Tue 15 Sep 2026 10.45 AEST
Photo: AAP Image/Dave Hunt
Australia’s most senior bureaucrats have been put on notice by the Senate over a push to restrict how footage of public servants appearing before parliamentary committees can be used.
On the 10th of September 1996, two very different politicians rose at the same time to give their first speeches to Parliament, Bob Brown and Pauline Hanson. The Greens and One Nation have become fixtures of Australian politics. The Greens have almost always had more electoral success and many more parliamentarians than One Nation.
Half of Australians believe tech executives should face jail time if their companies facilitate the spread of illegal and dangerous content online, as the Albanese government moves to impose a new duty of care on digital platforms.
Here’s a question you’ve probably never asked yourself: Why does Nauru Airlines exist? There’s a simple answer – Australia’s offshore detention regime. Australia’s “resettlement” program in Naoero requires air transport, and Nauru Airlines is the only airline that flies to Naoero, so our government needs Nauru Airlines to keep the offshore regime up and running. But Nauru Airlines isn’t viable as a commercial airline. It needs support.
How much support? Here’s the problem: Australia will do anything to keep Nauru Airlines operational. Anything? Anything.
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Naoero, formerly Nauru, a tiny island in the South Pacific, has a population of 12,000 people. It’s the least visited country in the world, averaging around 200 tourists per year. And no wonder: it has no fresh water, no crops and no distinguishing features in its 21 square kilometres. It has no public transport, lacks tourist infrastructure and is hard to access, while its trade with other countries is negligible, apart from the sale of fishing rights. Nor is the island scenic, at least not in a traditional tropical sense: a regional tourist operator describes the island’s central plateau, the former phosphate mine which makes up 80% of the island, as having “a rugged lunar-like surface … a surreal landscape where every step feels like an adventure into the unknown”.
Naoero’s larger and more attractive Pacific Island neighbours are served by other airlines. So why does this Micronesian micronation, the third smallest country in the world, with fewer residents than Horsham, have an international commercial airline – let alone one with seven Boeing 737s?
Photo: Nick Feik
This seemingly innocuous question opens a new window onto an issue that has been impossible to properly investigate for decades, even while its machinations have defined our national politics. Nauru Airlines isn’t just a transport service for freight, staff, immigration detainees and other sundry passengers, heavily subsidised by our government. A thorough examination of its operations gives a unique insight into Pacific relations, and how immigration politics in Australia corrupts everything it touches.
The Australian government is notoriously secretive about the resources it devotes to its ongoing Pacific detention system, and for the most part it has been remarkably successful at avoiding scrutiny. But the operations of Nauru Airlines, integral to this system, can’t be completely obscured, because its services also operate for the public: aircraft must be registered publicly and flights tracked; airline operations are subject to stringent regulation; companies registered in Australia must provide annual reports, and government contracts have basic levels of transparency.
As will become clear, Nauru Airlines exists only through the failures of multiple departments and regulators, driven by successive governments going to absurd and dangerous lengths to protect it, because our offshore immigration system demands it.
As one source put it to me, “If one of these planes was to fall out of the sky … no one could say they didn’t know.”
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Australia regularly spends around a billion dollars a year on the offshore management of unauthorised maritime arrivals, according to its own budget figures. Last year, with just over 100 asylum seekers held in Naoero, this equated to Australia spending around $9 million per person.
The government pays MTC Australia, a subsidiary of an American private prison operator, around $160 million per year to operate Naoero’s offshore processing centre; and a further $30 million goes to International Health and Medical Services for medical services on the island. The Australian government also paid Naoero an initial $408m last year, when it signed a new deal to take on the NZYQ cohort of asylum seekers, and will give it a further $70m annually for the next three decades.
Meanwhile, detainees on Naoero report they cannot afford to buy enough food or access clean drinking water while they wait for their asylum claims to be processed. Many are skipping meals to make ends meet, according to a recent survey by the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre. Naoero has also been experiencing frequent power outages. So, where’s the money going?
The answer is hidden in a web of contracts and sweetheart deals involving Australian government tenders whose profit margins can bear little relation to the services rendered, but which grease the wheels from here to Naoero. Only very rarely can we track them properly. Some involve Nauru Airlines.
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Nauru Air Corporation, which runs Nauru Airlines, is incorporated in Naoero and owned by the state of Naoero. But it’s registered in Australia as an overseas company, with its operational and corporate offices and aircraft based in Brisbane. It wouldn’t be remotely viable without Australian government contracts and subsidies, which amount to tens of millions of dollars annually. (Why does Nauru Airlines exist? Because we pay for it.)
