Despite insidious attempts by successive Australian governments to suppress truth, abundant evidence, buttressed in recent days by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and international humanitarian powerhouse Medecins Sans Frontieres, demonstrates mandatory offshore incarceration of refugees and people seeking asylum fails every measure of acceptable policy and politics.

It is brutally inhumane, obscenely expensive and lacks public accountability. It is not an acceptable policy for a nation that presents itself as – and is – an enlightened leader in many other areas of governance.

People protest against Australia's asylum seeker policies during a march in Sydney in July. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

The treatment, in our name and financed by several billion dollars of our taxes, of thousands of the world’s most desperate children, women and men over the past several years on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island and on Nauru is not only cruel, it is arguably criminal.

The Age has long argued that mandatory offshore incarceration will come to be seen as one of our darkest chapters. Our politicians should not rule out that there may one day be an official judicial probe into the policy and that it will find those responsible in breach of domestic and international law.