The public debate surrounding the 78 Sri Lankan asylum seekers aboard Oceanic Viking and the tragic rescue operation unfolding near Cocos Islands where one asylum seeker has already died has re-exposed Australia’s low humanitarian threshold.

It’s simply illogical that as a community we put such a high expectation on our government to protect and support people displaced by crises at home – like the Black Saturday bushfires – yet for some reason we suspect people who have fled persecution overseas are less deserving of support, or even that they must have done something to deserve it.

We live in a global community. Outside the borders of Australia the world and its people do not become less important, or less deserving of human decency. It is our continued and stubborn ignorance of this fact that allows 16 million refugees around the world so sit in a state of limbo. In this state refugees must wait for a handful of nations, Australia among them, to show drip-fed mercy by providing enough resettlement places to meet less than 1% of the need for them. Most refugees would like to go home but too often this is simply not an option - conflicts can run on for decades leaving refugees stranded. The situation is appalling and it needs national, regional and international solutions to fix.

Ensuring asylum seekers Australia comes in contact with can access their rights to seek refuge is one, obvious thing. But we need to start thinking beyond meeting our immediate obligations to people that happen to take the initiative to seek out our help.

This issue is so much larger than the question of what to do with the small number of asylum seekers who attempt to seek refuge in Australia by boat. Australia needs to start thinking big, and thinking long-term about preventing crisis from happening in the first place and establishing mechanisms to deal with the human impact when it occurs.

We simply aren’t doing enough to address the causes of conflict and disaster. While domestically our politicians squabble over how low they can set the bar on reducing our carbon emissions and our overseas aid budget falls short of the UN Millennium Development Goal targets – people living in the developing world know that poverty, climate change, the unregulated arms trade and the commercial exploitation of vulnerable people and their natural environment is, and will continue to force large population movements unless governments like Australia live up to their responsibilities.

According to a 2007 report by the International Alert, climate change may result in 46 countries – home to 40 per cent of the world’s population – being placed at greater risk of being affected by violent conflict. This is due mainly to increased competition over land and scarce resources and the destabilising impact of climate related disaster. In our own region, Solomon Islands was included in this group of countries. The report found that another 56 countries, home to 1.2 billion people, are at risk of political instability, with potential violent conflict and disaster risk in the long term as a consequence of climate change. Fiji, Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, Tonga and Vanuatu were all included in this group of countries at risk.

Australia has a responsibility and the capacity to be doing much, much more to address climate change and other causes of conflict and calamity. We are not on track towards meeting the UN Millennium Development Goal target of 0.7% of Gross National Income (GNI) in Overseas Development Assistance by 2015 – at present we’ll only be giving 0.5% of GNI by that year. Given the cyclical relationship between poverty and conflict this funding gap is simply unacceptable. It is also unacceptable that our leaders – in Australia and around the world – are still no closer to agreeing on deep cuts to our carbon emissions and a mechanism for helping particularly vulnerable communities cope with the inevitable effects of climate change. These factors are linked to global refugee movements – and thus they should be considered in our response strategies.

Nevertheless, even if Australia was living up to its obligations and addressing the root causes of conflict, the reality is that crisis-related displacement in some form or another is inevitable. It is up to Australia, as a large power in our region, to lead on developing a regional mechanism that works to address the human impact of conflict and disaster and ensure displaced people have access to a long-term solution.

The so-called “Indonesia solution” isn’t working because it focuses on keeping asylum seekers out of Australia (and their plight out of the minds of Australians) – rather than creating genuine long-term solutions for refugees. Refugees in Indonesia languish without access to their basic human rights like education and the right to work. What hope have they got to live a meaningful and productive life without the ability to send their kids to school and earn a living?

A humanitarian solution would emphasise genuine durable solutions for refugees. This was the approach taken after the World War II, when global leaders took a more humanitarian approach to assisting those displaced and permanently resettled hundreds of thousands of people. Why are we now avoiding our responsibilities to resettle people facing modern conflict and persecution in Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan and Congo? Given the increasing targeting of civilians in these wars there is arguably no greater time to look for better durable solution options.

In the Asia-Pacific region, a humanitarian solution would mean governments with capacity like Australia increasing the resettlement places available to refugees and providing greater support to countries like Indonesia and Malaysia to uphold the rights of their refugee and asylum seeker populations. It would also include escalating financial support for agencies mandated to protect refugees in the region, including UNHCR and the International Organisation of Migration. A humanitarian solution would not force refugees into prison-like detention – it would prioritise community settlement options where people’s rights are better upheld and refugees are able to grow roots in their new community.

This humanitarian approach would reduce the need for asylum seekers to risk their lives on rickety boats destined for a country that frankly, is too paralysed by its own domestic race politics to provide them the welcome any survivor of war deserves.