EmailSince last July, Aladdin Sisalem has been the sole inmate of the Manus Island detention centre in Papua New Guinea. The detention centre is part of Australia's policy to process refugees offshore, the "Pacific solution".
The cost of keeping the centre open is £300,000 a month. The immigration department says that £90,000 of that is spent directly on Mr Sisalem, with most of the rest paying for upkeep of the camp. Keeping a detainee in Australia's domestic detention centres costs around £2,000 a month.
A month ago, detainees in another camp on the Pacific island of Nauru ended a five-week hunger strike in protest at their situation.
The opposition immigration spokesman, Stephen Smith, called on the prime minister, John Howard, to shut the Manus and Nauru camps, along with another camp at Port Hedland in the far north of Western Australia.
"John Howard's Pacific solution has reached the point where it's costing over A$200,000 a month to keep one asylum seeker on Manus Island," he said. "This is clearly a nonsense. The government should close Nauru and Manus Island now."
The Pacific solution has cost Australia more than £210m since it was launched in the run-up to the 2001 federal elections.
The amount of money spent keeping Manus Island open would pay unemployment benefits for all the detainees in Manus, Nauru and Port Hedland, if they were allowed into Australia.
The immigration minister, Amanda Vanstone, told ABC radio: "We keep Manus not because there's one person there, [but] so that we can continue to deter the people-smugglers.
"Since we've had offshore processing centres ... people smuggling has dropped off dramatically, and as soon as we get rid of offshore processing centres ... the people smuggling, I confidently predict, will start again."
Mr Sisalem was taken to Manus in December 2002 after applying for asylum on Thursday Island, an Australian outpost in the Torres Strait.
The son of a Palestinian refugee living in Kuwait, he suffered police harassment in his home country after the 1991 Gulf war and fled to Indonesia in 2000.
He slept rough in Jakarta and crossed the malarial jungles of West Papua to reach Papua New Guinea, where his asylum application was again rejected, leaving him homeless on the crime-ridden streets of Port Moresby. He caught a fishing boat from Papua New Guinea's Western Province to Saibai Island, an Australian island near the coast of New Guinea.
Australia's federal court last year found that Australian immigration officers then rejected his request for asylum because he failed to ask for a form.
Lynne Murphy, a Sydney-based refugee advocate who is in contact with Mr Sisalem, said that he was despairing of his situation in the camp, despite an acknowledgement from the UNHCR last week that he was a refugee.
"He's very depressed with all the time he's been in solitary now," she said.
An email he sent to her last September said: "I'm completely alone here and I have not any company with me ... thinking about my ghastly situation [is] keeping me busy most of the day ... I really find difficulty to sleep nighttime or daytime because I'm so scared to be alone here."
The camp, a former military prison, was meant to have been closed last October, but has been kept open while the governments in Port Moresby and Canberra decide on Mr Sisalem's status.
The Papuan prime minister, Sir Michael Somare, won the 2002 election after calling for the camp to be closed, but agreed to continue hosting the facility after promises of aid from Australia.
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