But nobody needs the point-scoring of the compassionistas
We welcome Tony Abbott's announcement that Australia will take more Syrian refugees. The scale of the humanitarian crisis has been brought home by heartbreaking stories (such as the image of drowned three-year-old boy Aylan Kurdi) as well as by grim statistics (about nine million Syrians have fled their homes since civil war began in 2011). This is a crisis with no end in sight. As an affluent and peaceful nation with a long tradition of embracing refugees, Australia has an obligation to do what it can to help. It is, as the Prime Minister said, "the right thing" to do. Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has flown to Geneva for talks with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, on any further assistance that Australia may be able to offer. 
Australia's offer to take more Syrian refugees is an altruistic and deeply felt response to human tragedy. However, it's also true that the intake of refugees can bring benefits to the host country. The middle-class exodus from Syria is likely to include many useful future citizens, people able to fit in with Australia's pluralistic society. As with migrants in general, refugees tend to be young and highly motivated; they can be a transfusion of economic energy for an ageing society. None of this is at odds with a robust vetting process for would-be refugees. The first challenge is to establish identity; there are reports of asylum-seekers from other countries exchanging their papers for fake Syrian documents. Australia also must ensure there are careful security checks; we must take every possible step to ensure that we do not import extremists - for example, supporters of jihadist outfit Jabhat al-Nusra, or the al-Nusra Front.
Whatever the government does in response to Syria's plight, it will never be enough for the moral vanity crowd. On Twitter they compete against one another to nominate ever higher, arbitrary targets for resettlement; the higher the more righteous. Greens leader Richard Di Natale, for example, says Australia should take 20,000 Syrian refugees over and above our annual humanitarian intake. Mr Abbott's proposal is to accept more Syrians within the intake, which sits at 13,750. Not content with a difference in position Dr Di Natale yesterday said the Prime Minister was "devoid of any compassion and decency". This is strange logic. If GetUp! urged a refugee intake of 40,000, would that make Dr Di Natale's position morally bankrupt? Take the opposition; Bill Shorten says Australia should welcome 10,000 Syrian refugees; is that half as compassionate as the Greens' position? Of course, the compassionistas who deplore the Prime Minister's position are the same who assailed his border protection policy as not only impossible in practice but immoral in principle. Yet if the Abbott government had failed to stop the boats, the humanitarian intake would have been swamped - and there would not be room to accommodate more Syrians.
Another absurdity is that some self-appointed advocates of Syria's refugees are distinctly queasy about the military campaign to destroy Islamic State, the murderous entity that has inflicted so much misery on the civilians of Syria and Iraq. Yesterday Dr Di Natale did not welcome the prospect of Australia extending its airstrikes against Islamic State across the border and into Syria. Far from it; he said the government was "on the verge of making a humanitarian tragedy worse by dropping bombs on Syria". Australia's military has a reputation for taking great care in choosing targets and for aborting bombing raids if there is danger of harming civilians. What is certain is that millions of Syrians and Iraqis will have no possibility of a safe return home until Islamic State is destroyed.
Yet another odd compassionista argument is that Australia must take an above quota number of Syrian refugees to atone for our sins in helping rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein. But post-Saddam Iraq and Syria are different countries. And it is Syria's civil war - followed by Islamic State - that has brought misery and dislocation to its civilians.Twitter is easily distracted from horrors such as these and ever alert to serious infractions at home, such as the suggestion by a Fairfax Media columnist that Australia give priority to persecuted Christians among the Syrian refugees. "This is possibly the worst thing you have ever written," one Twitter critic said. "I don't even know where to start." That sums it up perfectly; Twitter groupthink means nobody has to engage with contrary opinions or produce telling arguments. In fact, the suggestion of a pro-Christian bias in refugee selection is not so ludicrous at all. The ancient Christian communities of the Middle East have been under tremendous pressure for decades now; persecution by Islamic State is just the latest, most violent instance of this. Is it really so surprising that a majority Christian country such as Australia might consider a refugee policy giving priority to Christian and other minority religions among the Syrian exodus?