Sydney - Australia is offering asylum-seekers in its Pacific immigration camps up to $10 000 (about R99 900) if they voluntarily return to their home country, a report said on Saturday, prompting outrage from refugee campaigners.
Fairfax Media reported that those returning to Lebanon from detention centres on Papua New Guinea's Manus Island and the tiny Pacific state of Nauru were offered the highest amount of $10 000.
Iranians and Sudanese were given $7 000 if they dropped bids for refugee status, Afghans $4 000 and those from Pakistan, Nepal and Myanmar $3 300, the report in The Sydney Morning Herald said.
The Herald said under the previous Labor administration - in office until last September - the payments were much lower, ranging from $1 500 to $2 000.
Immigration Minister Scott Morrison said “return packages” were standard practice but would not reveal what the maximum payments had been.
“It has been the standard practice for more than a decade for settlement packages to be offered to those who voluntarily return home,” Morrison told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
The packages are tailored individually for every person who decides to voluntarily return home, he said.
“The packages range (in terms of) value and it's not just in terms of any financial element, but also training, support and other issues to assist people to get on their feet when they return,” he added.
Labor's immigration spokesman Richard Marles said the government should be ensuring that asylum-seekers' claims were being properly processed, not issuing “blank cheques”.
“When Scott Morrison was in opposition, he opposed Labor's own reintegration packages and now he is offering sums which are triple the amount,” Marles told the ABC.
Australia has toughened its policy on asylum-seekers in recent years, with those arriving on unauthorised boats now refused residency in Australia even if they are deemed refugees.
Instead they are held in detention camps on Manus and Nauru and are expected to be resettled in those countries if their claims are valid.
Since the policy was introduced, more asylum-seekers have chosen to voluntarily return to their country of origin while the number of people attempting to reach Australia by boat has dried up, with no vessels arriving for six months.
Morrison's office said 283 people had voluntarily returned home from offshore processing centres since shortly after the conservative government of Prime Minister Tony Abbott won power in September.
Refugee campaigners criticised the idea of the payments, and said returning asylum-seekers could still face persecution back home.
“The idea that you would put people in a hell-hole like Manus Island, treat them abysmally and then try to bribe them to go back to the appalling circumstances they left shows just how morally bankrupt this government is,” Greens party leader Christine Milne said.
Ian Rintoul from the Refugee Action Coalition said he had spoken to detainees in PNG who had accepted the money to return home, adding the amounts had risen several times after an Iranian asylum-seeker died in riots on Manus in February.
“The money that's being offered to some people... it's straight out bribery,” he told AFP.
But he added: “Relatively few people are taking the money.” - Sapa-AFP