FREQUENT FLYER

Australia's costly asylum-seeker fiasco

AN asylum-seeker in Australia has been sent on a taxpayer-funded trip halfway round the world in a futile search for a home.
Edriess Abdulrahman and his entourage, including five guards, took 17 flights between them over 13 days in an extraordinary 24,000km journey. The cost to Australian taxpayers was almost $24,000.
But Mr Abdulrahman's travels ended where they began – in detention in Australia after Sudan refused to accept him as a citizen.
The trip began in remote Western Australia when authorities tried to deport Mr Abdulrahman last December.
Freedom of Information documents show escorts assigned to accompany Mr Abdulrahman cost taxpayers $4178 to guard him for more than 300 hours. About $3000 went on phone calls, accommodation and meals. The Immigration Department hired two troubleshooting companies – one Australian, the other South African – to help it offload Mr Abdulrahman, who spent three years in Port Hedland fighting for a visa.
The documents show taxpayers spent more than $15,000 for international and domestic flights as Mr Abdulrahman and his escorts criss-crossed two continents in search of a new home.
The journey turned to farce when his Australian Government-issued identity papers were rejected by Sudanese officials in Tanzania. Authorities tried to dump Mr Abdulrahman in Sudan even though Australia's refugee tribunal refused to accept he was Sudanese.
He was born in Kuwait to Sudanese immigrant parents, but the family was banished from that country after the 1990 Gulf War. Mr Abdulrahman, believed to be 29, went to Sudan for about one year, but left after refusing to join the national army.
Mr Abdulrahman is now in Baxter detention centre – at a cost of $310 a day – while Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone decides his future.

[If they put him in the Adelaide Hilton with three meals a day the Australian taxpayer would probably save $10 or $20 a da.]