September 29, 2015
The South Burnett Regional Council will be advising the Federal Government the region is unwilling to accept Syrian refugees after an online poll showed 70 per cent of respondents were opposed to it.
The idea of taking in a small number of refugees was floated by South Burnett Mayor Wayne Kratzmann at a Council meeting on September 16.
The Mayor said the scale of the refugee crisis was something not seen since World War II, and he felt the South Burnett should do something to assist.
But he said Council would only lend its support to the idea if the majority of the community were in favour of it.
The Council then set up an online poll to gather community feedback, which closed on Friday.
Today the Mayor said the poll had drawn about 600 responses, with almost three-quarters opposed.
As a result, the South Burnett will not be joining neighbouring Western Downs and Toowoomba, where Mayors Ray Brown and Paul Antonio have said their own regions would be willing to accept some of Australia’s proposed 12,000 Syrian refugee intake.
The Mayor said there didn’t appear to be any appetite for assisting refugees in the region, though he was heartened that 30 per cent of poll respondents supported the idea.
He said there seemed to have been a bit of hysteria whipped up in some quarters over fears the region might be inundated with large numbers of refugees.
“In reality we might have had one to three refugee families at most,” the Mayor said.
“However, our residents have made their feelings clear and we will respect the wishes of the majority.”
Footnote: the South Burnett may be hosting some Syrian refugee families, anyway, if a plan by Catholic Archbishop Mark Coleridge comes to fruition.
The Catholic Archdiocese of Brisbane has pledged to help resettle at least 100 refugee families from Syria, and Archbishop Coleridge has suggeste each parish help by taking in one Syrian family.
The South Burnett parishes of Murgon, Kingaroy and Nanango are all within the Brisbane Archdiocese.
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Very sad to hear. I hardly think the 1-3 families that would have been welcomed to the South Burnett would have any negative impact but the difference this would have made in their lives would have been incredible. An opportunity lost to do some good I think.
I agree. But the local outcome is the just the same as the reaction Western Downs and Toowoomba have had since their mayors announced the same idea. The only difference is that the SBRC ran a poll.
If I believed that the poll was responded to by only South Burnett residents and that everyone in the community knew about it, I would be even more despondent about this vote. This does not reflect the welcoming, caring and generous community I have known since arriving here from overseas 30 years ago – and doesn’t gel with the “fair go” and/or good Christian attitude locals so often profess to.
Surely between 30 thousand or so of us we could cope with a few families who have been to hell and back and have nothing! I hope the Catholic congregation sets a better example or that the 30% of voters who would support an intake find a way of banding together to send a different response to the refugees when they finally get to the country that has “boundless wealth to share”!