European countries that refuse to take in their proportion of forced migrants will face a financial charge of about €250,000 per refugee, according to Brussels’ plans to overhaul the bloc’s asylum rules.

That’s about $400,000 per person.

Given Australia today has 30,037 people seeking asylum (according to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre), it would be forced to pay $11.59 billion to the international community.

Let’s be more generous and imagine the government is only forced to pay for those 2437 individuals who find themselves in detention centres on Manus, Nauru and across mainland Australia.

We’d owe our more generous neighbours nearly a billion taxpayer dollars.