So on one level, when Amnesty International reported last week that Australia’s system of offshore detention — in which asylum seekers heading to Australia by boat are intercepted and sent to camps in Nauru or Papua New Guinea indefinitely — “essentially amounts to torture,” the Australian government’s response was entirely predictable.

“I personally find that to be offensive,” said the head of the immigration department, Michael Pezzullo.

“I reject that claim totally,” declared Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. “It is absolutely false.”

But that’s largely where the defense ended. Mr. Turnbull wasn’t about to engage in a legal argument on Amnesty’s claim. There was no need because he knows that ultimately not all that many Australians care all that much.

That’s been true for at least 15 years, when former Prime Minister John Howard prospered so handsomely from his asylum-seeker policies, from which the current program is derived. Repeated polling since 2013 shows that whatever those policies seem to be, somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of Australians think they should be even more severe. Around another 35 to 40 percent think the policy is about right. The view that our policy is too harsh tops out at around 27 percent.

These figures scarcely change, no matter how many reports come out from Human Rights Watch, the United Nations or Australia’s own Human Rights Commission.

You see, we’ve “stopped the boats.” That quote doesn’t come from anyone in particular. It’s everyone’s. Mr. Turnbull’s predecessor, Tony Abbott, most relentlessly repeated it, but it’s on high rotation in every government official’s playlist. Whatever the scandal, whatever the latest account of refugee children attempting suicide or detainees setting themselves on fire, it’s all anyone need say.

This is the great sedative of Australian politics: dulling our attention, rendering all else some indecipherable white noise we only vaguely register before we fall asleep. Then we can snooze through any bombshell. Even Amnesty’s language isn’t arresting anymore. Merely a year and a half ago a United Nations special rapporteur found systematic violations of the Convention Against Torture. None of it registers because as long as boats carrying asylum seekers aren’t making it to Australia, all is justified.

So Australia’s detention regime becomes virtuous, brutality repackaged as compassion. Those languishing in detention centers, even the people who die there thanks to violence or woefully inadequate medical care for simple afflictions, they’re just a warning to others who might be tempted onto a boat. It’s true the journey is deadly, but it’s also true that Australia is using the more than 1,200 other people stuck in limbo in Nauru and Papua New Guinea as a deterrent. These are the starkly utilitarian terms of the policy: We sacrifice the lives of innocent people to dissuade others from risking theirs.

This rhetoric masks an enormous problem. While Australia was adamant that anyone arriving by boat would be turned away forever, it has never had any idea where these people would ultimately go. Paying other countries to detain them could be only a stopgap measure. Eventually their refugee claims would be processed, and eventually they would need to be resettled somewhere.

And while we were sleeping, that moment arrived. Papua New Guinea’s highest court in April found the detention center there to be illegal, meaning the detainees must be sent elsewhere. Australia has paid Cambodia $42 million to resettle refugees — only two have been successfully resettled. Otherwise, Australia resorts to persuading people to return home to the lands they’re fleeing — war-torn countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, among other menacing places.

We have traded a boat problem for a resettlement one. And in the meantime, lives are still being destroyed, just slowly.

It’s here we confront Amnesty’s most arresting finding: Australia’s policy is a kind of contagion, lowering global standards on refugee policy, shifting the boundaries of what nations now find acceptable.

The most direct example is Indonesia, which, partly at Australia’s urging, has sharply increased its own use of detention centers, criminalized the act of providing accommodations for anyone without a visa, and attempted to return boats headed for Indonesia back to the countries they had left.

But we’re also seeing a procession of European far-right nationalist parties — the U.K. Independence Party in Britain, the National Democratic Party of Germany and the Danish People’s Party — expressly hold Australia up as an inspiration. There are even individual voices of support from within mainstream conservative parties, like Britain’s Tories. It’s clear that Australia would like its policy to be adopted more broadly.

Successive prime ministers — most recently Mr. Turnbull in his September address to the United Nations — have encouraged the world to follow Australia’s lead. It’s the kind of thing you can say when you’re an island nation far removed from the theaters of human misery producing the current refugee crisis. But it’s not the kind of thing to which the world can afford to listen.

The human displacement is too deep, the numbers too large. And with a global problem this urgent, the very worst you could do right now is reach for a sedative.

The emails, obtained by hackers and being gradually released by WikiLeaks this month, also are revealing how efforts to minimize potential conflicts at the foundation led to power struggles and infighting among aides and Mrs. Clinton’s family.

One top aide to Mr. Clinton, Douglas J. Band, noted in an email that the former president had received personal income from some foundation donors and “gets many expensive gifts from them.”

Chelsea Clinton accused her father’s aides of taking “significant sums of money from my parents personally,” of “hustling” during foundation events to win clients for their own business, and of even installing spyware on her chief of staff’s computer.

“She created this mess and she knows it,” a close aide, Huma Abedin, wrote of Mrs. Clinton in a January 2015 email.

For months, the Clintons have defended their foundation, making public proclamations that it went above and beyond what the law required in terms of transparency while Mrs. Clinton was at the State Department.

The emails, which came from the account of John D. Podesta, who had a leadership role at the foundation and is now Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, have not contained evidence to support Republican contentions that Mrs. Clinton performed any favors for foundation donors.

“Do they plan to do big events next year?” her campaign manager, Robby Mook, asked about the foundation last year, shortly after Mrs. Clinton kicked off her presidential campaign. “Possible for those to be smaller and lower key in 16?”

