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Greens senator David Shoebridge and independent Senator David Pocock have blasted the Albanese government’s secretive $2.5 billion Nauru deportation deal after a translated document revealed the Pacific island’s president hoped to send people back to their home countries.

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The controversial Nauru deal signed this year allows Australia to deport foreigners with criminal records whom it can no longer detain indefinitely, such as those released from immigration detention in the NZYQ High Court case. Nauru has agreed to give them 30-year visas.

“This is not the first time we have let foreigners come to our home, and it will not be the first time we have accepted foreigners with backgrounds that are not 100 per cent pristine,” Nauru President David Adeang said of the deal, according to a transcript of an interview he gave to local media in February.

He went on to insist that none of the people were refugees, despite contrary claims from non-government organisations who have worked with them. “We will little by little be able to return these people home if they want that,” Adeang said.

That transcript has been secret until now. While the original interview, given in Nauruan, was public, the Albanese government has refused to release its own translation and sought a non-publication order to suppress it in court.

But the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre has since procured its own translation, which Shoebridge and Pocock read into Hansard last night.

Adeang’s remarks about returning people to their home country have prompted Shoebridge and Pocock to claim Nauru could send refugees back to countries where they could be harmed – a breach of non-refoulement obligations, which prohibit states from forcing people to return to a country where they risk persecution.

“The government has been fighting tooth and nail to keep this interview from the president of Nauru secret,” Shoebridge said today. “The transcript reveals two different stories are being told.”