Australia is poised to join Europe in a $9 billion humanitarian effort to support Syria and its refugee-filled neighbours - at a time when public empathy for non-Syrian migrants has nosedived. 
Britain, Germany, Kuwait, Norway and the UN are co-hosting a conference on Thursday in London to help fill the UN 2016 budget of $7.76bn for Syria and a further $1.2bn for countries neighbouring Syria.
The funding is aimed at encouraging refugees to stay in the region rather than embark on the deadly migrant route to northern Europe through the Balkans that has created a maelstrom of social difficulties.
Conference organisers say they plan to ''lay out the full scale of the crisis" so politicians will provide "significant new funding" to meet immediate and longer-term needs of 13.5 million vulnerable people in Syria and 4.39 million in neighbouring countries.
Last year during a tour of the Za'atari refugee camp in Jordan not far from the Syrian border, Australian Immigration Minister Peter Dutton flagged possible Australian assistance for the educational needs of refugees living in large camps.
This is one of the key points of the conference, which will look at job creation and educational opportunities for refugees so that those forced to flee their homes are offered hope for the future.
British Prime Minister David Cameron this week addressed political infighting in the EU and the difficulties for politicians trying to enforce any agreement in the face of a strong public backlash.
Mr Cameron, desperately trying to forge a new relationship with the EU to sell to Britain before a referendum on membership this year, claimed his country had done more for the relocation and resettlement of Syrians - 1000 before Christmas - than other European countries.
He rejected intense pressure to accept 3000 migrant children from Calais and other European hot spots, saying it would only encourage more migration.
"Yes, we should take part in European schemes when it is in our interests to do so, and help to secure the external European border; but we are out of Schengen, we keep our own borders, and under this government that is the way it will stay," he said.
Public opinion in Europe, already shifting after more than 1.1 million migrants registered for asylum last year, has hardened further against an open-border policy after a murder in Sweden and mob sexual assaults in Cologne and elsewhere attributed to migrants. These tensions will only escalate, predicted the UN Refugee Agency in a report this week. The agency warned of more than a million refugees heading to Europe this year.
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