Teflon John Key should have learnt from the mistakes from the political Don Luigi Peters.

A few months before Key slipped into the Prime Minister's chair Luigi was sitting in front of reporters defiantly holding up a sign in bold print, it said NO.

Luigi learnt that in politics you never say never, he was banished from Parliament for three years while Key went on to be crowned at Government House.

Just a week ago Teflon John was saying a fairly categorical no to God's Own taking any more refugees. Fortunately he didn't have a sign on hand because it wasn't the first time he had ruled out the possibility of increasing the intake from the 750 we've housed each year for almost 30 years.

But a lot can happen in a week, particularly in politics, like focus groups telling you to bite the bullet, like your political opponents lining up to bring in their own bills to increase the quota and like your political allies, those who you rely on to govern, saying it's time for a change.

Being entirely on your own isn't a comfortable place to be in the political business.

It was the horror though of what will be the iconic photograph of this refugee crisis, three year old Aylan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish tourist beach, that shocked the world into the ghastly reality of the Syrians' plight. The image of Aylan has been described as the flotsam of humanity and it certainly resonated in the Beehive.

Key says those images can't help but make people's hearts melt, and clearly his did, and so did his resolve to wait for the scheduled review of the refugee quota to take place next year.

But there will still be detractors, like why Syrians are jumping the queue ahead of others who've been holed up in refugee camps for much longer? And there'll be concerns over whether embittered people coming from war torn nations pose a threat to our security.

They're legitimate concerns. On the threat they could pose we have to rely on the screening process that each one of them will now undergo which will include whether coming here is the right option for them.

And on the issue of Syrians getting preferential treatment. Well to a large extent they can thank a three year old drowned boy on a beach for that, at least for his desperate countrymen, his premature death wasn't totally in vain.