About the only area where the Government has had its media cycle management together lately has been on border protection. Last week, in a nice one-two, Chris Evans launched a high-profile overhaul of skilled migration to “take back control of our immigration program” and the Prime Minister announced a new set of aviation security measures, the primary impact of which seems to be to make the airport queues of travellers delayed by security checks an even bigger and more tempting target for terrorists.

That’s your Government: vigilant at our borders.

OK, so the whole thing was swamped by the froth-mouthed demands that Peter Garrett, he of the blood-drenched hands, be chucked in prison, but the Government had stolen a march on the Opposition, which has been looking for ways to exploit rising numbers of asylum seekers.  Anne Duffield, former chief of staff to Philip Ruddock, has followed the immigration portfolio from the demoted Sharman Stone to Scott Morrison and is co-ordinating the effort.

So Tony Abbott travelled to Darwin on Saturday to push the issue.  While the ostensible purpose of the trip was to meet ADF personnel involved in border protection, the real point was to lay the groundwork for what the Opposition hopes will be the overflow of the Christmas Island detention facility to Darwin.  As in, oh my God, they’re on the MAINLAND.  That won’t have any impact on the legal status of asylum seekers, but will be an excellent symbol for focusing voter attention on the issue, which has not been quite as obsessive as it was nine years ago.

Inconveniently, Malcolm Turnbull had already committed the coalition to a new type of temporary protection visa last year, despite plentiful evidence that such visas don’t discourage boats and in fact aren’t even temporary.  Abbott has tried to build on that by promising to “turn the boats back”, by what means is not clear, but at least that will make two out of two policies that encourage asylum seekers to endanger themselves.

But just to show that Abbott has learnt from Kevin Rudd’s successful stint as Opposition leader, he didn’t go to Darwin empty handed.  He announced that the coalition was getting to grips with the problem by setting up a committee.  The committee’s membership is Morrison, Julie Bishop, Michael Keenan, Jason Wood and Senators Johnston and Brandis.  The other member is Philip Ruddock, described in the Abbott press release as “ex officio”.  Ex-officio of what is left unsaid, but perhaps it means that if you’re going to have a scare campaign on asylum seekers, then Philip “it” Ruddock is a compulsory presence.

The committee’s strategy will in part focus on “prevention of the problem by minimising the outflows from countries of origin and secondary outflows from countries of first asylum”.  One looks forward to seeing how the coalition, which gleefully joined in the attack on Iraq that sent hundreds of thousands of people fleeing that country, will “minimise the outflows” of people driven from their homes by war, persecution and natural calamity.  Assuming we won’t have Julie Bishop becoming the new paragon of shuttle diplomacy and spending her entire time trying to broker ceasefires and peace negotiations around the world, “minimising the outflows” will involve more foreign aid to strife-torn countries and “countries of first asylum”.  That’d be from the foreign aid budget that Barnaby Joyce wants to slash.

Perhaps the committee will give some more oomph to coalition efforts on the issue.  For more than a week the coalition has been hawking a story around the press gallery about how UNHCR figures contradict that Government’s claim that there has been a significant increase in “push” factors driving asylum seekers to Australia.  Today they’ve finally had some luck, because Glenn Milne picked up the story no one else was interested in.

“Figures released at the end of January show there were 279,624 asylum applications in 44 key industrialised countries in the nine months to September, only 5 per cent more than in 2008,” Milne regurgitated. “This undermines the Rudd government’s argument that global “push” factors, such as war and civil unrest, were being experienced by all developed countries, which were also facing increased illegal migration.”

Now doubtless Milne’s very excited about how well Tony Abbott is doing but there’s no excuse for simple innumeracy.  The UNHCR figures actually well demonstrate the push factors at work.  Nearly all of the increased number of asylum seekers coming to Australia in the last year have been from Afghanistan and Sri Lanka.  Despite lacking data from several countries for the final quarter of 2009, the figures showed a sharp spike in the number of Sri Lankan asylum seekers in countries within their reach: a 30% jump in France, 14% jump in Germany, increases in Switzerland and Belgium; even Japan had more than double the numbers of Sri Lankan asylum seekers.  Even New Zealand’s numbers went up.  Indeed, New Zealand had a significant overall increase in asylum seekers last year despite the new conservative governments in Wellington.

The figures for asylum seekers from Afghanistan increased by a third (despite several countries missing final quarter data), causing a similar-sized spike all across Europe — Germany faced a five-fold increase and Hungary 10-fold.  Numbers even went up as far afield as the United States.

In short, the global numbers of refugees don’t tell us much.  It’s the numbers from individual trouble spots that are the issue, and two of the biggest, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, are in our region — indeed, we’re one of the few countries in the region that is a signatory to the UN Convention on Refugees. Even then, there are sub-regional factors at work — the big 2009 increase in asylum seekers from China would, two decades ago, have probably seen a spike in arrivals in Australia, but numbers of Chinese asylum seekers coming here actually fell. Instead, they rose in Europe and the United States.

If Milne and co want to talk about global numbers, perhaps he should congratulate the Government on keeping out Serbian refugees.  There was a 20% rise in Serbian refugees last year to more than 18,000, but we cut Serbian arrivals by 100%.  Yep, that’s right, they went from five to zero.  Ditto with Russian refugees, who made up about 20,000 last year.  We went from 21 to seven.

Of course we did.  Serb and Russian refugees are on the other side of the globe and don’t come into this region.  Same with the 20,000-plus and rising Somalian refugees, of whom 19 arrived here.  They go to Europe and North America.

When there’s a scare campaign on, there are lies, damned lies and refugee statistics.