t have Labor’s agreement on the lifetime ban, and it’s doubtful they would support it. Secondly, there’s too much activity and speculation around, which means NZ would be a pull factor,” he said.

Scott Morrison has said he would support sending asylum-seekers to New Zealand if there was a lifetime ban on them returning to Australia.

But even if the lifetime ban were in place, Mr Dutton said it could encourage people-smugglers to restart the boats, which would take the Australian government back to square one and could lead to more children ending up in detention on Nauru.

Revelations about the refusals to resettle in the US emerged as an advocacy group that has secured transfers to Australia for about 120 asylum-seeker parents and children said the families being flown from Nauru to Australia were being sent to cities that had psychiatric beds for children.

The Australian revealed yesterday that the Coalition government plans to move the remaining 40 asylum-seeker children still on Nauru to Australia by the end of the year, a policy later confirmed by the Prime Minister on radio 2GB in Sydney.

Some 244 children have been relocated in the past few years and 46 asylum-seeker children have been born on Nauru since the offshore regime began in 2012.

George Newhouse of the Nat­ional Justice Project said yesterday none of the adults from families already transferred from Nauru as a result of his advocacy had been told they were the subject of adverse security findings.

“Security risk has never been raised as an issue in relation to any of our clients that have been transferred to Australia,” Professor Newhouse said.

None, as far as he was aware, had received offers to be resettled in the US.

Professor Newhouse said all children transferred from Nauru were going “straight to hospital”.

He said most but not all of the families transferred as a result of work by the National Justice Project had been found to be genuine refugees.

“The vast majority of the families we act for have been found to be refugees,” he said.

“Most of our clients have not had a response and only a few of them have been rejected … the ones who have been rejected ­appear to be of a nationality that the US President has ordered to be excluded from the US.”