Premier Jay Weatherill will push the case with fellow state leaders to offer safe haven visas to displaced Syrian refugees.

Weatherill has indicated South Australia is prepared to bear the cost of resettling several refugees on temporary safe haven visas, a solution employed by then-Prime Minister John Howard in 1999 when around 4000 Kosovo refugees were granted temporary protection.

“The Commonwealth should give it serious consideration,” Weatherill said this morning.

“It doesn’t need to disturb the existing humanitarian intake … it is temporary, but this is a crisis that needs to be responded to urgently. (This) gives us an immediate way of responding to this unfolding crisis.”

The long-escalating Syrian refugee crisis engulfing Europe has been elevated in the international public conscience after graphic photographs emerged last week of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi lying drowned on a Turkish beach.

A vigil will be held in Elder Park from 6pm tonight to honour Aylan and urge greater Government support for asylum seekers. Thus far well over 3400 people have indicated they will attend the event, which was organised by grassroots activist group GetUp and co-sponsored by a range of humanitarian organisations.

“No citizen of the world seeing this awful suffering could do anything other than in all conscience offer to help,” Weatherill told ABC891.

“And that’s what we should do as Australians, and as South Australians we’re prepared to play our role.”

However, the nature of that role remains uncertain, with cabinet set to discuss the state’s contribution today, and the Premier forecasting further discussions with interstate counterparts, including NSW leader Mike Baird.

“That’s something that we’re grappling with, the size and nature of that offer that we could make,” Weatherill said.

“I don’t think it’d be in the thousands but it may be over a thousand.”

He said “the costs associated with that would be borne substantially by South Australia, because there will be substantial resettlement costs”.

“I’m presently working on that equation with my ministers,” he said.

Jay Weatherill says SA may offer safe haven to more than a thousand Syrian refugees.

Weatherill flagged a likely joint announcement later today with Baird, who on Saturday posted a personal reflection on social media, confessing that Aylan’s photograph had “changed everything” for him.

“I felt sick with overwhelming sorrow. And despair. And anger,” Baird wrote.

“I turned away, but that image will never leave me. That photo isn’t just a story of one tragedy. It is the story of thousands of real people in a fight for life itself … surely we can do more. But what is ‘more’ and what does it look like?

“Stopping the boats can’t be where this ends. It is surely where humanitarianism begins… NSW remains ready and willing to do more than our fair share.”

SA Opposition Leader Steven Marshall has indicated willingness for bipartisan support to increase local involvement in housing Syrian refugees.

But Prime Minister Tony Abbott has thus far ruled out increasing Australia’s refugee intake, vowing instead to increase the proportion of Syrians processed at the expense of other nations.

Nonetheless, South Australian Liberal Senator Simon Birmingham told ABC891 he “would be very willing to work with Premier Weatherill and talk through what options he is looking at in developing on this issue”.

“This is a true humanitarian crisis of a scale the world has not seen for many years … and we’re committing to do more and we should do more and I trust that as a Federal Government we will do more,” he said.