The Cabinet's response yesterday to the Syrian refugee crisis is no more than a token gesture. But public opinion was seeking no more. Nobody suggested this country had the capacity to take more than a few hundred of the million or more Syrians now surging into Europe. But a country with a refugee intake as low as New Zealand's 750 a year certainly had a capacity to do more.
The additional 600, plus 150 within the present annual intake, is to be spread over the next three years. That makes it more than a temporary concession to heart-rending scenes on television over the past week. Yesterday's decision effectively increases our refugee quota by 100 next year and a further 500 by 2018. By then the increased quota surely will have been made permanent.
Once the extra accommodation and services are established, and the country has proven capable of absorbing 1000 refugees a year, it would make no sense to scale back to a level that has been too low for too long. The conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa that have caused this crisis are not new and will not be soon resolved.
People have been fleeing them for five years, crossing borders to the relative security of Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. This year refugees from Libya have set out in crowded boats for Italy, which appealed to its European Union partners to help. Germany responded with an announcement last month that it would no longer enforce an EU rule requiring asylum seekers to be dealt with in the first EU state they reached. That was the trigger for Syrians in Turkey to set out by land or sea, many of them on foot, breaking down border fences, defying police cordons, crowding on to trains bound for Germany.
