Only weeks after allegations emerged that asylum-seeker families are being separated by immigration officials, reports continue to arrive regarding the dubious treatment of children who arrive on boats.

Fairfax Media airs today fresh claims that some children held in immigration detention are receiving little to no appropriate education as a result of overflowing holding centres on Manus Island and Nauru.

What little information that is filtering through the cracks in the federal government's information wall surrounding its so-called Operation Sovereign Borders paints a grim picture of desperation and despair.

The new government has staked so much of its success on its promise to stop the boats that it appears willing to take an all-or-nothing approach to the issue. It is a dangerous game of escalation that risks creating a generation of damaged and broken people, whose trauma from fleeing their homes is compounded by Australia's lack of compassion for their plight.

Already we are seeing the tragic, but predictable, results of the rough treatment being meted out: a group of unaccompanied child asylum seekers is reported to have been transferred from Nauru to Brisbane because of concerns they might try to harm themselves. What is to become of these children?

We don't know.

The government has also tried to demonise this group of desperate people seeking refuge on our shores by tagging them as ''illegals'', implying these people have somehow broken the law. Yet it is not illegal to seek asylum in Australia. The Department of Immigration's own figures show that more than half the Sri Lankan asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat have been found to be genuine refugees, and an even higher proportion of those coming by plane, proving their plight is genuine.

We have already witnessed during the past decade suicides, hunger strikes, riots and detainees sewing their lips together out of desperation. We risk leaving behind a sorry legacy.

News has a way of seeping out, no matter how hard governments try to contain it. There are those within the system who have seen too much to stay silent. The Australian public has a right to know what actions are being committed in its name.

There is another way. Other countries grappling with far higher numbers of refugees have accepted that they have an obligation to care for larger numbers of arrivals than in the past. As long as our government refuses to discuss the issue in any meaningful detail, it will be difficult to have a meaningful, open debate about this country's moral obligations.

Harsh, Hidden Asylum-Seeker Policy To Leave A Tragic Legacy