Since the start of 2023, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFAT) has signed contracts worth over $50 million with Nauru Airlines for flights both to Naoero and other Pacific destinations. Another key source of Nauru Airlines’ revenue is the Department of Home Affairs. Unlike DFAT, however, Home Affairs conceals its dealings with the airline.
In October 2025, Home Affairs executed a three-year contract for $104 million for air transport services. The contract is for two service lines: one for the movement of persons, departmental staff and cargo between onshore and offshore locations (primarily Naoero); the other for the movement of cargo to support detention operations and move detainees across the Australian Border Force (ABF) network, including Naoero. Together, these involve having a Boeing 737 available for Home Affairs use 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, as well as other ad hoc charters of aircraft. The two lines of the contract were open to separate tenderers, if that was preferred by suppliers.
Both lines of this contract were awarded to Adagold Aviation. But Adagold Aviation doesn’t have its own aircraft; it is a broker. So for this job, Adagold subcontracts to AERgO International. But AERgO International also doesn’t have any suitable aircraft. It is also a broker. AERgO International is the local agent for Nauru Airlines, which owns and operates the actual aircraft that deliver the vast bulk of flight services under this contract. The links to Nauru Airlines, however, aren’t listed in the public notice of the contract on AusTender – they only emerged under questioning by Greens Senator David Shoebridge in a recent Senate estimates hearing.
Here’s the strangest thing, though: according to leaked tender documents, Naoero’s government has advised our government that the only aircraft it will permit to land in Naoero are Nauru Airlines aircraft.
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Photo: Nick Feik
Home Affairs works with Nauru Airlines (and its agents) because these are the only aircraft that fly to Naoero. The department has no choice. But if it knows that only one airline flies to Naoero, why would it outsource the contract to a broker, which then offers it to another broker? Why would Home Affairs enter into a contract that pays two different intermediaries, only to end up with the only airline that could fulfil this contract? Why not contract directly with Nauru Airlines?
(In response, the department said that “a single-source procurement process was not appropriate” because “the second service line had a broader scope of services and was not limited to flights to and from Nauru”, but given the two service lines were open to separate tenderers, this only demonstrates it was the department’s choice to muddy the waters by linking them.)
The tender documents for the $104m contract explicitly stated that the tenderer must not engage in any collusive tendering or anti-competitive conduct. Yet while the tender was formally open to competitors, every competitor was required either to subcontract to Nauru Airlines or otherwise obtain access to Nauru Airlines aircraft – a de facto monopoly.
This is highly anti-competitive behaviour, not to mention fraught with risk. It belies the Department of Transport’s register of available capacity for Australian airlines, which states there are no restrictions for Australian airlines flying into and out of Naoero. It also contradicts the Air Services Agreement between Australia and Naoero, which obliges both parties “to ensure that the designated airlines of each Party enjoy fair and equal opportunities to operate services”, and states that airlines can “access airports on a non-discriminatory basis”.
More significantly, it means the Australian government has been facilitating, even institutionalising, an arrangement that would appear to breach Commonwealth Procurement Rules: Australia’s acquiescence that only Nauru Airlines aircraft can land in Naoero means that the Australian government can only (sub)contract this work, in effect, to a single company.
An arrangement like this is open to abuse – and exactly why governments have procurement rules: to avoid collusion; to prevent anti-competitive conduct; and to ensure transparency and accountability.
While Nauru Airlines may tender for Australian government contracts directly, other tenderers can participate only by obtaining Nauru Airlines’ co-operation. This requires competitors to disclose operational requirements, pricing assumptions and the like, while Nauru Airlines can influence agents’ and competitors’ costs, aircraft availability and commercial viability.
As a result, Nauru Airlines, controlled by the government of Naoero, has everyone over a barrel. To protect our offshore immigration arrangement, this is the price the Australian government pays.
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“Did you look at the related party connections between AERgO and Nauru Airlines?”, Senator Shoebridge asked Home Affairs representatives in Senate estimates. “Did you see that they weren’t third parties but that they were connected? Was that part of your due diligence?”
“I’d have to take that on notice,” replied the Home Affairs official who was the delegate for the tender.
