That was the news on Sunday when Scott Morrison, former immigration minister, now treasurer, was asked by Insiders host Barrie Cassidy to account for the decision to expel from Nauru 10 staff members of respected charity Save the Children in 2014. The allegations were brutal – these charity workers were inciting asylum seekers to self-harm.

Can you imagine anything more hurtful to those people? No one volunteers to work in non-government organisations for the money and the status. It's always about protecting and defending the vulnerable.

Now, the accused staff members have been cleared of any wrongdoing and the government is being forced to compensate them.

Madeline Gleeson, author of Offshore, a new book that gives us all insights into what has gone on in the detention centres of Manus and Nauru, says organisations such as Save the Children are always in a difficult position and attacks such as these are not helpful in an already tortuous situation.

Are charities there to protect and defend the vulnerable and the frightened? Or are they there simply to implement the policies of their employers? As Gleeson asks, who is the client?

"You are providing services to asylum seekers and you are torn in both directions," she says.

As a lawyer and research assistant at the Andrew and Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at the University of NSW, Gleeson has spent three years interrogating the Australian response to the refugee crisis.

She says that those who work for non-government organisations all face the same conundrum. This question: "Is our presence there going to legitimise the policy?"

Gleeson says the impact on children of these policies has been severe. The children are isolated from their families. Or, they are with their families and the Australian government's policy make it impossible for the family unit to work. Children see their parents' authority undermined by guards. Or parents have been driven to the edge and children see their parents falling apart.

"Family dynamics are so skewed in such abnormal situations," she says.

She urges the government to act right now for asylum-seekers and refugees who are in harm's way.

"If there is someone who needs an intervention, act now, not years down the track."

And it is the work of charities trying to make those interventions which is currently under attack.

Charities rely on their reputations and the reputation of Save the Children was certainly besmirched by the minister's allegations. It's the style of allegation that emerged again last week when Peter Dutton accused refugee advocates of pushing false hope to asylum seekers.

Dutton said: "Advocates should reflect on their messages of false hope and misleading portrayal of the situation in Nauru. While some may be encouraged by messages of false hope and some may resort to extreme action, this government will not be dissuaded from its stated border protection policies," he said in Canberra last week. "We are not going to allow people to drown at sea again."

Perhaps Dutton had not yet heard the news that the government would pay compensation for the last time it insulted charity workers. And perhaps he doesn't realise that it's his government's policies which are causing harm and not the salt-of-the-earth workers in these organisations.

Why is this government continuing to attack those who work for good?

Let's backtrack a little. In September 2014, Morrison ordered 10 staff members of Save the Children removed from Nauru amid allegations that they were part of a propaganda campaign designed to undermine the government's border protection policies by coaching asylum-seekers on Nauru to self-harm. He said: "The public don't want to be played for mugs with allegations being used as some sort of political tactic in all of this."

Dutton echoed those claims when he was responding, if you can call it that, to the horrific instances we have seen of Omid, an Iranian refugee who died after setting himself on fire on Nauru; and then Hodan, a Somali refugee, still in a critical condition. His response was not to recognise despair but to blame those instances on troublemakers.

But it is the federal government which is making this trouble.

When Morrison ordered an inquiry into Save the Children staff in October 2014, led by former integrity commissioner Philip Moss, perhaps he hoped to find some evidence for his claims. But in Moss's recommendations, issued at the end of December 2014, Moss is clear: the department needed to review its decision to remove the 10 staff of Save The Children. It needed to provide evidence for its decision to the organisation and it needed to allow Save the Children to respond to those allegations.

Simple procedural fairness.

The Doogan review (to examine recommendation nine in the Moss report) was commissioned by the Department in May 2015 and conducted by Adjunct Professor Christopher M. Doogan, from the Centre for Customs and Excise Studies.

Doogan is blunt. He wrote in his conclusion: "The information available at the time the removal clause was activated did not warrant issuing the removal letter." His review also said that the primary impetus for issuing the removal letter was "a perceived need to take action of some kind to prevent an escalation of the protest action then occurring on Nauru".

Now the department must pay compensation.

There is no evidence to say that Dutton is any more right than Morrison was two years ago.

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