Founded in 1997, when Mr. Clinton was still president, the foundation has raised roughly $2 billion to fund projects around the world, helping African farmers improve their yields, Haitians recover from a devastating 2010 earthquake and millions of people gain access to cheaper H.I.V./AIDS medication, among other accomplishments.

Some of the former president’s staff members followed him from the White House to the foundation, and the emails provide an extraordinary look at the soap opera that unfolded years later as people close to the couple felt their power threatened.

“This is the 3rd time this week where she has gone to daddy to change a decision or interject herself,” Mr. Band, the longtime aide to Mr. Clinton, wrote about Chelsea Clinton in 2011.

At the time, she was beginning to exert influence at the foundation, expressing concerns that Mr. Band and others were trying to use the charity to make money for themselves, and accusing another aide in her father’s personal office of installing spyware.

Emails released on Tuesday contained a memo from Mr. Band essentially defending his work for the foundation, and for Mr. Clinton personally, even as Mr. Band was building up his political consulting firm, Teneo. The memo noted that some foundation donors had indeed been clients of Teneo, but also that Mr. Band and Teneo had helped raise tens of millions of dollars for the foundation from individual, foreign and corporate donors, without taking a commission.

Mr. Band also noted how some of those donors he had cultivated were paying Mr. Clinton privately to make speeches or to do other work. One such donor, Laureate International Universities, a for-profit education company based in Baltimore, was paying Mr. Clinton $3.5 million annually “to provide advice” and serve as its honorary chairman, Mr. Band wrote.In another email, Mr. Band wrote that Mr. Clinton had even received gifts from some donors.

The tensions came to a head when Chelsea Clinton helped enlist an outside law firm to audit the Clinton Foundation’s practices. Some interviewees told the audit team that the donors “may have an expectation of quid pro quo benefits in return for gift.” The audit suggested the foundation “ensure that all donors are properly vetted and that no inappropriate quid pro quos are offered to donors in return for contributions.”

The advice proved prescient as Mrs. Clinton faced intense scrutiny about whether donors to the Clinton Foundation had received special access to her State Department or other rewards. In August, the foundation said it would no longer accept foreign donations should Mrs. Clinton win the White House.

Mrs. Clinton has dismissed criticism of the charity as politically motivated. A spokesman for the Clinton campaign, Glen Caplin, declined to verify the authenticity of the emails, but said the hack was part of the Russian government’s efforts to use cyberattacks to influence the election in favor of the Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Band’s firm released a statement saying: “Teneo worked to encourage clients, where appropriate, to support the Clinton Foundation because of the good work that it does around the world. It also clearly shows that Teneo never received any financial benefit or benefit of any kind from doing so.”

Behind the scenes, Mrs. Clinton’s aides grappled with how to sever her from the problematic optics of some of the philanthropy’s fund-raising practices.

In an October 2014 email, Mr. Mook asked whether Mrs. Clinton’s name would be used in connection with the foundation, which is formally known as the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. “It will invite press scrutiny and she’ll be held accountable for what happens there,” he wrote.

The next year, when Mrs. Clinton was on the verge of declaring her candidacy, Cheryl D. Mills, a lawyer and top aide, said she discussed withMrs. Clinton various “steps” to take to adjust her relationship with the foundation, including her resignation from the foundation’s board.

By fall 2015, Mrs. Clinton’s aides had fine-tuned her response to questions about foreign donors. “As President, I won’t permit any conflicts between my work for the American people and the Foundation’s good work,” aides advised Mrs. Clinton to say in a coming debate.

The emails give insight into the periodic fires that Mrs. Clinton’s advisers thought they had to put out. Mrs. Clinton ultimately did not attend the foundation event in Morocco that Ms. Abedin had complained about; her husband and daughter did go. It is unclear if the king had given the $12 million he was said to have pledged; he is not listed among the foundation’s donors.

In March 2015, Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian steel magnate who had given more than $10 million to the foundation, was “relentlessly” requesting a meeting with Mr. Clinton, according to an aide, Amitabh Desai. If the former president declined, the relationship would be damaged, Mr. Desai wrote in an email.

“No is better. Is that viable?” wrote Mr. Podesta, who by then was the chairman of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. It is unclear if the meeting took place.

That same year, during a discussion over a potential meeting between Mr. Clinton and the Saudi king, Mr. Podesta replied, using the former president’s initials, “Not something that would be on our top 10 list of WJC requests.”

Mr. Podesta took a leadership role at the charity when Bruce R. Lindsey, a former White House counsel and longtime friend of Mr. Clinton who had been chief executive of the foundation, had a stroke in 2011.

His role at the foundation, coupled with his later capacity as the chairman of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, put Mr. Podesta in the middle of internal workings of both operations and, by default, the delicate battles unfolding between Chelsea Clinton and her father’s top aides.

The day Mrs. Clinton’s mother, Dorothy Rodham, died in 2011, Chelsea Clinton emailed Mr. Podesta. “Doug called and yelled and screamed at my Dad about how could he do this,” she said, a reference to the internal scrutiny going on at the foundation. “My mother is exhausted, we are all heartbroken but we need a strategy and my father needs advice/counsel.”

Mr. Band has said the exchange described in the email never happened.

Mr. Band, who helped Mr. Clinton build the foundation, clearly felt irritated by Chelsea Clinton’s stream of implications that he had padded his own pockets from his work for her father.“As they say, the apple doesn’t fall far,” he wrote. “A kiss on the cheek while she is sticking the knife in the back, and front.”