Prime Minister Abbott has done something excellent for refugee politics in this country – he stopped the press releases about the boats. There are times when terrible people do great things by accident. This may be one of them, when a divisive and hardline PM institutes a policy that will remove a key contributor to anti-refugee and racist attitudes in the media.

There are many people already working hard to make sure we know how many boats are coming. I understand this approach. Abbott’s core election platform was that he would ‘stop the boats’, assisted by his 6 point plan, 3 star general and a healthy dose of fair dinkum-ness.

There is also nothing like being told you can’t know something (for your own good) to make you absolutely certain that you must know it. Then again, what good ever came of knowing how many boats were coming here? Even when reports came out like the heartbreaking and gut wrenching reports of people drowning at sea, what changed in our response?

The logic of both major parties was the same even then; because some people drowned we had to make life more difficult for the survivors just to make sure even a desperate person wouldn’t think that fleeing on a boat is a viable option.

Reporting on ‘irregular maritime arrivals’ in the last few years has been used to stoke community fears and justify ever more repressive regimes. The running tally of boat arrivals, and deaths at sea gave us just enough information to know too little. Just like in the argument at a bar where the person who knows 3 facts wades in with more energy and righteousness than the person half way through a PhD, this made the so called ‘refugee debate’ ever more vicious and circular.

Information should flow freely, but we should be careful about what information we value, and what we might be missing by privileging it. We were only provided with some information; everything hung off the number of boats, which was itself assumed to be a daily referendum on the Government’s immigration policy.

This information was provided without context, even if we were told the boat was from Sri Lanka there was no linking this information with what international news agencies and humanitarian agencies knew was happening there. The stories of those fleeing persecution were not told, reducing them to a number on a vessel (like a darker Three Men in a Boat).

We don’t necessarily lose by not knowing day-by-day how many boats have arrived here, but it rankles because it's a cynical ploy by a government who campaigned on a platform of refugee scaremongering. A government who conjured a rising tide of economic migrants masquerading as asylum seekers to play to a deep racism they believed was somewhere out there in the voting public.

Despite the above, it is also the worst possible time to not know what is happening out there on the water, particularly considering the obscene ‘tow-back’ scheme. Now more than ever there needs to be close scrutiny of Government policy and its implications for refugees and for our own society. This scrutiny requires knowing much more than just how many boats are coming, times like these call for fewer billboards and many more detailed briefings.

The absence of the boat tally might paradoxically make us more aware of the plight of people seeking asylum; in the absence of this single figure to ‘debate’ there may be more room to talk more conscientiously about those seeking asylum in this country and our responsibility to them.

There are so many people out there working to tell us why some people get on boats and head towards Australia, and what this means in a regional and global context. They have far more to tell us on this subject than Scott Morrison ever will.

Kym Chapple is Sydney-based writer and former UN consultant. She is a member of the Australian Greens and a staffer but writes in a personal capacity.