AERgO is a sales agent for Nauru Airlines’ charter services, but while this explains how it is included in the Home Affairs contract, and perhaps why Home Affairs didn’t contract Nauru Airlines directly, it does little to reassure that the Australian government is acting in the spirit of its own procurement rules – because Nauru Airlines and AERgO are linked via another web of companies that prevent full transparency. Government work is not normally subcontracted to related third-party entities, because such arrangements make it hard to assess where the money is going, and risk services being delivered at inflated rates.
AERgO and Nauru Air Corporation don’t share board directors, but a subsidiary of Nauru Air Corporation called Pacific Wings has directors who are also on the boards of Nauru Air Corporation and AERgO.
A further company, Kuruka International, directed and owned by AERgO executives, also owns a large share of Pacific Wings – with Nauru Air Corporation.
“Surely,” Senator Shoebridge followed up, “if you’ve got subcontractors who are each taking a cut along the way, one of the critical things you want to look at is that they are independent and that they aren’t related party entities. Surely that’s part of looking at a subcontracting chain, isn’t it, so that the Commonwealth isn’t getting doubly grifted on the way through a contract? Did you look at that?”
Home Affairs also took that question on notice, later replying: “The Department conducted the procurement process in accordance with the Commonwealth Procurement Rules. As part of the evaluation stage, due diligence activities were undertaken across all tenderers, including probity, technical capacity and capability, risk, benefit to the Australian economy, legal compliance and value for money. The Department undertook due diligence activities based on tendering parties’ roles in the procurement process. Pacific Wings Pty Ltd was not considered.”
(Although both Pacific Wings and Kuruka International are currently registered with ASIC, it’s unclear whether they are active companies, and The Point does not allege nor are we aware of any wrongdoing by these companies or directors.)
The $104m contract’s terms are commercial-in-confidence, so we don’t know how much of it ended up in the pockets of its middlemen. But given Adagold and AERgO are included in the original contract (as confirmed in Senate estimates), this raises the obvious question: if Home Affairs knew that the work would be subcontracted by Adagold to AERgO and onto Nauru Airlines, how could it possibly conclude that this would deliver the most accountability and best value for money?
As to why Home Affairs needs a Boeing 737 (capacity: up to 178 passengers) on permanent standby to charter a few handfuls of people back and forth to Naoero – when regular subsidised services to Naoero already exist – that’s also unclear, beyond Home Affairs’ standard explanation of “operational requirements”.
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Why couldn’t Australia support another airline to fly back and forth to Naoero, for example Qantas or another commercial charter company? Apart from needing to convince Naoero to permit other airlines to land, it would be a serious financial risk for any other airline, and not just because of the low passenger numbers. Nauru International Airport is not compliant with the international safety and security requirements which underpin global commercial aviation. According to the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) earlier this year, Nauru International Airport is yet to be certified even though it has been operating for decades, and its air navigation deficiencies were reported in 2021. This certification gap poses a major liability risk, not to mention insurance costs, for any airline using the airport.
According to the existing Air Services Agreement between the governments of Australia and Naoero, both nations are parties to the Chicago Convention (which establishes the legal core for global airspace, aircraft safety, and air navigation) and ICAO standards for civil aviation. This Air Services Agreement, although not legally binding, was signed in 2019, yet Australia has since turned a blind eye to Naoero airport’s lack of certification. Our Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA), which approves Nauru Airlines’ air operator’s certificate, places the onus on the airline “to assess the suitability of any aerodrome they operate to in accordance with its approved procedures and Australian regulations” – and is evidently willing to accept that it is operating safely in Naoero. Regular commercial operators wouldn’t have this luxury. (For the third time, why does Nauru Airlines exist? Because no other airline will fly to Naoero.)
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If Home Affairs and DFAT applied the appropriate due diligence to Nauru Airlines, it’s unlikely they’d award it any contracts. Because even if we set aside concerns about related-party entities or subcontracting fees – and before we look at the reliability of its aircraft, or its safety record – Nauru Air Corporation’s finances are a mess.
According to its annual report, Nauru Air Corporation lost $12.5m in the 2025 financial year, up from $6.6m the previous year. Its losses had near-doubled because its operating expenses grew at roughly twice the rate of its revenue. Due to these structural cost problems, it was burning around $34,000 per day. Its working capital was negative (with current liabilities outstripping current assets), and its cash position was propped up by debt and related-party financing. In early 2025, the airline was borrowing from its own maintenance fund – a separate company – treating it as a loan facility to cover general operations.
