Nauru's economy is booming again on the back of the refugee detention centre. In the early 2000s economics professor Helen Hughes told RNZ Pacific that Nauru couldn't stand on its own two feet and should be incorporated into Australia. Hughes, who passed away in 2013, said of Nauru in 2008 it was not a country in any meaningful sense. "This is a totally welfare-dependent country/shire where the education's been lost and nobody's working. They have a culture, a right to their language and all of that, but they don't have the right to being kept forever by Australian taxpayers and that's what Nauru is setting out to do - to be a perpetual beggar state," she said