In the past few days, the PM and immigration minister have praised Australia’s record on refugees. But their claims are often contested or inaccurate

Tony Abbott and his immigration minister, Peter Dutton, have claimed that Australia is generous to refugees and that the “stop the boats” policy has helped save lives. Here, Guardian Australia disentangles the rhetoric to explain the facts.

1. Tony Abbott, on 6 September, 2015: “We are a country which, on a per capita basis, takes more refugees than any other. We take more refugees than any other through the UNHCR on a per capita basis.”

The first sentence is not true. The second is, but it represents a tiny fraction of the world’s response to the refugee crisis.

The vast majority – somewhere around 86% – of the world’s refugees are hosted by developing nations, usually near to the one they have fled. The countries that host the greatest number of refugees are: Turkey, 1.58 million; Pakistan, 1.5 million; and Lebanon, 1.15 million. Fully one-quarter of Lebanon’s resident population are refugees.

Australia currently hosts 35,000 refugees, ranking it 48th of 187 countries. These are people who are here as recognised refugees but have not yet been given a permanent home here.

The Abbott government cut the number of new refugees accepted each year by almost a third, to 13,750, when it came into office (see below).

However, Australia does, on a per capita basis, take the largest proportion of refugees under the UNHCR’s resettlement program. Resettlement is the process of transferring recognised refugees from the country where they initially sought refuge to a third country that has agreed to accept them.



But formal resettlement represents only a tiny fraction of the world’s refugee program, less than 1%.

The United States is the largest resettler of refugees under the UNHCR program, taking more than 70% of all resettlements, 73,000 a year. Canada takes the second-largest number, 12,300, while Australia is third on 11,600. Per capita, Australia takes the largest number.

2. Tony Abbott, also on 6 September: “Like just about every other Australian, I was moved by the horrific imagery of that little boy washed up on a beach in Turkey ... Australia is a country which has always taken its international obligations seriously. Australia is a country which has always done what we can to assist when people are in trouble around the world ... obviously this is a very grave situation in the Middle East. People in Syria are caught between the mass execution of the Daesh death cult [Islamic State] on the one hand and the chemical weapons of the Assad regime on the other. It is important that there be a humanitarian response.”

An estimated 250,000 people have been killed in Syria’s civil war since March 2011. The conflict has both political and religious elements. War crimes, including murder, torture, rape and enforced disappearances, have allegedly been committed by both the military and Shia Alawites loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, and by rebel forces, representative of the Sunni majority. Neighbouring countries and distant world powers have been drawn into the conflict, further complicated by the rise of Isis.

The civilian humanitarian crisis is far greater than those who have managed to flee the country. An estimated 7.6 million Syrians are displaced within the borders of the country, compared with 3.8 million refugees outside.

“The Syrian situation is the most dramatic humanitarian crisis the world has faced in a very long time,” the UNHCR has said.



As to how good a global citizen Australia has been in this regard, it’s record on Syria, and the region, is mixed. Australia has donated additional funds to the Middle East region ($100m this year) and to Syria itself ($155m in humanitarian assistance since 2011), but Australia’s broader aid budget to the Middle East and North Africa has been cut by 82%, from $2.8m to $0.5m in the last federal budget.

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Both Labor and Liberal governments have been actively deporting refused asylum seekers to Syria. In 2014, Guardian Australia reported that the current government was preparing to remove Syrian asylum seekers despite the men being, in the words of one public servant, “quite adamant that I would be sending them home to their death”.

Recordings obtained by Guardian Australia also revealed the Australian government told Syrians on Manus Island they would be passing on their details to the Syrian consulate if they opted to return.

3. Immigration minister Peter Dutton on 4 September: “As soon as we were elected the Coalition government implemented strong policies to put the people smugglers out of business and end the deaths at sea. Our policies are lawful. They are safe. And they work. They save lives.”



The much-trumpeted success of the “stop the boats” policy is contested.

Boats are being stopped – Australia has stopped 20 boatloads of asylum seekers since December 2013, and the rate of boats attempting to arrive has slowed dramatically.

But boats have not “stopped”. People continue to attempt to come to Australia by boat: two have been stopped in the past three months alone.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people continue to seek asylum by sea in Australia’s region.

In south-east Asia last year, 63,000 people travelled irregularly by sea to seek asylum, and at least 750 are believed to have drowned.

Peter Dutton hits back at New York Times attack on 'inhumane' boats policy Read more

Australia-style policies of boat turnbacks have this year been employed by other nations, including Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, which led to the situation of nearly 8,000 Rohingyan and Bangladeshi migrants being stranded at sea in vessels that the UN feared would become “floating coffins”, because they were unable to land anywhere. Asylum seekers on board fought each other to death over dwindling food and water supplies, according to observers.

There are also questions over how legal Australia’s stop-the-boat practices are.

It is not legal for Australia to intercept, detain or “turn back” boats in international waters.



It is also not legal for Australia to turn back boats (from within Australian waters) if that would send a person back to a place where they faced persecution (the non-refoulement principle under the 1951 refugees convention), or back to a place which does not provide effective refugee protection (such as non-refugee convention countries like Indonesia and Malaysia).



The high court found Australia’s practice of “screening at sea” asylum seekers’ claims for protection was legal. However, the UNHCR says it has “deep concerns” about the process.

4. Peter Dutton, also on 4 September: “Because of the success of our policy in restoring the integrity of our borders, the Coalition government is increasing our offshore humanitarian program by almost 40%. By 2018-19 places in resettlement program will increase to 18,750.”

The 18,750 is not an increase, it is a decrease on the figures of recent years.

In 2012, Australia accepted 20,019 refugees (this figure was an unusual spike on previous years). The Abbott government cut that number in 2013 to 13,750. The government has vowed to increase the number of refugees accepted to 18,750 over four years.

But Australia’s refugee intake is significantly smaller, in gross terms and proportionally, than it used to be: in 1980-81, Australia accepted 22,500 refugees, at a time when the country’s population was only 15 million.

In 2012, the Labor government-commissioned Houston expert panel on refugees recommended progressively increasing Australia’s refugee intake to 27,000.

Visas granted onshore (to people physically in Australia) and offshore (outside the country) are not intrinsically linked. This is a government construction. Australia’s onshore and offshore programs were directly linked by the Howard government. As a result, every time an onshore applicant is granted a protection visa, a place is deducted from the offshore program. Australia is the only refugee-accepting nation in the world to do this.

The conflation of the offshore and onshore components has given risen to the argument that people arriving by boat are “queue jumpers”, taking places from more deserving people who remain abroad. In reality, there is no queue.

In countries where people are facing persecution, it is rarely possible for them to present themselves to an embassy or UNHCR office (if those places exist). On their journeys seeking asylum, many asylum seekers have come either directly from home countries (such as Sri Lanka) or without passing through any country that offers legal protection for refugees (Malaysia, Indonesia).

Finally, the UNHCR’s resettlement process works less like a queue than a hospital triage system, where individuals with an acute resettlement need (severe sexual abuse, disability, continuing vulnerability) are prioritised ahead of those whose need for resettlement is less urgent. At current resettlement rates, the UNHCR “queue” – if no more people were to join it – is estimated at 117 years long.