The latest report from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees says asylum applications in Australia increased by 19 per cent last year, from 3980 to 4750. How many came by boat? Actually, 179 or fewer than 4 per cent.

This year the number of boat people is already higher, at 221. But it still is tiny compared with those coming by air. And total refugee flows to Australia are much smaller than those experienced by other countries.

Today we have proof that while boat-borne asylum seekers may be only a small, highly visible subset of total asylum seekers, they are clearly the most desperate of all the many thousands trying to make a new life in this country. As the ABC reports:

At least three people are reported to have been killed and dozens more are injured following an explosion on board an asylum-seekers’ boat being escorted to Christmas Island this morning.

Hospitals in Darwin and Broome have been told to expect an influx of casualties from the boat, which was carrying 49 people who are believed to be from Afghanistan.

The issue will flare from here. Already opposition spokespeople are lining up to brand the Rudd Government a soft touch for illegal arrivals, a group exclusively characterised in the public imagination as boat people bobbing off our north western coast. This is nonsense, a cynical, politically opportunist projection. That people are so maddened by misfortune and circumstance that they will take to the sea in pursuit of not much more than faint hope is a tragedy, not a political opportunity.

The Howard Government used boat people as an emblematic threat, a bogey that would allow it to show itself to be a hairy-chested and resolute defender of our borders in a time of war on terror.

That moment has passed. Our understanding of international circumstances is becoming more sophisticated and increasingly conditioned by many more factors than simple, visceral fear. There is a risk for the current opposition that in taking too old-school a line on boat people they will be seen as Howardite relics. There is a risk for the Rudd Government that they will bullied into being exactly the same.

Good lord what can they mean? It’s been one of those weeks in which the politics of politics resolutely becomes the story. But here, with this little effort, The Australian has gone to the head of the class. What they mean, of course, is that Malcolm Turnbull has reclaimed the natural ascendency that conservatives have when it comes to the discussion of serious things like Economics. Regular readers will recall the doggedness with which the paper held to the notion through last year that whatever the headline polling figures might say, John Howard’s edge as “preferred economic manager” would see the Liberals through.

Yup. This headline says some troubling things about the quality of our political discussion. The fact is that the only economic debate that seems to count in this country is the meta-chat about who said what in talking the whole thing down, about where inflation came from and under whose watch. There is no particular difference in actual economic approach between the two major parties. There is no discussion, other than the sort of cheap inward looking talk that follows an overlong examination of competing navels.

We’d be better served if the discussion got real. People are poor. Kids sleep on the streets. Houses are expensive. Hospitals struggle to cope. Teachers are paid a pittance. Rivers are running dry. The Australian economy bobs like a cork in a turbulent global pool. Regional communities are dysfunctional and in decline. Malcolm Turnbull has reclaimed nothing.

Anyway, there was just one tear, quickly mopped aside. It was enough to make the lead on the ABC evening news, some gush on a tearful farewell. Through the afternoon it featured in gleaming closeup on Fairfax websites. I’d be prepared to take money on its being featured in the morning press.

Good grief. There was only one, and it didn’t in any way represent the moment. But it suited some confected view of the story, never mind that it was at odds with the broader reality, and it starred. How much modern news is like that? The selective harvesting of fact and image to fit some abstract notion of actuality.

Nelson, in fact, bore himself with dignity, said the right things, and said them with crisp purpose. How dull.