There’s a lesson here. When voters speak loudly enough, politicians listen. The Abbott government has come a long way since Sunday, when the prime minister suggested any additional intake of Syrian refugees would have to come from within the existing humanitarian intake.

Three days and thousands of Australian voices raised in protest later, he announced that we will welcome an additional 12,000 people fleeing the Syrian-Iraq conflict, offering them a permanent home and normal resettlement assistance. On top, we will provide $44m in extra assistance to those facing a winter in refugee camps.

Australia to accept an extra 12,000 Syrian refugees and will join US-led airstrikes Read more

Suggestions that the haven we offer should be temporary were ignored. So was the idea, floated by some frontbenchers, that our compassion should somehow discriminate according to religion. This decision was not diminished by such meanness.

The backbenchers who warned the prime minister that the “heartbeat of the community” was shifting in response to the images flooding in from Europe are delighted.

Beyond this immediate change of heart, the longer term implications are interesting.

Where will it end, this unleashing of compassion towards refugees – previously characterised as people whose flight had to be stopped, at all costs, by secret military-style operations, people who should be “waiting” in a non-existent “queue”?

When the Howard government “stopped the boats” and the fears of “loss of control over our borders” subsided, the voices of moderate Liberals broke through and by 2005 people like Petro Georgiou and Judi Moylan forced a softening of the detention system, including allowing people on temporary visas to stay permanently.

In 2015 the 30,000 asylum seekers who have been waiting in limbo inside Australia have barely begun their processing and, at the moment, a temporary protection visa is all they can hope for, even if they are successful. Those on Manus Island and Nauru have even bleaker prospects.

Poll shows Australians back rise in refugee intake, but criticise Abbott's handling of crisis Read more

The Lonergan Research poll reported by Guardian Australia shows a clear majority of Australians support the idea that we should show more generosity to Syrian asylum seekers but also that a clear majority continue to support Operation Sovereign Borders.

It was pictures – of mass human exodus, of tiny Alan Kurdi washed up on a beach like jetsam – that prompted the outpouring of compassion that seemed to change the Abbott government’s mind on the Syrian crisis. It was stories – of mental health impacts and unremitting despair – that forced the 2005 change on temporary protection visas. “Operational secrecy” means the pictures and stories of those caught up in Australia’s current border policies are difficult to provide.

But we have seen once again how human stories can move public opinion and prompt political action.