Amim Muhammad has pleaded with her sister and brother not to get on a rickety boat to flee Myanmar.
A Rohingya Muslim and former student democracy leader, Muhammad, 40, has called Australia home for the past decade after she was resettled through the United Nations' refugee agency.
But waiting for official channels is a tough case to make to loved ones facing daily persecution and with little prospect for quality of life or hope for the future.
Her siblings and extended family are languishing in refugee camps, living in apartheid-like conditions without health care and limited food and water.
Muhammad's nephews and nieces can't go to school.
The 1.3 million Rohingya population is effectively stateless because they have no citizenship status in Myanmar.
Violence against Rohingyas at the hands of extremist Buddhists and the military has led to greater unrest in the past three years.
Muhammad despairs that the risk of death is too great if her family members try to flee the country.
"I tell them don't go by boat, it's very dangerous," she told AAP from her Melbourne home.
"A lot of people are killed in the jungle in Burma, in Thailand, Malaysia and on the ocean."
Muhammad can also offer her family a unique insight into what happens to those who survive the perilous boat journey but wind up in an Australian-funded detention centre.
She's seen the tough conditions and hopelessness of those locked up, having worked at the Nauru detention centre for the Salvation Army.
Muhammad believes improving the living conditions for Rohingyas displaced in Myanmar, by ramping up aid, will help reduce the numbers falling prey to people smugglers.
It's an idea that might gain political traction next week when 15 countries gather in Bangkok to discuss ways to solve the southeast Asia asylum seeker boat crisis.
Nearly 3000 refugees have landed on the coasts of Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia after a Thai crackdown disrupted people smuggling routes.
Some syndicates abandoned their human cargo at sea with estimates 7000 people are still stranded on boats.
There are hints of a breakthrough, with Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand agreeing to end the dangerous game of "human ping-pong" and stop turning away vessels.
Instead, Indonesia and Malaysia will provide temporary shelter to the refugees so long as the international community provides resettlement within a year.
Resettling people within southeast Asia will be a challenge because only Cambodia, East Timor and the Philippines are signatories to the United Nations refugee convention. The United States says it will consider resettlement requests, but not so Australia.
"Nope, nope, nope," Prime Minister Tony Abbott told reporters on Thursday, arguing the prospect of resettlement in western countries would encourage more people to risk their lives on leaky boats.
It's a view not shared by Labor.
"Tony Abbott's not-my-problem approach is disappointing," Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said.
The Greens say Australia should be accepting thousands of Rohingya refugees.
The government is offering money instead, pledging $6 million for emergency food and shelter to Rohingya communities in Myanmar on top of a $10.7 million in emergency aid announced last week.
"We want to be a good neighbour to our friends and partners and obviously if we are asked to help, we are happy to do so," Mr Abbott said.
Elliot Brennan, from the Institute for Security and Development Policy's Asia Program in Sweden, believes southeast Asia is reliving the boat crisis that gripped the region from the 1960s up until the mid 1990s as a result of communism and conflicts in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
"Today's crisis is also marked by buck-passing between governments," he wrote.
Brennan argues the European Union's recent plan to resettle an extra 20,000 refugees to combat mass drownings in the Mediterranean Sea, could provide a framework to a regional solution in southeast Asia.
But for those on boats in the middle of the Andaman Sea, time could be running out.
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