They tried to bury AUSTRAC’s “suspicious transactions”. Now Senators Shoebridge and Pocock have put the Government in the cross-hairs for complicity on Nauru fraud. Janet Pelly reports.
One of the most significant foreign-affairs stories of the year almost disappeared — by design.
On Monday night, Senators David Pocock and David Shoebridge read into Senate a translated interview with Nauru’s President, David Adeang. His claims about the $2.5B NZYQ resettlement deal were so sensitive that the Australian government had secured a 10-year non-publication order.
The next night, Senator Shoebridge was back on his feet, reading out another bombshell.
This time it was a previously unreleased 2022 report from AUSTRAC, Australia’s financial intelligence agency, detailing “a series of suspicious transactions” from Nauru’s current and past Presidents, dating January to September, 2020.
They knew
Despite this, the controversial deal was signed in February 2025. Nauru was the only country willing to take the so-called NZYQ cohort and a federal election was fast approaching.
The 358 men facing exile in Nauru were initially released after the High Court of Australia ruled indefinite detention unlawful in November 2023.
More than 300 are refugees, and the others are stateless or otherwise unable to be returned to their countries of origin. This is why they had been indefinitely detained.
The fraud irony
While some reasons for their visa cancellation – under Australia’s character test – were undeniably serious, it is downright dystopian to think that a refugee committing fraud could be sent to Nauru for 30 years (after prison and years in detention) when that country’s President is accused of siphoning off millions of dollars of Australian taxpayer money.
But more immediately serious are the claims that the Australian government tried to suppress.
In conversation with his own Government Information Office, President Adeang repeatedly denied the men were refugees and stated that they have visas “for 30 years — unless… we find a way for them to move around, for example; they get to go home.”
Who’s lying?
Either the Australian government has been lying to President Adeang or he is lying to Nauruans. The fact is any attempt to return the men would be chain refoulement,
illegal under international law.
It’s worth noting that Australia and Nauru are both parties to the 1951 Refugee Convention, which includes provisions for:
Non-refoulement (Article 33(1)).
A State cannot “expel or return (‘refouler’) a refugee in any manner whatsoever” to a place of persecution.
Extraterritorial Responsibility
The UNHCR is explicit on this:
Non-refoulement prohibits “indirect” removal, including where the intermediary State may subsequently send the person to a place where they face persecution.”
Canberra exposed
In other words:
If State A (Australia) sends a person to State B (Nauru), knowing State B may return them to State C (their country of origin) Australia remains responsible.
Both countries have also signed up to the UN’s Convention Against Torture (CAT), under which Article 3 absolutely prohibits sending a person — directly or indirectly — to any state where they face a real risk of torture.
This includes onward removal through a third country like Nauru.
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Refoulement by another name
Five men have already been sent to Nauru and despite President Adeang’s assurances that “they will be living among us like normal free people”, they remain in detention.
At least ten others are being held in closed detention in Australia despite having been issued Nauruan visas.
Why have they not been transferred?
My guess is the Australian government hopes they’ll opt to return to the countries they fled rather than face more time in Australia’s “mental illness factories or 30 years exiled in Nauru.
This is known as constructive refoulement; ie, when a State’s policies and practices make life so unbearable that a person chooses to return voluntarily.
Engineered misery
UN Special Rapporteurs and the UNHCR have repeatedly stated that such “voluntary returns” are incompatible with the Refugee Convention when the alternative is engineered misery.
Another explanation is political choreography: warehousing people until the next “crime panic” or talkback cycle requires a flex.
Either way, the outcome is the same.
Senators Pocock and Shoebridge had to force truth into the public record, something that has been tried repeatedly – and unsuccessfully – since the Pacific Solution started in 2001.
Tony Burke and the old ‘Operational Reasons’ shield
Tony Burke appears to be the latest Home Affairs Minister to use the “operational reasons” shield, refusing to comment on the matters raised.
Calls for the controversial deal to be abandoned are growing. But most urgently, we need assurances from the Australian and Nauruan governments that they will respect the laws they’ve signed up to.
Bikie gangs in Nauru. The hypocrisy of Australian visa character tests
Janet Pelly is a Melbourne-based refugee and detention rights advocate. She has worked with Human Rights 4 All since 2019.