Welcome to Nauru. Land area: 21 square kilometres, the world's smallest republic. Permanent population: around 10,000. Temporary population: name any figure — or, better still, don't name one. Chief natural resource: bird droppings (until it was exhausted in fertilising Australia). Chief economic activity: human dumping ground.
Nauru has joined Papua New Guinea in the Cohort of the Willing — willing, that is, to take dollops of Australian money to hide away an Australian problem. Substitute 'asylum seekers' for 'convicts', and it recalls the way Australia was used by Great Britain in the 18th century to dispose of a British problem. The distinction between convict and asylum seeker is largely semantic since some of the money changing hands will be used to build a new prison on the island.
Nauru supported a native population for three thousand years. The British sea captain who first sighted it in 1798 named it Pleasant Island. Then came the phosphate miners who, within a century, had carted away all the usable guano and left 80 per cent of Pleasant Island scarred and barren. In recent years, the country has resorted to other means to generate income, including selling passports, offering a tax haven and facilitating money laundering. (Nauru, along with Kiribati and Tuvalu, uses the Australian dollar as its official currency.)
After serving variously as a watering hole for British whalers, a Germany colony, a UN-mandated territory under Australian administration and a Japanese air base during the war, Nauru's mainly Micronesian population gained their independence in 1968. A trust fund was set up to receive a share of earnings from phosphate mining, as an insurance policy for the future, only to have most of the money lost through bad investment decisions. Over the past decade, fund assets have been sold off to meet current expenditures.
Today, more than ever, Nauru depends for its existence on Australia, and specifically the detention business. Any form of bilateral negotiation must be compromised by this dependency. The $30 million dollars it is due to receive under the latest refugee diversion scheme is equivalent to nearly 50 per cent of GDP (already inflated by previous 'Pacific Solution' money). Australia also supplies Nauru's defence needs, its court of last appeal for criminal cases (the High Court of Australia) and its most popular sporting pastime (Australian Rules football).
But according to data published by the UN, social indictors for Nauru are in stark contrast to Australia's (figures