As Australia debates how many more Syrian refugees to take from the worsening humanitarian crisis, former immigration minister Scott Morrison tweeted some stats.
# of Syrians resettled in Aust under Refugee & Humanitarian Program 14/15 2232, 13/14 1007, 12/13 98, 11/12 9, 10/11 1, 9/10 6, 8/9 4
He said Australia had resettled 3,346 Syrian refugees since the conflict intensified in 2011. In a bid to put the Aussie contribution into perspective, we used this scale.
This is what Australia's 3,346 Syrian refugees looks like.
It is true that Australia ranks the highest in the world on a per capita basis when it comes to the UN resettlement program. However this only tells part of the story.
"Resettlement" occurs when a third country agrees to take refugees from a country where they originally sought protection. For example, a Syrian family may seek protection in Turkey and then get resettled in Australia. Australia receives comparatively few direct applications for asylum from Syrian refugees.
It's therefore entirely reasonable that Australia – which is geographically a long way from conflict zones – has world-leading resettlement numbers.
But "resettlement" accounts for less than 1% of the UN's refugee programme.
To put Australia’s efforts into context, this is the scale of the situation facing countries around the world.
According to the UN refugee agency, the UK took 7,030 Syrian asylum applicants from 2011-2015.
Sweden took 64,685 Syrian asylum applicants.
And Germany received 98,783 Syrian asylum applicants in the same period.
There were 629,245 registered Syrian refugees in Jordan as of August 2015.
In Lebanon, the UN refugee agency registered 1,113,941 Syrian refugees.
Meanwhile, Turkey registered 1,938,999 Syrian refugees as of 25 August 2015.
Finally, there are 4,088,078 registered Syrian refugees across the Middle East and North Africa.
