Australia’s government published the complete text of its deportation agreement with Nauru, revealing a 30-year commitment worth up to AU$2.5 billion to relocate members of the so-called NZYQ cohort, a group of 358 former immigration detainees released after a 2023 High Court ruling barred indefinite detention. The document had previously been kept largely confidential, with only broad cost figures disclosed publicly before Wednesday.
Under the arrangement, Australia pays Nauru an upfront sum of AU$408 million, split between direct government costs and a long-term trust jointly managed by both countries, followed by AU$70 million in annual payments for the life of the deal. The agreement covers processing, housing and resettlement support for detainees transferred to Nauru, many of whom hold criminal convictions but cannot be deported to their countries of origin because those nations refuse to accept them or because removal would breach Australia’s international obligations.
Greens Senator David Shoebridge, who has pushed for the deal’s release through Senate estimates hearings, said the published terms confirmed what advocates had long suspected about the scale of the payments involved. Refugee advocacy groups have criticized the arrangement as effectively outsourcing Australia’s legal obligations to a much smaller and less resourced Pacific nation.
Who is actually covered by the agreement?
The NZYQ cohort takes its name from the anonymized plaintiff in the 2023 High Court case that found indefinite immigration detention unlawful when there is no real prospect of deportation. That ruling forced the release of hundreds of people from Australian immigration detention, including some convicted of serious offenses who could not be safely returned to their countries of origin. The government has since sought a legal mechanism to remove a subset of that group from the Australian community, and the Nauru deal was designed to provide a so called safe third country option.
The first transfer under the arrangement took place in October 2025, and the newly released contract lays out in detail how future transfers, housing standards and dispute resolution between the two governments are meant to work over the coming decades. Nauru’s government has defended the deal as a source of stable revenue for a nation whose economy has struggled since the exhaustion of its phosphate reserves decades ago.
Opposition lawmakers in Canberra have not moved to block the agreement, though several crossbench senators have called for an independent review of conditions on Nauru before further transfers proceed. The government has not indicated any plans to renegotiate the deal despite the political pressure that led to its public release.
Sources: ABC News Australia · Asia Pacific Report
