Today, on World Refugee Day 2025, close to one in ten Australians is a refugee or descendant of someone displaced.

By the end of this year, Australia will resettle its one-millionth refugee since the end of World War II.

This is a legacy built through decades of bipartisan policy, community support, and the belief that when people are given safety and opportunity, they can contribute and thrive. It’s also a legacy that stands in contrast to our harsh treatment of people seeking asylum by boat, which continues to rightly attract criticism. Still, when it comes to refugee resettlement, Australia has a foundation of which we can all be proud.

The question is whether we will rise to meet the moment we are in now.

Today, there are more displaced people than at any time in recorded history: 123.2 million, according to figures released this month by the United Nations’ refugee agency. That’s one in every 67 people on the planet, and nearly double the number from just a decade ago.

In the past week alone, assaults on Gaza have intensified; Kyiv has suffered its worst attacks in more than a year; the war in Sudan has escalated; and the eruption of Israel-Iran violence threatens to pull the entire Middle East into regional conflict. From the Sahel to the South China Sea, displacement is being driven by brutal wars, climate shocks and strongman leaders who fan the flames.

Despite this worsening global picture, the international community has settled into a kind of Faustian pact when it comes to responding. Many governments label their responses “temporary”, allowing them to avoid more durable, rights-based solutions. Refugees are pushed to the margins, warehoused in camps or held in legal limbo for decades.

Last week, I stood near the Thai-Myanmar border, in a refugee camp that’s been labelled “temporary” since the 1980s. Children are born, grow up, and start families of their own without ever leaving Mae La camp.

Governments know mass population movements are destined to be protracted, but the fiction of temporariness is maintained, because acknowledging the reality would require costly and politically fraught investment in real, lasting solutions.

As one of the world’s most successful multicultural nations, Australia needs to lead. We can help fill the deep void left by the US, which decimated its refugee resettlement program under the Trump administration.

So what would it mean for Australia to step up?

One of the most promising strategies is to expand access to regular migration pathways for refugees, or what are called “complementary pathways”. These include routes that already exist in our migration system, but have historically excluded refugees, such as study visas, work permits, and family reunion programs.

They are critical because they unlock pathways to safety at a scale traditional resettlement simply cannot match. Australia grants far more work, study and family visas than humanitarian visas each year. If we make these routes accessible to refugees, we increase the number of people who can move from displacement to stability.

In the past five years, nearly one million people from just eight refugee-producing countries were granted permits to live and work in OECD countries and Brazil through regular migration programs. That’s a 3-to-1 ratio compared to traditional resettlement.

Australia has played a key role in some of these early efforts. The Skilled Refugee Labour Agreement Pilot, developed in partnership with Talent Beyond Boundaries, has enabled hundreds of skilled refugees to migrate to Australia to fill workforce gaps. The Community Refugee Integration and Settlement Pilot program has supported communities to sponsor and provide settlement support to incoming refugee families. And just last year, the Refugee Student Settlement Pathway was launched, allowing young refugees to study at Australian universities with a pathway to permanent protection.

These developments remain small. The Refugee Student Settlement Pathway has only 20 student confirmed places so far. The CRISP program is 200 places. The labour mobility pilot, though impactful, has not yet been expanded beyond the 500-place pilot.

We know these programs work. The question now is whether Australia will invest in scaling them.

At the Global Refugee Forum in Geneva in 2023, Australia pledged to increase complementary and community-sponsored refugee pathways to 10,000 places annually, in addition to our core resettlement intake. This was a significant pledge, backed by a broad coalition of civil society actors.

But pledges are only the beginning. What’s needed now is a serious political commitment to build these programs to scale, and to do it in partnership with the communities, universities and employers who are ready to help.

Australia has done this before. We have built one of the world’s most respected resettlement programs. We have the tools, infrastructure and public support to do it again. Now we need to start doing it bigger, smarter and faster.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.