‘New level of bastardry’: Australia releases NZYQ agreement with Naoero

An Australian senator says the release of terms for a controversial deportation deal between Australia and Naoero (formerly Nauru) raises more questions than it answers.

The Australian government has released an agreement to deport more than 350 refugees and asylum seekers to Naoero, known as the “NZYQ cohort”.

Shrouded in secrecy, the government has been hesitant to release the deal, offering details in bite-sized pieces over the course of last year. Once such revelation came from Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke in August 2025, when he said the deal gave Naoero AU$2.5 billion over thirty years.

Green Party Senator David Shoebridge, who has led efforts to hold the government to account for grievances over the NZYQ affair, told RNZ Pacific the release only scratches the surface.

“The government has been far from forthright”, Shoebridge said.

“[It has] resisted and made multiple privilege claims for basic information that we have sought about not just this agreement: there’s another whole memorandum which sets up the financial arrangement … they are continuing to resist producing that document.”

Australia turned to Naoero and its long-standing offshore processing arrangements with the Pacific country to solve a problem created for it by a High Court ruling in late 2023.

A stateless man who had been in Australia for more than a decade – known anonymously as NZYQ – had sued the Federal Government for his treatment in a detention centre where he had been held indefinitely.

The court found that the government had no legal right to detain a stateless person within the country: that was the job of the judicial branch. It resulted in around 150 detained refugees being automatically freed – the “cohort”.

The deal with Naoero thus became a work-around: keep the cohort off Australian streets, without the use of detention.

The Australian Human Rights Law Centre (HRLC), which represents deportees traumatised by their experiences in offshore processing, said the deal was not worth the paper it was written on.

“The Nauru deal has been in effect for just over a year, and we have already learned about the involvement of organised crime in propping it up,” HRLC director Sanmati Verma said.

“[Australia’s] willingness to scapegoat migrants shows they have no real solutions to offer.”

As per the agreement, signed in August of last year, Naoero is under obligations that can be sidestepped only with Australia’s consultation. But as the only country contracted to process Australian detainees, Naoero may have some leverage.

Under the terms, Naoero is only able to unilaterally refuse a “proposed person” under exceptional circumstances, accepting them “without any reservation in relation to age, past offences, health conditions or other characteristics”.

If somebody is declined, it has to be due to “a serious and immediate risk to the public health or national security” of the country.

Once there, it is agreed that the person would not be detained, separated from the community, or generally restricted in movement, with the right to leave at any time. They are given work rights and an oligation to “modest” cost of living support.

Once they have received a long-stay visa, which has a 30 year term, they would become a “settled person” with a commitment from Naoero not to send or return them to another country where they would be in danger or at risk of chain refoulement.

But their status as a “settled person” depends on their having that visa, which Naoero could work with Australia to amend.

Shoebridge said if Naoero had a change of heart, this could kneecap the protections as given.

“[Deportees] are just protected as long as Nauru feels it’s in their interest to protect it,” he said.

“As soon as another Nauruan government comes in and decides they want to remove work rights, or they want to take away any obligation to provide basic sustenance, or they want to create a detention camp to put people into … it just has to give the Australian government notice and an opportunity to consult.”

He said the lack of connection that the deportees have with Naoero could make this more likely.

“The idea that we’re deporting people who we’ve found to be refugees to a country to which they have no connection, which has almost no economic capacity to to deal with them, and which gives them almost no future to hope for: this is a new level of bastardry from Australia.”

The released document reveals nothing new about the broader arrangements outside of NZYQ

Environment Minister Murray Watt wrote last week that the government had reconsidered withholding the document “due to recent events”, with it being an “action to mitigate the potential harm.”

“The Minister [Burke] is now satisfied that the public interests weigh towards releasing this document,” he wrote in a cover letter, the government having argued the opposite for months.

Officials have been scrutinised by the Senators, including Shoebridge, under an inquiry into offshore processing that kicked off earlier in the year.

It canvassed the legacy of the old Manus Island offshore detention facility in Papua New Guinea, and the long-running opaque arrangements with Naoero that continue today.

The inquiry heard testimony from traumatised detainees, who recalled the harassment and constant danger they faced in these offshore processing centres throughout the 2010s.

“It’s disastrous for their physical health, or their mental health, we’ve seen man epidemic of self-harm and tragically some people taking their lives,” Shoebridge said.

“We know what happens because past experience has told us this, and in order to deal with a political problem that the government thinks it has here, they’re willing to do that harm to yet more people.”

Australia also deports individuals to New Zealand under Section 501 of the Australian Migration Act.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters at the Pacific Islands Forum leaders summit in Palau last week that that this, and the NZYQ deportations, had in no way contributed to a transnational organised crime crisis in the region.

“If people who aren’t Australian citizens commit crimes in Australia, we’re entitled to implement Australian law, just as other countries are,” he said.

“The objective here is to do everything we can, working with out partners and neighbours, to reduce crime… including with our friends.”