Most refugees and asylum seekers held in Nauru’s detention centres say they cannot afford enough food or access clean drinking water, even as Australia spent more than $9m per person on offshore management in the 2025-26 financial year. More than 100 people remain on Nauru awaiting processing, and many are skipping meals to make ends meet.
Rakib, who has been on Nauru for 2.5 years after attempting to reach Australia by boat, said the pressure has pushed him to breaking point. He said the price of a banana had risen from $1.50 to about $4, while the next ship with rice might take two to three months to arrive.
Asylum Seeker Resource Centre survey
The Asylum Seeker Resource Centre surveyed 78 people between February and April. All but one said the Australian government’s $260 fortnightly payment was not enough to keep them from going hungry. That payment is meant to cover food, drinking water, supplies, phone credit and internet service, but one minimum 28GB monthly data plan with Digicel costs $112.
The group on Nauru mostly comes from China, Bangladesh and Pakistan, and it has been waiting for asylum claims to be processed since after 2023, when a stream of arrivals followed an empty offshore processing centre in mid-2023. If people are found to be refugees, they must wait for Australia to strike a deal with another country to take them in.
Australia spending on Nauru
Australia’s offshore management bill for unauthorised maritime arrivals was $971.6m in the 2025-26 financial year, or about $9.6m per person. MTC Australia will receive $791.2m over five years to operate the offshore processing centre on Nauru, and a further $106.5m over three years is also listed in the spending.
The scale of that spending sits beside a basic shortage problem: vegetables such as tomatoes, capsicums and onions cost about $18 a kilo on Nauru, and more than 90% of the food consumed on the island is imported. Nauru has a population of about 13,000, so the people in the system are a small group, but they are the ones waiting for food shipments and processing decisions at the same time.
Rakib on Nauru
Rakib described a shortage of rice on Nauru and said the wait for the next shipment leaves people trying to stretch the $260 payment across food and other basics. He said, through a translator: “We have been told that it might take two to three months for the next ship with rice to arrive, so we don’t know how will we survive in the meantime”.
For the people still held on Nauru, the immediate question is not a policy slogan but whether the allowance covers the week in front of them. Until the next shipment arrives and the processing backlog moves, the gap between the spending figure in Australia and the price of food on Nauru remains the daily reality.
