The success of the city that has accepted more refugees than any other in Australia shows the country can, and should, resettle more refugees, the New South Wales resettlement tsar Dr Peter Shergold has said.

Of all city councils, Fairfield, in Sydney’s west, resettles the largest number of humanitarian migrants to Australia. In the past five years, it has resettled nearly 12,000 – more than three times the number of any other NSW local government area.

And in the past 18 months, Fairfield has seen a 500% increase in the resettlement rate, accepting more than 7,000 humanitarian migrants, including several thousand of those brought to Australia from Iraq and Syria under the federal government’s additional settlement program.

Speaking at the launch of the Fairfield city settlement action plan, Shergold, the NSW coordinator general for refugee resettlement, said the city had offered not only “sanctuary … but opportunity”.

“I’m proud of the fact we are a nation that’s taken in more than 500,000 refugees, wave after wave, since the second world war.

“We’ve made a success of it, and we can make a success of it again … we can show this is eminently doable. This is not hard, Australia can do this and by doing it, gain benefit. That establishes not just pride, but a strong foundation to say, ‘We can take more refugees.’”

But Shergold, formerly the head of Australia’s public service, said Australian governments, councils and communities needed to recognise that the refugee resettlement task began, rather than ended, with refugees arriving in Australia.

“Our responsibility does not stop at the moment we say, ‘Welcome to Australia, you’re here’– that’s just the start. The challenge we face is how we help refugees to help themselves, because that’s what they want.

“What do you want if you’re a refugee? You want to be self-reliant. And our job is to help make that possible and, in doing so, to help refugees, as they have done, generation after generation, give back to our nation.



“Once we’ve accepted them, we’ve got to do our utmost to help them, to help them integrate into our multicultural society, to help get their children through our education system, and to help their adults find an Australian job.”

Peter Shergold speaks at the launch of the Fairfield city settlement action plan. Photograph: Ben Doherty/The Guardian

Shergold said NSW would continue to take “more than our fair share” of refugees, likely to be between 10,000 and 11,000 this year, and between 6,000 and 8,000 in 2018.



“These are not huge amounts, this is entirely manageable with the kind of planning being done here in Fairfield,” Shergold said.

Fairfield’s mayor, Frank Carbone, said the city would continue to welcome more refugees: “Our community has told us they are willing to open their arms, open their hearts and open their homes.

“Because we’ve walked the road before, we understand the challenges refugees face, but we understand the benefits too.”

More needs to be provided to make sure that resettlement is done well Frank Carbone

But Carbone vociferously repeated his call that the city needed greater support from governments, state and federal, to assist in resettling humanitarian migrants. He said Fairfield had an unemployment rate nearly twice the national average – at 9% – and needed further health, education and employment infrastructure.

He said 7,000 people – equivalent to a new suburb – had been transplanted to his city in a year and a half, without sufficient support.

“We’re very disappointed with the government’s budget … my community says to me, ‘We don’t mind refugees coming to our city, we’ll always open our arms and we’ll take as many as are available but we are disappointed that the government is not providing the infrastructure, we need to make sure our whole community is not impacted.’

“More needs to be provided to make sure that resettlement is done well.”

Fairfield city’s settlement action plan outlines eight key actions to assist refugees building a new life, centred on health, housing, education and employment.

In September 2015, the then prime minister, Tony Abbott, announced Australia would resettle 12,000 refugees displaced by conflict in Iraq and Syria in an intake additional to Australia’s annual humanitarian quota (now 13,750 visas a year but set to rise to 18,750 by 2018-19).

That additional quota has been filled, with the majority of refugees settling in NSW, and the majority of those in Fairfield.

After a slow beginning – during which Australia’s program was outstripped by similar additional intakes by the US and Canada – the resettlement program has been largely lauded as a success.

But there are lingering concerns about an apparent preference for Christian refugees. Christians do face persecution in Iraq and Syria – large numbers of Christians have fled both countries – but Muslims, particularly ethnic or sectarian minorities, also face severe persecution and are a much larger population.

Statistics released under freedom of information show that 78% of those resettled from Syria and Iraq between July 2015 and January 2017 identified as Christian.

Christians are less than 0.1% of the Iraqi population and 10% of the Syrian. And Australia’s intake is disproportionate too, to the presence of Christians among the region’s displaced. The United Nations high commissioner for refugees estimates the number of Christian refugees from Iraq at 15%, from Syria it is less than 1%.

Fairfield’s settlement plan was unveiled during Refugee Week, as the UN’s refugee agency released its 2016 Global Trends Report showing that 65.6 million people were displaced worldwide at the end of last year, the highest number in history.

Every minute in 2016 20 people were forced from their homes, the UNHCR said.

Fifty-one per cent of the world’s refugees are children, and 84% of refugees – those forcibly displaced over a national border – are hosted by developing countries, usually close to the one they’ve been forced to leave.

More than half of the world’s refugees came from just three countries: Syria (5.5 million), Afghanistan (2.5 million) and South Sudan (1.4 million).

Australia’s immigration department secretary, Mike Pezzullo, said this week more countries needed to contribute to third-country resettlement of refugees.

He said there were fewer than 100,000 places available in the US, Canada and Australia combined, while there were 1 million “resettlement-ready” refugees around the world. Fewer than 1% of refugees are resettled in a third country in any year.

“Globally, something has to happen,” Pezzullo said, “the rest of the world needs to step up on the permanent [refugee resettlement] side.”

It is countries nearby to conflict and persecution – often themselves facing development challenges, conflict and ill-equipped to host additional populations –that house by far the largest number of refugees.

Turkey now accommodates 2.9 million refugees, Pakistan 1.4 million, and Lebanon 1 million.