In 2014, then Immigration Minister Scott Morrison infamously clinked champagne glasses with Cambodian officials to celebrate the resettlement deal.

It cost Australia tens of millions of dollars in aid but only ever saw a handful of refugees arrive in Cambodia and even less stay.

The Australian government was berated by rights groups for paying, what critics call, a corrupt and authoritarian government to take refugees it had forced into an offshore processing center on the tiny island nation of Nauru.

After years of living countries apart from one another, Abdullah Zalghanah, a Syrian refugee, was reunited in December with his wife and children in Phnom Penh.

“I declared I would go on a hunger strike if my family could not come to live with me. Then in November last year, they told me that they would bring my family to Cambodia. We were finally reunited in late December.”