If the airline had stopped flying at the end of the 2025 financial year, it could not have refunded its ticket holders – the classic airline insolvency signature.
On the financials provided in its 2025 annual report, Nauru Air Corporation would potentially fail both Australian solvency tests – the cash-flow test and the balance-sheet trajectory. This is despite the Australian government propping up the airline with contracts to the value of $40 to $50m per year, when the airline’s annual total revenue was just over $110m. In February, the company sold the engines of its fleet of planes; it now leases them back.
These figures raise serious questions about the capacity for Nauru Airlines to deliver the services paid for by the Australian government, which is entirely aware of the airline’s fiscal position. In other circumstances, such financial delinquency would be disqualifying. In Home Affairs, however, the contracts were waved through. (This was the department, after all, that gave a $432m offshore detention facilities contract to an unaudited little company that was registered to a beach shack on Kangaroo Island and had a PO Box in Singapore.)
The Australian government and its regulators are also turning a blind eye to other governance issues quite apart from Nauru Airlines’ financial problems. On October 28, 2025, the same day its troubling annual report was signed off by its directors, the Naoero government appointed four new directors to the Nauru Air Corporation board with immediate effect, including Damon Adeang, the President’s son. At the time of writing, these additions are not listed in ASIC company records. Either these board changes were reported and ASIC is being negligent, or, more likely, Nauru Air Corporation didn’t report them, despite it being a legal requirement to report such changes within 28 days. This would appear to breach the Corporations Act.
Government contractors are obliged to comply with all applicable laws and policies, and the government has the right to cancel contracts based on non-compliance. Despite all this, the Australian government continues to direct tens of millions of work annually to Nauru Airlines.
It gets weirder. A key reason Nauru Airlines didn’t fall into financial inoperability earlier this year was that Naoero’s finance department bailed out the national carrier with funds that had just been paid to it by … the Australian government. Without this cash injection, the airline – and Australia’s entire offshore detention arrangement – would have been crippled. Two months prior, Australia settled a payment of $388m into the Nauru Trust Fund No 2, tied to Naoero’s acceptance of the “third country resettlement arrangement” for asylum seekers. The Secretary of Finance, who approved the Nauru Air Corporation bailout using these funds, was none other than the new Nauru Air Corporation director – and the President’s son – Damon Adeang.
This is the price we pay for insisting that some asylum seekers don’t have basic human rights under our law, and for treating Naoero like a human dumping ground. Australia entered into a $2.5 billion, 30-year resettlement agreement that depends entirely on Nauru Airlines, regardless of the costs or consequences.
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We can only speculate as to how Australian ministers and departments justify the position in which they’ve put themselves. But assume it runs along the lines of ends justifying means: the offshore immigration system is fundamental to border security; Naoero is critical to this system; and national security overrides any other concerns. The Nauru Airlines monopoly may breach regulatory standards, compromise procurement processes, and enable market manipulation and anti-competitive behaviour, but doing business with imperfect Pacific administrations (and airlines) is apparently the price we must pay for our security.
It’s worse than this, though. The risk has a physical safety aspect too. Our government is supporting an airline to fly Australian employees and asylum seekers in and out of an aerodrome that has safety and security deficiencies according to international standards; an airline that requires tens of millions of Australian taxpayer dollars annually to simply operate; and whose fleet consists of seven Boeing 737s that are on average over 25 years old and expensive to maintain, run by a company without competitors and on the verge of insolvency.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), Australia’s national transport safety investigator, has reported no current or recent investigations into incidents involving Nauru Airlines aircraft. The most recent investigation in its records dates to 2015. In other circumstances, this might be reassuring. In this case, however, there are many reasons to be concerned.
On March 19, 2021, a Nauru Airlines Boeing 737-300 with 48 passengers was on approach to Brisbane Airport when passengers heard a loud bang from the right-hand engine – a compressor stall that caused it to choke. The engine started spitting out fire. Residents in the suburbs below told news reporters that “it sounded like it was going to explode, it was so loud … I thought it was missiles”, and “(we) saw flames coming out the back of the plane as it flew over”. The plane landed safely, and the incident, recounted with full drama on that evening’s 7NEWS bulletin, caused the brief suspension of all domestic and international flights as the tarmac was inspected for debris.
