This one-off deal with the United States will see refugees from the Manus Island and Nauru detention centres settled in America, with Australia (in return) permanently settling a number of refugees from Central America. Typical of the government's parsimony regarding information about asylum-seeker operational matters, Mr Turnbull did not say how many of the 1600 refugees on Manus and Nauru would go to the US. Nor did he venture any reassurance that the deal would survive the accession to the White House in January of Donald Trump, a man whose views on Muslim immigration are sceptical to say the least.

In so far as the Manus and Nauru detainees have been in an impossible legal limbo for three years, the deal is to be applauded. However, the prospect of imminent liberation will be tinged with bitterness about the months and years that have been lost, never to be regained. And many may harbour suspicions that their being kept in limbo was a deliberate strategy of successive Australian governments to deter prospective asylum-seekers from journeying here.

Even allowing for the difficulties and sensitivities of identifying (and negotiating with) a third country to accept Australia's "unwanted" asylum-seekers, the three years it took to concoct this deal suggest conscious foot-dragging. Not even offers by New Zealand to resettle up to 150 asylum-seekers from Nauru, nor the April injunction of the Supreme Court of Papua New to close the camp on Manus immediately, appeared to elicit any signs of urgency within the Turnbull government about ending the farce.

The Coalition's willingness to ignore the harmful effects of imprisonment without hope on 1600 people, the damage done to Australia's international reputation, and of course, the enormous financial burden this benighted exercise has imposed on taxpayers has been indicative of dismaying cynicism.

The justification for such obduracy has always been that asylum seekers were perishing at sea trying to reach Australia, and that the only way to prevent this was to remove the incentives to undertake the trip. Governments also claimed that stopping the disorderly arrival [of queue jumpers] enabled them to take more refugees from camps run by the UNHCR. Such logic, however, takes no account of the fact that the concept of an orderly queue rarely accords with reality. And while deaths at sea have slowed to a stop, we don't know to what extent this has been influenced by the push-back of boats as distinct from the removal of the "sugar from the table".

That 1600 people have been used as pawns in an exercise of dubious political worth is to Australia's lasting discredit. A new approach, one involving co-operative regional processing, and a cut in immigration intake to accommodate more refugees if needs be, is overdue.