Nauru has the greatest airline in the world. It’s called Our Airline. The leased-from-Taiwan 737-300 looks a little dated, not having those upturned wing tips which denote a modern plane, but the smiles of the Nauruan flight attendants are warm and welcoming.
There are plenty of spare seats (flying in and flying out) and they offer long-flight sedation in the form of brimming plastic cups of red wine. One of the flight attendants even has her own baby on board, a homey touch.
This airline used to be called Air Nauru. Then, in 2005, the last of its more contemporary 737-400 series jets was repossessed as the country fell into a heap. Clearly, the older plane’s navigational equipment is up to scratch. You’d need it to find this pin-drop island in the middle of the night.
Nauru is located six hours’ flying time north-east of Brisbane, somewhere between the Solomon Islands and the Marshall Islands, which includes whatever is left of Bikini Atoll, which the Yanks used to use for nuclear bomb practice in the 1950s.
The only problem with Nauru’s Our Airline is that it flies to Nauru.
Nauru has no bank. You cannot give a credit card a workout here because they don’t take them. It’s a cash-only country and the dollars are Australian. Nauru’s best hotel, the Menen, is a run-down affair, many of the rooms rented out by local government workers such as teachers and nurses. Huge underpants are pegged on clothes lines on the balconies. It does not have that resort feel.
For breakfast, the Menen is serving eggs. Poached eggs, fried eggs, omelettes, French toast, scrambled eggs. There is nothing else for breakfast but eggs. There is no fresh food on the island.
Don’t get me wrong. Breakfast is fine. But the Nauruan ladies who work the Menen breakfast shift shrug helplessly at the limitations of not just the menu, but the island. The eggs, one lady explains, are flown in from Australia. The only thing they can count on for sure is fresh fish, which people east sashimi-style. But there is a malaise about the place and not too much enthusiasm for going out and catching their own.
For a hundred years, Nauru has had its heart torn out by phosphate mining. The island, only 21km in circumference, has been gutted. So have the shops. There is no food to speak of, except for what comes in Black & Gold label cans, the most popular of which are enticing rows of spam-type products.
In the words of one woman, who I will not identify, Nauru is being asked to “prostitute itself once again” to meet Australia’s internal political games with a request that it revisit recent history by becoming the Coalition’s Pacific Solution II.
There are only 12,000 or so people on Nauru. It has no defence force but if it was invaded, Australia would provide Nauru’s protection. The Japanese shelled Nauru in World War II as punishment for it being a British Empire phosphate mining outpost. It is shocking to learn that the Japanese decimated the population by enslaving 1200 Nauruans to work as airstrip labourers on their staging point on Truk Atoll, in the Caroline Islands, where many died of starvation and abuse.
The Federal Opposition is talking about reopening the Nauru as a key election weapon in what they call the “fight” against people smugglers. The reality is that this is a fight against asylum-seekers. One lady whispers to me that while she doesn’t mind the idea of them reopening the detention centre, she herself would quite like to seek asylum in Australia, where there’s jobs, money and, most of all, decent food.
During the good years of the 1980s and 90s, Nauru was so phosphate-wealthy that a family of five was said to be living off $100,000 a year, all of it distributed from phosphate royalties. After achieving independence in 1968, and taking control of the phosphate money for themselves, the people of the world’s tiniest – and richest - republic lived like kings.
Nauru was a wealthy welfare state. At that time, living like kings meant seeking out the finest tinned food, which was coveted in a cargo-cult way. They ate it up, big-time, forgot about the fresh fish, forgot about work and suddenly they had serious health problems. The head nurse at RON Hospital (“Who is Ron?” we wonder. Then it dawns: Republic of Nauru) says 40 per cent of Nauruan people have diabetes.
This is a product of indolence combined with bad diet. And now there is 90 per cent unemployment. There are no social security payments, because the government is broke. Down on the wharf, waterside workers sit idle. Phosphate boats only turn up twice a month, as do the ships which bring in food and other supplies. “They just wait around, killing time,” says a supervisor.
The stories of Nauruan government corruption during the good times are infamous: chartered planes to Europe carrying MPs and their families to see stage shows they’d invested in; ignoring sound investments such as steady government bonds for chancy schemes; overspending, outright corruption and international blacklisting after the US State Department identified Nauru as a halfway house for drug dealers and money-launderers.
