The hashtag says #refugeeswelcome. The people gathering at vigils around the country mean it from the bottom of their hearts. The politicians, from all parties, calling for Australia to do more mean it too.

But our laws have been changed, gradually but inexorably, to ensure refugees are often not welcome here. Turning that hashtag into the truth requires a discussion much deeper than whether we take 10,000 or 20,000 or 50,000 Syrian refugees in response to the immediate wrenching images we have seen on our screens.

The refugees pouring into Germany have crossed six or seven countries to get there – usually Turkey, Greece, Serbia, Hungary and Austria – and many have paid people smugglers. Australia’s bipartisan determination to “stop the boats” is based on the view that people should claim asylum in the first safe country they reach so that countries like Australia can conduct “orderly” resettlement programs and people smugglers are “put out of business”.

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If we accept that Syrians who continued to flee to western Europe for a chance to have some semblance of a real life and true safety deserve a compassionate response, even though they left camps in neighbouring countries, even though they sometimes paid people smugglers to get there, why would we not accept the same logic for Syrians or Iraqis who fled in the other direction and boarded a boat to reach our shores?

Neither major party has accepted that logic for some time.

In January last year the prime minister, Tony Abbott, defended the conditions in Australian-run detention centres and likened defending Australia’s borders to a “war”.

“Let’s remember that everyone in these centres is there because he or she has come illegally by boat. They have done something that they must have known was wrong,” he said.

“We are confident that we are well and truly discharging our humanitarian obligations. But we want them to go back to the country from which they came, that’s what we want. Every single one of the recent arrivals has come to Australia through a series of other countries where they could easily have claimed asylum.”

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The same could be said for Syrians who have moved on from camps in neighbouring countries like Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.

If we think the Syrian refugees in Europe need certainty – even the certainty of an immediate safe haven visa, as several European nations are offering – why have we left in limbo the 30,000 asylum seekers who have been waiting here in Australia for up to three years (since the former Labor government changed the law in August 2012) with no work rights and a subsistence allowance?

Their processing began earlier this year – under a new, narrower, Australia-specific definition of refugee – but even if they are found to be refugees they will be offered only temporary visas, a kind of sanity-sapping limbo existence where they have no right to bring their families here or travel abroad to see them. Every three years their situation is reviewed.

And if we can feel compassion for the hopelessness of the refugees in Europe, how can we not feel compassion for those found to be genuine refugees on Manus Island and Nauru – a kind of macabre booby prize that entitles them to continue to live on a tiny island with no work rights and no prospects and, as things stand, no chance of being resettled anywhere that might change.

For years Australians have seemed anaesthetised by the drum beat of “stop the boats”, by the constant portrayal of boat arrivals as a threat, by the obsessive secrecy that made it harder for asylum seekers to be seen as real people with life stories and by the counter-argument that the compassionate response is to stop boat trips and therefore also drownings.

But once we respond to the plight of one group of people who have fled however they can, to wherever they feel safe, by whatever dangerous path they can find, it challenges many of our previous assumptions. This is the point Liberal senator Cory Bernardi is making when he says, of tiny Aylan Kurdi, “That boy and his family had lived in Turkey for three years … they were in no fear, they were in no persecution and they were in no danger in Turkey.”

Bernardi is still reading faithfully from the old policy script. It’s just been overwhelmed by a wave of compassion.

Many MPs rose in the private Liberal and National party meetings on Tuesday to say that they sensed this – that the “heartbeat of the community” was changing and the “very people who stood by us on tough border protection are now calling on us to do more.”

But once compassion is introduced into this policy-making process it changes everything. Unless we forget when the pictures stop coming.