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Cruel, costly and ineffective: Australia’s offshore processing asylum seeker policy turns 9
This week marks nine years since Australia re-introduced a policy of offshore processing for asylum seekers arriving by boat.
Nine long years of a cruel, costly and ineffective policy sustained by successive governments of both major parties, despite consistently failing to meet any of its stated aims.
- Authors
- The Conversation
As we outline in a new Kaldor Centre policy brief, Cruel, costly and ineffective: the failure of offshore processing in Australia, offshore processing does not “save lives”, “stop the boats” or “break the business model of people smugglers”.
Nor is it a benign failure.
Beyond simply not doing what it sets out to do, offshore processing carries enormous costs.
There are human…