Migrant crisis: From these good intentions must come firm action

Migrants enter a train heading to Salzburg.

The Abbott government should respond positively and generously to the Syrian refugee crisis. It will have to respond eventually, anyway.

International pressures and domestic politics will combine to make this inevitable.

Yesterday’s announcement that Australia will take more refugees from Syria in response to the growing international crisis was a welcome step but Tony Abbott needs to move quickly from declaring an act of good intentions to a statement of firm action.

The intervention of NSW Premier Mike Baird underlines the power and broad impact of this issue. It will be infinitely better for the Abbott government if it moves proactively rather than being dragged reluctantly to action it must take anyway.

If it acts quickly, the government will get more credit, internationally and domestically, and it will have more options about what it does.

First of all, any extra resettlement places Canberra provides will have almost no effect on the overall situation, yet the Abbott government should increase the total refugee intake as well as just offering more places to Syrians, at least for the next year.

This is a critical global crisis. Every capable nation needs to lend a hand. There is an element of ­national self-respect here.

Permanent resettlement cannot and probably should not be the primary mechanism for dealing with this crisis.

Millions of people are on the move throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Many are fleeing war, some are fleeing persecution, others are just seeking a better life, that is, they are economic migrants. Permanent resettlement is not the long-term solution for such problems.

The long-term solution has to be to make the nations of the ­Middle East habitable again so that people can return home. The tragedy and pathos of the situation on the borders of Europe today are overwhelming.

The same hard, inescapable logic applies in Europe as in Australia. The easier resettlement looks in one big nation, in this case Germany, the more certain it is that there will be tragic deaths at sea. The solution surely cannot be the wholesale relocation of North Africans and Arab populations to western Europe.

So what should the Abbott government do? First, it should offer a few thousand extra resettlement places to genuine refugees, ­assessed and chosen by Australian officials.

More importantly, it should make a substantial financial contribution to the Middle East’s refugee camps. Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey have shouldered enormous refugee burdens arising out of Syria. In these matters, they are innocent nations. This is what aid budgets are truly for — to respond to devastating emergencies. Labor is right to argue that Canberra should make a big, ongoing contribution to the financial sustenance of refugees in the Middle East.

Trying to re-­create some order and stability in the Middle East is one object of Australia’s interventions against Islamic State in Iraq and now in Syria. If Islamic State had kept its momentum going, Iraq could have become a repeat of the whole Syrian nightmare.

Australia is not central to all this. Nor is it unaffected. Nor is it without responsibilities. Acting quickly and with clarity is better than coming in late, flustered and without clear objectives.