Tony Abbott gets it right on Syrian refugees

Tony Abbott got the policy and the politics of Syria right yesterday. He was a bit slow off the mark at the weekend but he quickly identified this shortcoming, read the community sentiment ­accurately and drove government processes to produce a credible policy response.

If anything, it’s a bit light on for money. But overall it is well balanced and addresses the humanitarian and the strategic elements of the Middle East today.

On refugees, the government will accept 12,000 refugees from Syria above and beyond the annual quota of 13,750, which is due to rise to 18,750 in three years.

This figure compares more than well with the commitments of other nations. Britain, for example, will take 20,000 over five years. The figure also compares well with other European nations.

In particular, this act of generosity is possible only because the flow of illegal immigrants by boat to Australia from the north has been halted. Australians are generous, including with resettlement. Historically we have been one of the most generous nations in resettling refugees.

But the Australian people want to know that it is their government that controls Australia’s borders, and that refugees come here in an orderly way, given that there is no immediate neighbour from which anyone can legitimately be fleeing persecution to Australia.

In other words, this generous action is possible only because of Abbott’s success in stopping the boats.

Nonetheless, with four million people having fled Syria, it is also the case that Australia’s effort does not change the situation in any fundamental way. This is life-transforming for the 12,000 people affected, but in a larger sense it is the politics of national gesture. It is also the case that resettlement cannot be the primary solution for the troubles of the Middle East.

Abbott was therefore also right to stress that Australian officials would be selecting people for resettlement who were housed in camps in the nations adjacent to Syria and Iraq — Turkey, ­Lebanon and Jordan. We would not be taking people who had gone to Europe already.

There is a terrible and fundamental contradiction at the heart of European policy on these people. European government leaders are as opposed to the people-smuggling trade as the Abbott government is. European public opinion, indeed global public opinion, has been moved by the sight of people, especially children, drowning trying to get to ­Europe.

That is also why it is right to focus more on the money to help the relevant international agencies run the camps in the neighbouring countries decently and to provide ongoing humanitarian assistance to people who have fled there but are not in camps.

But as with Australia, so it is with Europe — the more permanent resettlement becomes a viable option for people, the more they are encouraged to undertake the journeys the people-smugglers offer them. The truth is almost all of the recent influx into Europe has been secondary movements — that is, people not fleeing war or persecution directly but fleeing countries where they did have a measure of safety.

There is no criticism to be made of people for doing that, but it cannot be the future. Perhaps the most important story in the media this week was that the sight of so many people getting to Europe was inspiring tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands more, from Iraq to Nigeria and many other points of Africa, to make the same journey.

This policy mess has a long way to travel.

On the military front, Abbott displayed excellent, discriminating judgment yesterday. Our airstrikes into Syria are purely to target Islamic State, or Daesh, not the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Abbott said: “Do we want Assad gone? Of course we do. Do our military operations contribute to that at this time? No, they don’t.”

Indeed Abbott gave a classically realist, sensible, world-wise view of Australian, and indeed Western, strategic aims in the Middle East. He said: “What we want throughout the Middle East are governments that do not ­commit genocide against their own people nor permit terrorism against ours.”

This represents the newly modest, mature Western strategic judgment about the Middle East. Abbott gave this wider view eloquent expression: “What we’re working towards is not an attempt to build a shining city on a hill. This is not an attempt to build a liberal pluralist market democracy overnight in the Middle East. That’s been tried and it didn’t magnificently succeed.

“So, our objectives are important but they’re achievable, I believe. I think they’re vital, but in a sense modest because surely all human beings are entitled to a government which doesn’t commit genocide against them, nor permit terrorism against people who have done them no harm.”

Abbott’s remarks are morally and strategically correct as a statement of Australian policy. But in a sense they also apply now to wider Western policy. Stability now is an overriding objective in the Middle East. Even powers such as the US, which have infinitely more clout than Australia does, now have much more ­modest strategic aims — along the lines articulated by Abbott — than they had before.

Thus our military actions in Syria may well help Assad. So be it. We will be attacking Assad’s chief enemy, Islamic State. That inevitably will take some pressure off Assad. Assad is a horrible dictator but in the last years of his rule before the outbreak of the Arab spring his regime was not especially bad by Arab standards. He certainly in those days bore no comparison with Saddam Hus­sein in Iraq. Since his rule was challenged his regime has been utterly brutal and murderous.

But Western governments are undergoing an agonising reappraisal. If Assad is overthrown the new situation may be even worse, with nothing left but a civil war between Islamic State, al-Qa’ida and various war lords. Over- throwing Muammar Gaddafi in Libya produced no benefit for anybody though the Australian government of the time (and, let me hasten to say, this writer), led by then foreign minister Kevin Rudd, warmly supported it. It may be that any negotiated political ­future for Syria involves Assad.

The real strategic subtext of all of Abbott’s actions is to encourage the Americans to become much more actively involved and to try to restore stability throughout the region.

Altogether, the Abbott government is making a solid contribution.