“If Europe fails on the question of refugees,” said the chancellor, “then it won’t be the Europe we wished for.” The polls showed public opinion on her side. More than a million refugees entered Germany last year.

But New Year’s Eve in the German city of Cologne marked a turning point in the debate. The crowd of about 1000 men who made co-ordinated sexual assaults on women at Cologne railway station generated 560 formal complaints to the police that night.

Most of the assailants, according to a senior German official Ralph Jaeger, were Arab or North African. One reportedly told the German police: “You can't touch me. I'm Syrian: Merkel wants me here.”

News emerged of similar, co-ordinated attacks on the same night in Austria, Switzerland, Finland and Sweden.

Coming after the Paris terrorist attacks last November conducted mostly by immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, these attacks seemed to vindicate the anti-immigration parties and the far-right demagogues.

A backlash is under way. The polls have reversed. Most Germans now oppose Merkel’s stance, and over 60 per cent say the country has too many refugees already.

Across the continent, attitudes have hardened, fences have been built, laws toughened. Germany, Austria, France, Sweden and Denmark have all suspended the Schengen zone system of free movement across borders.

Central Europe's response has been harsh - the "Visegrad group" of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic has been unified in opposing any move to liberalise immigration laws. But xenophobic and far-right parties across Europe are on the rise.

But it’s also much wider than a European phenomenon. There is no precedent since World War Two for the number of displaced people in distress and seeking haven.

“We are witnessing a paradigm change, an unchecked slide into an era in which the scale of global forced displacement as well as the response required is now clearly dwarfing anything seen before," the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres, said last year.

His commission said that the number of people forcibly displaced at the end of 2014 was 59.5 million, an increase of over 8 million in one year. It compares to 37.5 million a decade earlier.

Syria is the biggest new source of refugees, but in the last five years 15 wars have started or resumed, eight in Africa, three in the Middle East, plus the Ukraine crisis in Europe and three in Asia.

In the face of this rising tide of distressed and displaced people, attitudes everywhere are hardening. It’s no coincidence that Donald Trump’s very first policy announcement in declaring his bid for the presidency was his proposal to wall off Mexico.

Australia, by hardening its borders to refugees two years ago, has been largely immune to the latest global upsurge in asylum seekers. The Coalition’s boat turnback policy was harsh, ugly and effective, so effective that Labor has now adopted it too. Because of this, Australia is now in a position to make measured responses from a position of strength, by gradually increasing its refugee intake and helping alleviate the greatest human suffering since the Second World War.