On November 15, 2023, a Nauru Airlines Boeing 737 cargo aircraft was approaching Brisbane Airport when the pilot experienced a loss in normal control: the horizontal stabilisers on the tail were not functioning as expected, meaning the pilot had retarded capacity to control the craft safely to ground. Disaster was averted; he regained control and landed safely, but subsequent inspection revealed serious corrosion issues – rust – affecting the movement of the tail flaps. The aircraft was taken out of service for 35 days. After various maintenance checks, it was back in the air, but another technical event a few weeks later forced another unscheduled landing, and the aircraft was then leased out to a different airline – and grounded for six months immediately after its delivery to them.
The latter incident is not recorded in the ATSB Aviation Occurrence database, therefore likely not reported, and was not investigated. The former incident was reported to the ATSB – but also not investigated.
Nauru Airlines, like many small Pacific airlines, has a high incidence of diversions from scheduled flight services – of air returns, cancellations and changes of destination. These can be caused by a variety of things: aerodromes being unprepared for an arrival; medical emergencies; weather conditions and other things. But they can also be caused by maintenance problems, fuel contamination or sundry other technical failures. Flight data and public records allow us to distinguish between the causes, by tracking every aircraft, every flight, and all of their flight data – altitude, flight path, velocity, timing and more. Data reveals when aircraft are grounded, and when they are sent into the air on an “engineering” flight following maintenance or repair work, to check that all systems are functional.
Since the start of 2026, there have been at least seven occasions in which a Nauru Airlines aircraft has set off on a scheduled flight, had an apparent technical failure, and returned to where it departed. (This doesn’t count other breakdowns on the ground or other unscheduled diversions, of which there were many more.) In most of these cases, the Nauru Airlines aircraft circled over the ocean for extended periods burning off fuel so as not to land with a full (and more combustible) tank. Some data indicate the possibility of de-pressurisation events. Each aircraft had been involved in similar previous return events, sometimes only a day or two before, and in several cases the aircraft was immediately grounded for repairs, with replacement aircraft taking over the service. Several flights carried tonnes of freight, while others carried passengers.
Photo: Nick Feik
By industry standards, this is a high incidence of air returns, let alone of turnbacks caused by aircraft technical issues. For example, Malaysia Airlines’ turnback rate in 2024, based on its own published figures, was 40-70 times lower than that of Nauru Airlines this year; yet even this rate was notable enough to attract parliamentary attention in Malaysia and a cautionary amendment to its air operator’s certificate. Other global aviation data comparisons also confirm that the Nauru Airlines’ turnback rate is tens of times higher than the industry average.
In Australia, any safety incident or serious technical failure is required by law to be reported to the ATSB. Failure to do so is a criminal offence. Yet only one of this year’s air returns is recorded in the ATSB Aviation Occurrence database, and none is being investigated. Combined with what we know of earlier incidents, this would suggest that either the airline is not reporting all such events, or the ATSB is receiving reports but not recording and investigating them. Or both.
CASA also treats in-flight technical diversions as a reliability indicator, and requires operators to monitor trends against established performance standards. The concentration of Nauru Airlines turnbacks surely warrants serious attention.
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On July 20, Nauru Airlines apologised to its passengers for flight disruptions across that week, blaming “unserviceable fuel trucks” at Nauru International Airport. The following week, all flights in and out of Naoero were temporarily suspended without notice or explanation. A few days later, the Australian High Commission in Naoero announced the arrival of new “aircraft rescue and firefighting capability”, which the Australian government was funding, “to support the safe resumption of flights”. Nauru Airlines announced that regular services would soon resume, but didn’t clarify whether the “operational challenges” to which it referred related to the unserviceable fuel trucks, the fire-fighting equipment, scheduled works to the landing strip, aircraft maintenance, or some other issue.
In the middle of all this, on July 28, Nauru Airlines announced the appointment of its new CEO, Wendy Bowden, marking “an exciting new chapter” for the airline.
In the past 18 months, in addition to the board changes, Nauru Airlines has changed personnel in the following roles: CEO (twice); Deputy CEO; chief financial officer (three times); airworthiness managers (multiple); head of flying operations; head of maintenance; finance manager; and numerous other operational roles. Unsurprisingly, the human resources manager, the people & culture manager and the payroll manager also resigned earlier this year.
To say that Nauru Airlines’ staffing has been fluid throughout this period would be an understatement. This has also meant that its own organisational charts don’t easily match – and sometimes contradict – CASA records of its key personnel, or public listings of critical positions, hinting at a dangerous blurring of accountability lines. (CASA must approve key personnel changes.) In multiple cases over the past 18 months, several people have been simultaneously listed as filling the same safety or airworthiness role. This indicates a degree of dysfunction that would be concerning for any company; in an airline it’s alarming.
