Now the mindset of the Coalition (and Labor) is that any deviation from this position will be a "green light" to the people-smuggling trade and trigger an armada of boats from Indonesia.

It was Kevin Rudd who, desperate to minimise the scale of Labor's defeat in the 2013 election, took the punitive policy of indefinite offshore detention embraced by both sides of politics to a new level, declaring those processed on Manus and Nauru would never be settled in Australia.

Both tragedies represent a failure of policy and politics, and the interplay between the two. Both pose the question: Just what will it take for the Coalition government to rethink a policy that relies on punishing more than 2000 damaged people, year after year, to keep the people smugglers at bay?

Now another young asylum seeker , a Somali woman, has set herself on fire three days, we are told, after she was returned to Nauru against her will after receiving medical attention in Australia.

The difference is that Labor says it would actively pursue a "pathway to permanent migration in a resettlement country" for those on Manus and Nauru, while the Coalition has comprehensively failed in this area.

Not only is the Coalition opposed to resettlement of those on Nauru and Manus in New Zealand, on the grounds that it would be possible for refugees to make it to Australia (a position shared by Labor), it says the only option for those on Nauru is Cambodia, one of the poorest countries on earth. As for those on PNG, it says the only option is PNG, where danger is ever present for outsiders and most would have no prospect whatsoever of earning enough money for immediate family members to ever join them.

The result of this is that the mental state of those in limbo on Nauru and Manus is far worse than was the case for those who spent as much time on Nauru under John Howard's "Pacific Solution".

Their sense of hopelessness and helplessness is greater because, unlike those held on Nauru in the early 2000s, whose numbers dwindled as they were slowly resettled in Australia and New Zealand (without re-starting the boats), they have nothing to look forward to. Absolutely nothing.

Those willing to take their own lives in such horrible circumstances are not, as the Nauru government asserts, attempting "to influence the Australian government's immigration policies". Nor are they responding to advocates who have given them "false hope", as Dutton asserts. They have simply given up.