The day a young Iranian husband died after setting himself alight on Nauru last week, Immigration Minister Peter Dutton released not one, but two media statements accusing Labor of being weak on border protection.

The first one accused Bill Shorten of refusing to rule out bringing the "Illegal Maritime Arrivals" on Nauru and Manus Island to Australia, saying the Labor leader would "talk tough before the election and back-flip in government".

The second said pretty much the same thing. Neither made mention of the fact that a 23-year-old refugee, consigned to indefinite limbo on Nauru by the Australian government policy, had felt compelled to take his own life.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

The Coalition's vow that nothing will change is based on the crude and callous calculation that the damage to those on Nauru and Manus is preferable to the prospect of many more deaths at sea once the people-smuggling trade resumes.

That leaves us with the worst situation imaginable: a government that not only refuses to bend, but also seeks to exploit the issue for political gain during a marathon, eight-week election campaign, as increasing numbers on Nauru and Manus lose the will to live.

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