Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member sincerely for her question. I appreciated her question in September and I appreciate the opportunity to provide her with an update today in relation to the situation. As she is aware, both prime ministers O'Neill and Turnbull announced this year that the regional processing centre in Nauru would close on 31 October. We are able to do that because we haven't had a successful boat arrival in over 1,100 days. We're seeing the population in detention dwindle dramatically and appropriately. It is not as quick as we would want, but we've been given this difficult situation and we're in the process of cleaning it up.

What we've said is that we have the ability to transfer some people to the East Lorengau transit centre. At the moment, in the regional processing centre the population is 606. The non-refugees that the honourable member speaks of number 141. We have the ability in the new facility at Hillside House to accommodate 198 people who have been found not to be refugees. At the moment, as I said, within the regional processing centre there are 141, so those people on our proposal with the PNG government will move into Hillside House. There is the ability for the refugees—that is the balance of the 606—to move from the regional processing centre into East Lorengau and into another facility that we've set up there. So there is that capacity, and we want to do it as quickly as possible.

As the honourable member knows, the Prime Minister was able to negotiate an arrangement with the United States which will see in the order of some 1,200 people moved from Manus and Nauru. Our priority is for women and children to move off Nauru as quickly as possible. And, noting there are no women and children on Manus, nonetheless we've already had the first uptake of 53 people between Manus and Nauru and are working with the United States to make sure the people can move out as quickly as possible.

What we need to do in all of this is make sure we don't get new boat arrivals, because those new arrivals would be relocated to Nauru. They would be held there, and we've been very clear about the fact we don't want people under any circumstance to come to Australia if they've sought to arrive by boat, because we aren't going to allow those people—

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