In 2006, with trust fund money depleted, and loans unable to be repaid, receivers moved in on Nauru’s offshore assets. And then Nauru looked and saw all the premium phosphate was gone. The Asian Development Bank recently reported that unemployment in Nauru was worse than suffered by Western countries during the 1930s depression.
Now, the Menen swimming pool is empty and, in this respect, it looks like a mirror image of the once-fabulous casino resort at Christmas Island, on the opposite coast of Australia but also a place which has been dug up for its bird shit and which, as well, shares notoriety for asylum-seekers.
It is a bizarre to consider that Nauru’s phosphate was used to give some zing to Australia’s vast wheat crops, which struggle in our nutrient-void landscapes. Yet here they can’t grow anything except for maybe a bit of cassava or taro in the beachside backyards. The majority of the island is pure phosphate, but it’s rock-hard and is no good for cropping.
People live on the coastal edge, on a thin fringe of land protected by a reef which extends a couple of hundred metres off the coast and then plunges to deep, deep water.
The two Nauru detention camps built for John Howard’s Pacific Solution in 2001 were closed by Labor in 2008. Topside, the biggest camp, held about 1300 people at is peak in 2003, and the smaller camp, State House held about 300. The State House camp now serves as the temporary school, after the school was burned to the ground last month in a suspicious midnight attack.
Top Side, which Tony Abbott and shadow Immigration spokesman Scott Morrison say they would like to reopen should they win on August 21, is a series of half-smashed demountables sitting atop the island, on one of the few patches of Nauruan earth which has not been mined.
Top Side served as a kind of natural prison, surrounded by deep holes where the phosphate has been dug. If you were an Afghani or Iraqi doing slow island time under the Pacific Solution I, you wouldn’t have wanted to walk too far out of this compound at night because you’d fall off the edge and break your neck.
Around the vicinity of Top Side there remain in the near distance numerous creepy grey outcrops – or pinnacles – that were left behind because they contain lower-grade phosphate. Now these pinnacles are being blown up and mined once again, as desperately poor Nauru tries to make a buck out of whatever is left of their almost-spent resource.
Scott Morrison flew in for meetings with the Nauruan government and opposition members on Monday. President Marcus Stephen, a former Commonwealth gold medal weightlifter who also competed in the 2000 Olympics, runs a minority government of nine men. The opposition also has nine members. Both sides of say they would welcome their island being used again as a detention centre.
This is not surprising. There is no tourism industry here. Most of the budget comes from Australian aid money, about $27m each year, with Taiwan and New Zealand, and others, kicking in to take up the annual aid budget to about $36m. There is no chance of Nauru reclaiming its independent wealth from its remaining phosphate, or from the money it earns selling fishing leases to countries such as Taiwan.
Says Opposition foreign affairs spokesman, David Adeang: “We’re not rich. We’re not as well-off as we used to be. We’re accustomed to a higher standard of living than we’re currently enjoying right at this time. We are an impoverished country, we accept that.”
And that is why they’d accept a reopened camp for asylum-seekers – not that the government of Nauru will admit this. We know that President Stephen is in favour of the camp, because he said so a couple of weeks ago on ABC radio. Members of the media went to Nauru this week expecting to talk to Stephen about the Pacific Solution II, but while he had time for Scott Morrison, he was – very strangely - not available for journalists.
Stephen is chauffeured around Nauru in a black Toyota Aurion with a flag on the bonnet, and is saluted by his police officer-driver every time he steps in and out of the car. Hopefully, this performance is only for the benefit of Morrison and the visiting media, and they drop the farce when the visitors leave. The island is too small for such pretensions and, whether Stephen knows it or not, it causes locals to snigger.
Stephen disappeared from the cabinet room after his meeting with Morrison. It was announced that Foreign Minister Keiren Keke would talk to the media. This led to complaints (namely from me). It was, after all, impossible to believe President Stephen was too busy studying unfolding events in the Nauru Situation Room to chat with the media.
The asylum-seeker issue is getting major play in Australia and we wanted to know the mind of the president. But Rod Henshaw, an ex-ABC radio bloke from Brisbane, now working as Director of Media for the Nauru government, didn’t like my complaints. “If you don’t like it, stiff shit,” Henshaw said. An appropriate choice of words. After all, that’s what this country’s built on.
