Stopping the boasts

With a resurgence in the number of asylum seeker-carrying vessels moving shorewards, Tony Abbott has taken us back to 2001¹ and told us he will

Stop the boats.

In response, Gillard and the ALP are slightly more confused about persuing an almost identical outcome. While there are issues of fairness and honesty involved, and the policy in this area doesn't deserve to be ignored, the acceptance of the idea that unauthorised boat arrivals are significant to the overall questions related to immigration and population² is ridiculous.

The rest of the Liberal mantra can almost be summarised as 'stop the bloat'. While I've seen some details of Labor's “real solutions”, mostly they've been simply telling us to

Stop a boat,

sorry, stop Abbott, and that only they can achieve this for us. I am told that, if elected, Abbot will “take Australia backwards”. Economics and industrial relations get a run, but no doubt we're also meant to conclude that the coalition broadband-lite will 'stop the posts', at least the ones requiring a lot of bandwidth.

Not wanting to be outdone on personality-driven anti-campaigning, in the last week the opposition moved their ads forward from the bloat and boats message to also question the PM's trustworthiness. Both sides have put a lot of effort into telling us not to choose the others, and they both get agreement from Mark Latham, who thinks the answer is to

Stop your votes.

Whatever your choice, I expect that most of the boasts and promises will be stopped and forgotten pretty soon - probably by Monday.

¹Which was, incidentally, the last time I was in Australia for a federal election campaign.
²The discussion of which has been, for the most part, bringing together every issue that has population as a factor and putting them together as a scare campaign targetted at self-interest, with very little consideration of how the details interact with each other.