This year, the archives released minutes from 1992 and 1993 – from before and after Paul Keating's "sweetest victory of all" in the 1993 election. Australia, then emerging from recession, was grappling with its identity. Mr Keating wanted to break from the past. He promoted multiculturalism, a republic, a new flag and the right of gay men to serve in the military. He continued to deregulate the economy, privatising government-owned businesses and shifting workers away from award rates of pay onto enterprise agreements. The High Court delivered the Mabo decision and his government passed the Native Title Act into law. The pace of change was immense.

Mr Keating oversaw another change that was overshadowed by other events: his government introduced mandatory detention of asylum seekers who arrived by boat.

What's striking about this decision now is that what was then seen as a "crisis" involved a mere trickle of boat people. Just 438 had arrived over 26 months, most from Cambodia. By comparison, the later influx during the Gillard government, which led to the botched "Malaysia solution", involved almost 100 times as many asylum seekers over a similar period.

The Keating government was regarded as one of Australia's least conservative. Nonetheless, its immigration minister, Gerry Hand, told cabinet in April 1992 that "any softening of approach by the government in relation to unauthorised arrivals in this country, including their custody, will be an invitation to persons without genuine claims to pursue the same route". He added that if the government failed to "maintain strict border controls and regulate who is allowed into the ... community, there is a grave potential for Australia to become an easy target for spontaneous mass movement".

The line of argument was near identical to that employed later by John Howard and Tony Abbott when they endorsed processing refugees offshore.

A quarter of a century after the Keating government first cracked down on boat people, Australia's policy has become one of the harshest in the Western world. Both Labor and Coalition governments eventually proposed banning boat-borne asylum seekers from calling Australia home, on the spurious basis that they were jumping "queues" of more diligent, law-abiding refugees. The boat people were sent to Nauru and, until recently, Papua New Guina, whose communities don't welcome them and lack genuine resettlement opportunities. They were detained for cruel lengths of time.

Marking a low point, detailed reports emerged in 2015 that Australian spies had for years bribed smugglers to turn their boatloads of refugees back to Indonesia. The government neither confirmed nor denied these reports, but they effectively undid the moral basis of offshore detention.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull recently expressed his concern about the welfare of asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus Island. That's not enough. He must make 2017 the year in which Australia rediscovers an ethical approach to refugees, which it first began to lose grasp of 25 years ago.