Say what you will about former Prime Minister turned taxpayer-funded capricious mischief sprite Tony Abbott, but the man knows how to get a quote out there.
For example: in his weekly fireside chat with 2GB on Monday he refuted the claims of Doctors Without Borders that the mental and physical health of children on Nauru was at crisis point, using all the experience which he has gathered by not going to Nauru, not having any medical training, and not having met the children under discussion.
“They are being very well looked after on Nauru,” he bravely insisted, in contradiction to the information being shared publicly by those who have worked there and who have worked for the Home Office on border protection.
“Health services on Nauru for boat people are much more extensive than the health services that a lot of regional towns get here in Australia. And Nauru is no hell hole by any means. If you like living in the tropics, it’s a very, very pleasant island.”
Now, not that we’d want to go contradicting Tony, but Nauru’s pleasantness is very much in the eye of the beholder.
Yes, it’s a tropical island, much like many of the planet’s beloved holiday destinations. Indeed, many equatorial islands make tourism a key industry.
Nauru is, however, notoriously not a tourism hotspot. Not least because people that do visit tend to be spied upon – as Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young discovered in 2015.
Another reason why no-one calls Nauru “the Barbados of the south” might be because that the interior of much of the 21 square kilometre island is largely devastated thanks to phosphate mining operations which made Nauru the second richest per capita place on Earth, until it all ran out.
Also, that these days it has to import just about everything, including drinking water, its national bank is insolvent, the unemployment rate is around 90 per cent for its just-over 11 thousand inhabitants, and the biggest employers are the Nauru government and Australia’s detention regime. Indeed, before the detention centre opened it was surviving mainly by acting as an international tax haven.
And New Zealand suspended its aid to Nauru’s justice system in 2015 on the grounds that the place was no longer governed by the rule of law.
Hmm.
The place is a client state of Australia – as in, without our financial support the place would be destitute – and just for a kicker, it’s considered super-vulnerable to climate change wiping out what agriculture it has, the coastline is eroding, and most plausible predictions for sea level rise would see much of the island submerged.
It also raises the question that, if Nauru is so gosh-darn pleasant, why did the government of which Tone is a part specifically advised Nauru to refuse a visa to Greens senator Nick McKim to visit the place? Maybe they were worried his TripAdvisor review would slam the place for being, if anything, too pleasant.
In any case, as far as places that are very, very pleasant go, broke lawless kleptocracies that are super-vulnerable to the weather wouldn’t necessarily be top of most people’s lists.
But hey, we know that Tony has unique tastes.