It was the image of Aylan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler lifeless and alone on a Turkish beach, that did it, say politicians and refugee advocates alike.
Fifteen years of ugly, rancorous and highly politicised debate in Australia over refugees was seemingly overturned by a bold gesture of compassion sparked by the photo of a dead three-year-old.
Russell Broadbent, the Coalition MP and long-time supporter of refugees, says it was simply "too raw to ignore".
Precisely a week after the image was first broadcast and shared on social media around the world, Prime Minister Tony Abbott was standing in a Parliament House courtyard announcing Australia would take 12,000 Syrian refugees within a year, over and above Australia's existing refugee intake. 
A national discourse replete with abuse from adversaries on all sides was transformed. Rather than talk of queue jumpers and a wilful failure to integrate, people were praising the contribution of refugees to Australia's well-being.
Abbott himself was earning plaudits from unlikely quarters. Australia was the most successful migrant nation ever. No country integrates refugees better than we do.
For followers of the refugee issue, it was surreal to watch politicians in an auction to see who could be most caring. Giddy and heady stuff, even.
"Today we've seen the Australian heart," says Craig Laundy, another Coalition MP who was at the vanguard of the internal agitation for action.
However, against the breath-taking speed of events and kind words, there is a sobering reality. The scale of the refugee crisis is so immense that Australia's offer of assistance, generous as it may be, may come to be only a small down-payment.
The mass movement of people across borders may well get worse, much worse.
"What we are seeing is just a leading indicator of what's to come," says John Menadue, a former immigration department head.
"We will see more and more pressure from population movement. Mass migration by refugees is here to stay."
What will Australia do next year when refugee numbers have risen further and there is more call for another intake?
Will the feel-good factor fade? And what is the solution?
Tim Costello, head of World Vision, which runs camps for Syrian refugees, says Australia has reached a pivotal - and heartening - moment in its refugee debate.
"The real breach in the wall is that we are saying we do have the capacity, we are generous, we can and must do more," he says . "The message got out there that 86 per cent of refugees are hosted in developing countries."
The focus on the level of the refugee intake has been missing for much of the past 14 years, since the Tampa crisis sparked the split in political bipartisanship over asylum seekers and ushered in a new era of offshore detention and boat turn-backs at sea.
For refugee advocates, the human rights of boat people caught in the system and the cruelty of offshore detention was at the centre of their advocacy. The refugee intake was a second order issue.
Yet ultimately it is the number of refugees Australia resettles that is its most substantial contribution to alleviating the global refugee crisis.
To be sure, Abbott's natural instinct when faced with outcry over Syria's refugees was to reject expanding the intake. His government cut it when it took office, from 20,000 to 13,750. In the budget repair effort, withdrawing money from refugees and asylum seekers was seen as politically painless.
But the outpouring of public support for Syria's wretched masses is grounded in long-held views. For years, the Mapping Social Cohesion report has put approval for a substantial humanitarian refugee program at 75 per cent.
And though just 25 per cent are sympathetic to boat people, polling from the Lowy Institute this year suggests Australians were uneasy about the manner in which the "stop the boats" policy was being implemented.
Despite a halt to asylum boats, respondents still ranked the government's response a "fail", among only three of seven categories that were negatively rated (the others were climate change and the economy).
Minister for Immigration Peter Dutton has suggested the Coalition is open to taking more refugees. Labor is desperate to be bipartisan too.
"It depends if our leaders, if they want to appeal to our better instincts or that part of us we all have that fears outsiders," says Menadue.
Menadue headed the Department of Immigration during the Vietnamese refugee crisis, when Australia accepted 250,000 refugees - a massive intake and national achievement given Australia's almost entirely European population of 15 million.
He recalls travelling up and down the country with the then minister for immigration Ian McPhee and his Labor opponent Mick Young, cajoling newspaper editors and meeting with community leaders to promote the intake. "It broke the back of the white Australia policy."
He says there are always challenges integrating first-generation humanitarian refugees, especially non-English speakers. But "once they settle down, you find they make a fantastic contribution to Australian life."
A recent report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics found that humanitarian refugees typically worked several jobs. There is a sharp increase in the number who, after five years in the country, buy their first small business.
