Barnaby Joyce has called for more Syrian refugees to be resettled in Australia, as horror grows at the scale of the migration emergency in Europe.



The agriculture minister said he was affected by scenes of desperate asylum seekers fighting to board trains in Hungary and the image on Thursday of a drowned child washed ashore in a Turkish resort town.

“You would be less than human if you didn’t ... Who thinks watching a child drown is a good outcome?” he told the West Australian on Friday.



“As an accountant myself, when you see an accountant walking across the border into Hungary from Syria when his life has been destroyed I feel a sense of empathy for him.”

Joyce expressed support for taking extra Syrian refugees through “proper and legitimate channels”.

“We must do so through appropriate processes, otherwise you can see what happens when there are no controls on the border,” he said.

Christians in the region should be given priority, he said.

Joyce later told ABC Radio that Shiites, Zoroastrians, and Jews in the region were also under threat from extremist, but it was “the reality [that] the future of Christianity in that area is over”.



He said it was important that Europe and Australia assist people who are “under the pump”, but that the intake needed to measured or else “it will inspire those rightwing movements, and that is very dangerous”.

Joyce would not be drawn on whether he would argue in cabinet for extra Syrian refugees to be added to Australia’s annual humanitarian intake.

About 2,200 Syrians were granted offshore humanitarian visas to Australia in 2014-15, up from 1,007 the previous year. At least 1,500 will arrive each year over the next three years. About 20,000 Syrians applied to Australia for a refugee or humanitarian visa in 2013-14.

The prime minister, Tony Abbott, said on Friday Australia had already increased the proportion of refugees it had taken from Syria and Iraq in response to the crisis in the region.

“We’re doing exactly what Barnaby has suggested,” he told reporters in Wodonga.

Earlier on Friday Abbott told ABC radio the image of the child was sad and poignant, but “thankfully we’ve stopped that in Australian because we’ve stopped the illegal boats”.

“As long as people think that if they can get here they can stay here, we’ll have the illegal trade, we’ll have the people smugglers in business, and we’ll have tragedies at sea,” he told ABC radio.

“So if you want to keep people safe, you’ve got to stop the illegal migration, and that’s what we’ve done.”

Australia’s migration policies were criticised in a scathing New York Times editorial on Friday.



“Prime minister Tony Abbott has overseen a ruthlessly effective effort to stop boats packed with migrants, many of them refugees, from reaching Australia’s shores,” it said. “His policies have been inhumane, of dubious legality and strikingly at odds with the country’s tradition of welcoming people fleeing persecution and war.”

Referring to the litany of abuses in the Nauru detention centre, highlighted by a Senate committee report this week, the editorial said it was “inexcusable” that refugees to Australia were finding themselves “in situations that are more hopeless and degrading than the ones that prompted them to flee”.

The federal government’s hardline refugee policy, which includes forcibly turning back maritime arrivals, has reduced but not stopped boat journeys into Australia’s region.

Guardian Australia revealed last year the immigration department has tried to facilitate the return to Syria of asylum seekers on Manus Island, including men one senior officer said were “quite adamant that I would be sending them home to their death”.

More than 63,000 people boarded boats to migrate irregularly through south-east Asia last year. At least 750 are believed to have drowned.



Australia is the third-largest recipient of refugees under the UNHCR’s resettlement program, behind Canada and the US, by far the largest resettlement country. But the UNHCR’s program accounts for less than 1% of all refugees.

Australia is ranked 17th for all resettlements of refugees to third countries, according to Refugee Council of Australia figures.

On the number of all refugees and asylum seekers hosted, Australia is 48th out of 187 countries. It is 62nd when measured against the size of population.

The Pacific island of Nauru, where Australia sends boat arrivals, is now the third-highest resettler of refugees by population.

In 1980-81, at the peak of the Indo-Chinese refugee exodus – and when Australia’s population was less than 15 million – Australia resettled 22,5000 refugees, under a Coalition government headed by Malcolm Fraser.

Australia last resettled a comparable figure – 20,000 refugees – in 2012. That year the Labor government-commissioned Houston expert panel on refugees recommended progressively increasing Australia’s refugee intake to 27,000.

The Abbott government, under a deal negotiated with Senate crossbenchers last December, has promised to increase the number to 18,750 over four years.

Joyce could not be contacted for comment.