Palmerston first to welcome refugees to NT IT was the Dalai Lama who started it. His Holiness made a visit to the small city of Palmerston just outside Darwin two months ago, and on Thursday Palmerston's council signed an official Refugee Welcome Zone declaration. It's the first council in the Northern Territory to open its arms to refugees, along with only 84 others representing only 15 per cent of councils across the country to officially do so. Palmerston Mayor Ian Abbott jokes that the Dalai Lama's visit is what set the city on its path of enlightenment and acceptance. "How could we not take his message and pass that on?" he told AAP. The Refugee Welcome Zone is a 2002 initiative of the Refugee Council of Australia and requires participating councils to commit to welcoming refugees into the community, upholding the human rights of refugees, demonstrating compassion for refugees, and enhancing cultural diversity. It's estimated since the end of the Second World War over 800,000 refugees have been successfully settled in Australia. "That's an incredibly small number of people," Mr Abbott says. With the motto 'Palmerston is a place for people', the council considers itself to be fairly open and progressive, he says. Everybody that walks into my city is welcome. If we don't make them welcome, where are they going to go? What are they going to do? The issue of asylum seekers has been a very emotive one, he says, with people forgetting that most illegal entries to Australia in fact arrive by plane, and that over 90 per cent of asylum seekers are found to be genuine refugees. I'm not even looking at it on humanitarian grounds, I'm thinking these are people coming into my community who will enrich it in all sorts of ways," Mr Abbott says. He hopes that other councils in the NT and around the country will sign up to the declaration. "I can't believe that there are a lot of councils that are either not supporting it or aren't putting out the 'refugees are welcome' shingle," he says.