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In recent months, there has been another strange twist in this tale. Nauru Airlines is at the heart of a geopolitical power struggle that threatens to reshape the entire region.
In June, Minister for the Nauru Air Corporation Asterio Appi led a delegation of Nauru Airlines officials to China, in a bid to unlock “new Pacific aviation opportunities”.
“China presents, for Nauru Airlines, very real pathways for us to elevate our services, our network and our presence in the Pacific,” said Appi. “We came with purpose, and we leave with a clear roadmap.”
As specialist aviation publication Aero South Pacific noted, “China has increasingly used aviation as a tool to expand its influence across the Southwest Pacific. It has been involved in airport infrastructure projects in countries including Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands … China has also explored extending one of its state-owned carriers’ services to Vanuatu from existing scheduled flights to Port Moresby”, and has “supported local airlines in launching services to China”.
The Australian government is evidently struggling to find a coherent response to the spectre of China’s direct access to the region, especially in regard to Nauru Airlines. It has the ongoing $104m Home Affairs contract and is funding new equipment at Nauru International Airport, which are both practical demonstrations of support and acknowledgements that Australia needs Naoero’s air services. On the other hand, our government is reconsidering its support for the Australian North Pacific Connector, the subsidised travel route through the region which has been operated by Nauru Airlines for several years. This pause represents either a cooling of the relationship or a coded threat: that Australia’s support for Nauru Airlines is conditional on Naoero’s good behaviour – not getting too close to China – or on improved standards. But without this subsidised service, Nauru Airlines becomes even less viable.
In the face of this, while happy to accept Australia’s largesse whenever available, Naoero is quietly demonstrating its autonomy and initiative by signing aviation agreements to link with various Pacific neighbours – presumably with the support of China, into whose orbit it has been slowly moving. Naoero’s foreign minister has also spoken openly about his government’s plans to run direct flights from Naoero to Guangdong.
Fresh from signing a major fishing-rights deal with China, Naoero announced in May that it had ordered all public servants and employees of state-owned enterprises to observe the One China Principle: staff were to “avoid using terminology, symbols, flags, emblems, or representations which are inconsistent with the One China Principle”. This meant all Nauru Airlines employees – including those in Australia – were forbidden from referring to Taiwan as anything other than a province of China; a bizarre state of affairs in an Australian-registered company receiving Australian government support, and probably unlawful.
Then in June, the nation formerly known as Nauru announced that it was changing its official name. It was shaking off the mangled relic of its colonial past and honouring its true heritage, according to President Adeang. The symbolism would not have been missed in Canberra: Naoero was looking to a post-colonial future, and this coincided with its burgeoning relationship with China.
These developments, concerning as they must be to Canberra, are about much more than aviation. China is flexing its muscles in various ways across the region, and not just in commercial deals. The Asia-Pacific is the critical forum in its great-power rivalry with the United States. In July, China launched a nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile test thousands of kilometres across the Pacific. To the outrage of many Pacific islanders, the missile landed in the ocean between Solomon Islands, Naoero and Tuvalu. Naoero, however, refused to condemn it. In fact, it went so far as to block (with Kiribati) a joint statement by the Pacific Islands Forum which sought to condemn China’s test.
After years of financially supporting Naoero, propping up its airline and turning a blind eye to its failings, Australia now finds itself in a bind. The airline is critical to its offshore detention regime, but is also a slice of sovereignty for impoverished Naoero – one which Naoero is seemingly willing to use as a geostrategic pawn. Australian leaders and bureaucrats should be rightly concerned and embarrassed that their covert asset – and secret shame – is now being used to court China, but they only have themselves to blame.
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To conclude with the strangest irony: in recent years, Nauru Airlines has reportedly been bringing employees and executives into Australia regularly on visitor (tourist) visas, even though the purpose of their visit is work. Under the Immigration Act, it is illegal to work on a tourist or visitor visa, or to enter Australia for purposes other than those allowed by your visa conditions.
If this proves true, it presents a serious problem: as a result of supporting this airline, to facilitate Australia’s offshore immigration apparatus, Home Affairs has been abetting illegal immigration.
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We contacted Nauru Airlines with detailed questions, but they declined to reply. If you have any further information related to this story, please contact nickfeik@proton.me
