A top secret translation of the Nauruan president\u2019s public commentary on the NZYQ deal will remain suppressed for a decade after the Albanese government considered its release \u201cinappropriate\u201d.<\/p>\n
Nauru declined to endorse an informal translation by Australia\u2019s high commission of the 10-minute public interview uploaded to Facebook in February, nor did it provide its own translation, newly released documents reveal.<\/p>\n
The interview in Nauruan with the Pacific nation\u2019s president, David Adeang, was posted online shortly after Australia\u2019s home affairs minister, Tony Burke<\/a>, announced Australia had struck a deal with Nauru to send the first of about 350 members of the so-called NZYQ cohort there after the 2023 high court ruling freed them from indefinite detention.<\/p>\n Guardian Australia reported on Adeang\u2019s comments at the time using an informal translation from a Nauruan speaker \u2013 of which there are fewer than 10,000 worldwide.<\/p>\n Sign up: AU Breaking News email<\/a><\/p>\n But the informal translation held by the Australian government has been subject to extreme secrecy, after it was deemed too harmful to publicly release and later subjected to a 10-year suppression order by the federal and high courts as part of one man\u2019s challenge against his deportation to Nauru.<\/p>\n Internal government correspondence tabled in the Senate on Thursday showed officials from the foreign affairs and home affairs departments had discussed Adeang\u2019s comments in the weeks after. In March, a home affairs director said foreign affairs had advised them not to release the transcript of Adeang\u2019s interview to a Senate estimates hearing.<\/p>\n The foreign minister, Penny Wong, explained this week that the translation notes had been \u201ctaken hastily\u201d by an official who was not an accredited translator and were \u201cfor internal purposes only\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThe government of Nauru has confirmed it will not provide any translation of the interview. I am informed the notes were taken hastily, for internal purposes only, by a staff member in the Australian high commission in Nauru who is not an accredited translator,\u201d Wong said in a letter accompanying the release of correspondence.<\/p>\n \u201cThe translation of Nauruan to English is the source of much debate in Nauru. As the government of Nauru has not provided its own translation, nor endorsed the above-mentioned notes as a true and accurate reflection of the interview, it would not be appropriate to release them and doing so would damage our bilateral relationship.\u201d<\/p>\n Australia\u2019s deal with Nauru is expected to cost more than $400m in the deal\u2019s first year, and about $2.5bn over the deal\u2019s 30-year lifetime.<\/p>\n One of the three men first announced for deportation \u2013 an Iranian refugee whose visa was cancelled after he was convicted of murdering his wife in the 1990s and who was placed in indefinite detention after serving his sentence \u2013 launched a challenge in the federal court against his removal.<\/p>\n The man, known in the courts as TCXM, sought to avoid being offloaded to Nauru by arguing he had serious health conditions and was not afforded procedural fairness.<\/p>\n The federal court judge dismissed the case and applied a suppression order over sensitive details of Australia\u2019s arrangement with Nauru. The order includes the countries\u2019 memorandum of understanding and the transcript of Adeang\u2019s February interview in Nauru.<\/p>\n TCXM\u2019s appeal, which was moved to the high court, will be heard in December. But the transfer of other members of the NZYQ cohort remains opaque. Sources on Nauru say a number of people are being held in the RPC3 detention complex, but that they have not been sighted outside the centre.<\/p>\n Successive Australian governments have imposed extreme secrecy around their offshore detention regime.<\/p>\n The Howard government issued an edict that \u201cno personalising or humanising images\u201d should be taken of asylum seekers, while Scott Morrison, as immigration and prime minister, repeatedly told reporters \u201cwe don\u2019t comment on on-water matters\u201d.<\/p>\n The Albanese government has repeatedly told the Senate it would not reveal the details of a multimillion-dollar \u201cconfidential bilateral agreement<\/a>\u201d it has signed with Papua New Guinea to hold asylum seekers and refugees formerly detained on Manus Island. \u201cThe release \u2026 could reasonably be expected to cause damage to the Australian government\u2019s international relations,\u201d the government said.<\/p>\n This month, Adeang arrived in Canberra for a series of meetings with government ministers not previously declared by either government \u2013 as most visits by heads of state are \u2013 leading to speculation around a \u201csecret\u201d visit, amid controversy around Australia removing NZYQ members to Nauru, and Australia\u2019s contracts on the island<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A top secret translation of the Nauruan president\u2019s public commentary on the NZYQ deal will remain suppressed for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":296928,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-296927","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296927"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296927\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/296928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}