Humanitarian refugees are an entrepreneurial class, twice as likely to have an unincorporated business as skilled migrants. With so many children among refugees, they also help combat the ageing of the population.
Positive stories about refugees, their love for Australia and verve to make good have emerged this week.
There is almost a national excitement as accommodation is prepared and resources are deployed for the first arrivals, due before Christmas.
For the government, though, much remains the same.
The decision to take 12,000 Syrians and allocate an extra $44 million to refugee camps, though its represents a rapid back-down from Tony Abbott's initial reluctance to increase the overall refugee intake, was very much imprinted with his immigration world view.
Australia will only take refugees from the camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. Those taking boats across the Mediterranean Sea, massing at rail stations and breaking down fences in Europe will not be beneficiaries.
Moreover, Syrians - or any other asylum seekers in detention - on Nauru and Manus Island will remain there.
"We will never, ever do anything that encourages the evil trade of people smuggling," Abbott says. "This is the self-same trade which resulted in the deaths of more than 1000 people at sea in the waters to our north and ... perhaps many, many more thousands in the Mediterranean."
The Australian government maintains that "stopping the boats" is a major part of the answer to Europe's influx of hundreds of thousands refugees.
And the New York Times and other media outlets have reported that more asylum seekers from the Middle East and Africa are rushing to get to Europe, attracted by the compassionate response of many Europeans and Angela Merkel's cry for Europe to open its doors.
Stopping the boats is significant, and the government is certainly not shy of trumpeting it.
In a tough and sharp interview with 7.30 host Leigh Sales this week, Abbott reflexively answered one probing question on the economy: "We have stopped the boats."
But though it may have worked in Australia, a maritime nation dealing with tens of thousands of boat people, it is not a model that can exported to places where millions are crossing borders.
"It only works if other countries, especially those close to conflicts, don't follow it," says Tim Costello.
"If Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan did it, millions would literally die."
The conflicts in Syria and Libya are seemingly intractable and the sheer scale of the refugee exodus makes it horrendously expensive - and cruel - to shuttle people off to camps for years, if not decades.
Costello says the surge of refugees to Europe from Syria was sparked in large part by deteriorating conditions in the camps, where 3.3 million inhabitants, many of them children, have languished for years. Many are charged rent for the privilege.
"They are just terrible. You have huge numbers of people who are in debt to middlemen. There are standovers and threats," he says.
Food vouchers have been cut by more than half to $13.50 a month.
"That means they are living on 45c a day. They are going hungry. They can't look after their children -there is a desperation that we are going to die here."
The statistics lay out the horrendous human equation. They also explain why the Australian experience can't be replicated around the world: almost 60 million people displaced by conflict and persecution. Among them are almost 15 million refugees (excluding Palestinians in the occupied territories) who have fled their country.
In the midst of the worst refugee crisis since World War II, just 126,800 of those were able to return home in 2014 - a 31-year low.
A desultory 105,200 were resettled by other countries under the UN's program.
With no prospect of release for years through official channels, people will continue to take risks and employ people smugglers to find a better life in Europe and beyond.
Technological advances - phones and transport - and lower costs means travelling has never been easier.
Economic development in some of the world's desperately poorest countries means millions of more families are no longer leading subsistence lives and can scrimp together their life savings to pay a people smuggler.
Menadue argues that any giddy hope of a new era of bipartisanship and generosity towards refugees must be tempered by the enormity of the refugee crisis and the prospect it will get worse.
"It's a challenge as great as climate change. And the two may become linked in the future. Climate change has the potential to displace hundreds of million of people," he says.
"We have enough land and food for everybody but it's divided by borders. It's going to be a major world problem.
"The institutions of the post-war era have served the world but they are not delivering now.
"We will need new institutions, and a new culture, to deal with large and mass movements of people."
More immediately, says Costello, pressure must be brought to bear on other developed countries to do more - Japan, Korea, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, which resettle few, if any, refugees.
"That's where the pressure has to be. It's a global crisis. Everybody has to step up."
In the end, it may take more harrowing stories and images such as Aylan Kurdi's to keep the momentum for a more compassionate approach.
"Is this a 'moment' for Australia and its attitude to refugees? I'm not sure," says George Tan, from the University of Adelaide's Population and Migration Research Centre. "If there's a camera there, though, it helps."