Australia’s prime minister, Tony Abbott, announced on Wednesday that Australia would take an additional 12,000 refugees fleeing the Syrian conflict, as well as providing an additional $44m in aid.
This is what the decision means for Australia and those who will be resettled.
12,000 refugees
Australia will accept an additional 12,000 refugees who have fled conflict in Syria.
The extra refugees will be accepted in addition to the existing humanitarian program. That program is:
13,750 places for 2015-16
16,250 for 2016-17
18,750 in 2017-18.
The government intends that the 12,000 will all be settled here this financial year, and if that happens, it will bring the annual intake to 25,750 – the largest under the humanitarian program since 1951, when there was a surge of arrivals after the second world war.
The largest intakes since were 22,545 in 1980-81 and 21,917 in 1981-82, both under Malcolm Fraser, and 20,019 in 2012-13 under Julia Gillard. Fraser’s government consistently had a large humanitarian resettlement program.
There has been no suggestion Australia will permanently lift its annual humanitarian intake, as was recommended by the Houston expert panel in 2012.
That three-member panel, headed by former defence force chief Air Chief Marshall Sir Angus Houston, recommended Australia’s humanitarian intake be increased to 27,000 within five years.
The number of people coming to Australia under the humanitarian program is still a small proportion of the total migration program of 190,000 people per year.
Permanent protection
Those accepted for resettlement in Australia will be granted permanent protection.
This is different from the situation in 1999, when the Howard government offered temporary safe haven visas for 4,000 ethnic Albanian Kosovars fleeing conflict in Kosovo.
All but 120 of those people were obliged to return at the end of the conflict.
Priorities
Australia’s additional intake will prioritise “women, children and families from persecuted minorities who have sought temporary refuge in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey,” Abbott said on Wednesday.
The prime minister made no specific mention of a religious priority being attached to Australia’s intake. However, the foreign minister, Julie Bishop, mentioned “religious minorities” – which might prioritise Christians, Druze, Yazidis and other minorities.
“I do want to stress women, children and families, the most vulnerable of all,” the prime minister said.
$44 million
Australia will contribute an additional $44m to the UNHCR’s work in Syria and throughout the Middle East.
The sum will provide assistance to 240,000 people, in the form of shelter kits for the impending northern winter, food, drinking water, blankets, support for women and girls, as well as money.
It will bring Australia’s total pledged humanitarian contribution to the Syria/Iraq conflict to $230m over the past four years.
But $44m is an insignificant figure in the scheme of Australia’s asylum policies.
Australia’s detention and processing of asylum seekers costs $3.3bn a year. It costs $400,000 to keep one person in offshore detention for a year.
The Australian government pays Transfield about $60m a month to run its detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru, which currently hold 1,500 people.
Global position
Abbott and the immigration minister, Peter Dutton, have claimed Australia has been historically generous in terms of its refugee intake, referring to the per capita number of refugees received through the UNHCR’s resettlement program.
While it is true that Australia tops the rankings when using this metric (or is just below Canada, depending on which population estimate you use), Australia’s ranking varies considerably depending on the figures used.
Here’s a table comparing the figures from the UNHCR, adjusted for population.
When comparing countries by the number of refugees living in a country, regardless of how they arrived, Australia is dwarfed by countries adjacent to Syria such as Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. Taking population into account, Australia ranks 68th for total refugees per 1,000 people in the country.
Looking at the number of refugees who have had their claim officially recognised within a country – what the UNHCR refers to as a “positive determination” – Australia ranks 27th. This counts asylum seekers who have arrived in the country outside of the resettlement program.
Combining both the resettlement figures and the positive determination figures together puts Australia tenth.
An additional 12,000 refugees would almost certainly increase Australia’s position in global rankings.