Keiren Keke fronted the media and explained that his government’s willingness to talk to the Australian Opposition had nothing to do with the money that a detention centre might bring. He said asylum-seekers were a regional problem.
But they’d never seen an asylum-seeker prior to John Howard. Actually, that’s wrong. Keke said one person, a Sri Lankan chap, jetted in sometime in the 1990s, put up the white flag and asked for asylum.
“This is not seen by us at all as being a major input into our economic recovery,” Keke said. “This is very much about finding a way we can reciprocate the major assistance Australia provides us.” No other Pacific Island country seem in a hurry to return favours to Australia for the foreign aid it pours in, but we are asked to believe Nauru is doing this from the goodness of its heart.
Nauru became notorious during Pacific Solution Mark I, when Afghan asylum-seekers sewed their lips shut and went on hunger strikes in protest at being left to languish on the island for years and years. But Nauruans do have good hearts: they eventually allowed the asylum-seekers to wander about the island at will, to swim in the sea and to use the internet and make phone calls out. The only requirement being that they return to their compounds for a 9pm curfew. Friendships were formed.
But Nauru has such stringent – and, at $200, expensive – visa conditions that if a Coalition government reopened the detention facility, it would be difficult for independent observers to access the island. Jesuit priest Frank Brennan was not allowed onto the island during Pacific Solution I, but Nauru Opposition members – who were in power when Brennan tried to get here – say that was because he did not go through the proper channels.
David Adeang points out that other independent observers, who did go through the proper channels, were allowed in. “At one stage we had (human rights lawyer-advocate) Julian Burnside in my office. He was quite pleasant. We allowed him to do what he wanted to do. We never had any objection to that.”
Julia Gillard says she doesn’t want to talk to Nauru because she’s already talking to East Timor (so she reckons) about an offshore facility. And also because Nauru is not signatory to the UN Convention on Refugees.
Many suspect that if her East Timor idea fails, as seems likely, Gillard might – if she wins the election - talk to Nauru. Then again, she might not, because all her talk about offshore processing might just be election posturing. Morrison says it doesn’t matter whether Nauru is a signatory or not. He’d deal with them either way.
There is no question Nauruan people want another camp. They all say so. Even Rick Daoe, who at one point was involved in forcefully putting down a riot when he worked at as a security guard at the State House camp, and who dealt with the hunger strikers and lip-sewers, says that once the asylum-seekers understood that the Nauruans were not their enemies, and once people like him started having them to dinner in his own home, things really improved on the island.
At least Daoe admits he wants the camp reopened for straight economic reasons: “It will really benefit our people. Locals would be employed. A lot of people who worked on the (detention) program have not worked since it closed.”
The people are so physically unwell there are now programs encouraging the most simple of physical activities, such as getting up and taking walks about the island. There has also, in recent times, been something of a return to the sea, with people heading out in dinghies to catch their own fish. There has been a realisation that eating from Black & Gold tins is not the best way to go; and, more particularly, with 90 per cent unemployment and little money, that subsistence hunting makes sense.
What doesn’t make sense is Pacific Solution II. Everyone knows it’s just a political game which Nauru is prepared to play because it is in despair. Likewise, everyone knows that 95 per cent of those who were detained here previously made it to Australia anyway. The Coalition argues that Nauru and Manus Island sent such a shudder through the asylum-seeker community that it caused the boats to stop coming.
And this is true. But if the Coalition wins, it will be just an expensive holding pen for people who will almost inevitably arrive in Australia. It’s the same for Gillard’s alleged East Timor Solution.
The Nauruans reckon the centre could be up and running in a matter of weeks. Barina Waqa, who worked at the Top Side camp as an operational manager during Pacific Solution I, is hoping a new camp will open. But she admits that Nauruans were not necessarily delighted that the asylum-seekers lived with 24-hour electricity, in air-conditioned sheds, with guaranteed food and guaranteed water. “No, I guess there was a lot of envy,” she says.
For Nauru, a new detention centre will only be a temporary fix on their intractable financial problems. Because if they rebuild the centre, and word goes out again to the asylum-seekers that they can only look forward to a long stay on Nauru, then they won’t come.
Nauru, therefore, won’t be needed. And once again, we won’t need Nauru.
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@ToryShepherd I hope that's in your piece tomorrow. Also - are you coming over this week or laaaaaater?
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