The Abbott government has won praise for offering to settle an extra 12,000 refugees from the conflict in Syria and Iraq but faces warnings about the lack of a strategic plan for the Middle East as it confirmed Australia would expand airstrikes against Islamic State.
The UN refugee agency “warmly welcomed” Australia’s humanitarian assistance, which includes a pledge of $44m to help shelter and clothe people as winter approaches, but the agency reiterated the sheer scale of the “tragedy of our time” as millions of desperate people flee violence and many children miss years of schooling.
The prime minister, Tony Abbott, announced on Wednesday that the one-off allocation of 12,000 places would be on top of Australia’s existing annual humanitarian intake of 13,750 – bowing to pressure from ministers, backbenchers, state premiers, other political parties and community members to increase the overall quota to help the plight of Syrian and Iraqi refugees.
Abbott said he “didn’t want to rush into something before receiving advice” and it was “important that we act with our head as well as with our heart here”.
The prime minister also confirmed on Wednesday that Australian strike aircraft – which have been involved in coalition bombing raids in Iraq since 2014 – would expand their missions into Syria within a week on the basis of “collective self-defence” of Iraq.
Using an alternative name for Isis, Abbott emphasised that Australian operations would be “targeting Daesh, not the Assad regime, evil though it is”.
“What we want throughout the Middle East are governments that do not commit genocide against their own people, nor permit terrorism against ours,” he said.
Labor pledged its support for the increased refugee intake and for the expanded airstrikes, although it urged the government to convene a parliamentary debate and explain “their long-term strategy regarding Australia’s changing role in the defence of Iraq”.
The Labor leader, Bill Shorten, told parliament: “There are legitimate demands to understand the exit strategy. And to ask, what does success look like? To ask, what kind of peace we are seeking to build?”
Minor parties and independents were more forthright in warning about the lack of a clear strategy.
The leader of the Greens, Richard Di Natale, said the government had failed to learn from the previous Iraq war and risked making a bad problem worse. “There is no legal basis for airstrikes in Syria and there is no clear strategy,” he said.
The independent MP Andrew Wilkie said Australia was recklessly allowing itself “to be drawn deeper and deeper into the broader Middle East civil war”.
But the government received plaudits from across the political spectrum for the extra intake of refugees. The first of the extra 12,000 Syrian refugees should arrive in Australia before Christmas as officials crank up a $700m process to select, check and resettle them.
Amin Awad, the UNHCR’s bureau director for the Middle East and north Africa, thanked Abbott for the contribution, saying the resettlement of refugees and extra funding were both “very important and they go hand in hand”.
But in a briefing for Australian MPs on Wednesday evening, Awad also underlined the severity of the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Middle East.
He noted there were more than 4m registered Syrian refugees in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and other countries.
Many had been content being close to their home country for the past three or four years, hoping the situation would be resolved, but were now on the move and risking dangerous journeys across the Mediterranean sea because “desperation had set in and hopelessness”.
“Children missed school for the last five years,” Awad said, suggesting the education gap represented a lost generation. “Five years is a long time.”
Awad called for “a peace agreement to stop all of this”.
At the same briefing, the Unicef ambassador Tara Moss said until now it had “been incredibly difficult to get the public’s attention and the attention of change-makers” about the plight of refugees in the region.
“The conflict in Syria is the world’s largest humanitarian crisis today,” she said. “It is a children’s crisis. More than half of the refugees are kids.”
The World Vision Australia chief executive, Tim Costello, said people had been deeply moved by the pictures of Alan Kurdi, the boy found washed up on a beach in Turkey. “That just pricked this bubble of indifference and suddenly we’re going ‘He’s innocent; these people are innocent’,” Costello said.
The Liberal MP Craig Laundy, who had been pushing for the government to increase its refugee intake, said he hoped “that today we’ve seen the Australian heart”.
“The public have been shown what this [situation] looks like,” he said.
“I hope today is the start of a conversation at a much more mature level that enables members of parliament to engage with the public in a way that transcends partisan politics and focuses on results.”
