Book review : Asylum and extraction in the Republic of Nauru

Abstract

In 2001, the Norwegian merchant vessel MV Tampa was refused entry to Australian waters because it was carrying 433 passengers, most of whom were fleeing Afghanistan, seeking asylum. The decision was taken by the then right-wing government of Australia, who were facing an impending election, which they subsequently won. The electoral lesson was unequivocal and, more than two decades later, is instantly recognisable: anti-immigrant policies are a vote winner. Having realised this, the Australian government needed to find somewhere else to take the roughly 3,000 asylum seekers arriving on its shores at the time. They rang Rene Harris, then President of the Republic of Nauru. A ‘Pacific Solution’ called ‘Offshore Refugee Processing’ was born. Asylum and extraction in the Republic of Nauru is an ethnographic account of an island economy based on extensive fieldwork on Nauru in 2015, as well as research in Fiji, Australia, and the UK. It traces continuity and change, from the colonial period and the beginnings of the phosphate industry in the early 20th century, to the halcyon days of the post-colonial mining boom when the island had some of the highest GDP per capita ratios on earth, to the bust when phosphate was exhausted, and the birth and consolidation of offshore processing as an economic substitute. It is a fascinating tale, elegantly told.