Border security billion-dollar budget hole

The federal government's boat people policy is sinking Treasurer Wayne Swan's budget with the cost of detaining asylum seekers blowing out by $1 billion.

As the number of arrivals continues to mount - 10 more asylum seekers arrived by boat yesterday - The Daily Telegraph can reveal the five-year contract with the private firm Serco to run the majority of the country's detention centres until 2014 has blown out by a further $700 million.Contracts for providing public health services have also been revised up by $200 million and the cost of providing residential homes will rise by $50 million.

The total contract cost for Serco to just run the centres is now five times the estimate of the original contract of $279 million in 2009, which was last revised at the end of 2011 to $1.03 billion.

The latest figures for the revised private sector contracts, which all fall within this budget year, are contained in an Australian National Audit Office report released this week, which also criticised the government for allowing the costs to rise before contract variations were agreed.

Other contracts obtained by The Daily Telegraph reveal that the cost for providing contracted health services to detention centres has been revalued up for the five years until 2014 from $70 million to $272 million.

Residential hosting contracts for the same period have also been revised up from $44 million to $93 million.

The blowout comes on top of a disastrous week for the Treasurer, who was forced to defend a collapse in the budgeted revenue from the mining tax and then reassure voters he would not raise income taxes to help plug the budget.

"As a result of the variations, the value of the (detention centres) contract has increased from $279.22 million to $1.67 billion," the ANAO report said.

"Due to the rapid growth in the immigration detention program, many of the valuations were not executed until after the services were in place. These variations should have been formalised much earlier.

"The figures contradict evidence this week to a senate estimates hearing in which Finance Department officials claimed that the annual budget costs for immigration would dramatically fall from the forecast $2.2 billion to $338 million by 2015.

In a desperate bid to limit further damage to the budget in an election year, it has based immigration budget forecasts on an assumption the government will stop boat arrivals.

More than 33,000 asylum seekers have arrived in Australia since Labor came to power.

Mr Swan's spokeswoman said that financial statements released by the finance minister "show that total government spending is running more than $1 billion below MYEFO estimates for the first six months of the year".

A spokeswoman for Immigration Minister Brendan O'Connor, who has been in the job just two weeks, also said the policy of releasing people on bridging visas would bring down costs.

Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison said the ANAO report exposed the government's fudging.

"The increase in Serco's contract is 10 times what the government's mining tax has raised in the past six months."

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/asylum-seekers-ram-a-billion-dollar-hole-i...

Editorial: Border control a failure for Gillard

Of all the issues troubling the federal Labor government of Julia Gillard, the two most vexing are border control and budget constraint.

The first is made clear by the sheer weight of numbers. Last year saw the arrival in Australian territory of more than 13,000 asylum seekers, an amount similar to the number that arrived during the entire 12 years of John Howard's time in office.

The second is probably best shown by the government's anticipated failure to provide a budget surplus, after literally hundreds of assurances from Prime Minister Gillard, Treasurer Wayne Swan and other senior Labor figures that a surplus was on the way.

Budget problems and the border shambles are connected, as today's exclusive Daily Telegraph report makes clear.

The government's original 2009 contract with private security firm Serco to run Australia's immigration detention centres was valued at $279 million. That figure has since blown out to five times the initial amount, as wave after wave of arrivals stretch immigration resources and the capacity of detention housing.

We spent around $1 billion during 2012 on immigrant housing and will most likely spend even more in 2013 - all to address a problem caused by Labor's changes to our previously successful asylum seeker policies.

The human cost in lives lost is another factor that cannot be put aside while discussing this issue.

Seeking a more humanitarian outcome for asylum seekers has actually condemned many to deaths at sea. This was an inevitable result of policies that fail to offer as much deterrence as possible to asylum seekers and people smugglers.

Should the Labor government lose office later this year, the legacy of its asylum seeker decisions will sadly grind on. Fixing this particular problem will doubtlessly require even greater spending.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/border-control-a-failure-for-gilla...

These damned reffos...whats next..hundreds of thousands a day lining up for protection like they do in Africa, Asia and Europe!

olde.sault wrote on Feb 16^th, 2013 at 7:27am:



I also wonder why these wretchedly poor civilians dont take on these well armed and trained terrorists and insurgents with gardening implements.
We know it makes sense

Labor took a problem that no longer existed and turned it into a catastrophe. Only the Labor Party could do that!!!

I wouldn't trust labor to provide security for a Blue Light Disco, let alone this country.

Four boats in three days over the last week or so. Yeah, Labor has a real handle on this problem that they created all by themselves!

chicken_lipsforme wrote on Feb 20^th, 2013 at 10:50am:


They're paying for it in advance. Just look at the polls.