Can a boat jump a shark?

Call me Ishmael if you like, but I can’t help thinking that our two aspiring leaders’ collective obsession with stopping the boats is becoming a little, well, obsessive. Part of the trouble could be that the issue of beating up on the small number of refugees that take the aquatic option is failing to capture the imagination of the non-bigot voter demographic.

Julia did a marvellous job tying the NBN to healthcare, and I don’t see why the same thing can’t be done with boat people. If Australians could watch high definition video of boats moving away from our shores at the rate of one gigabit per second in real time on their iPads, that would really help us all stand up for Australia and move forward together in an optimistic fashion. It would also neatly distract us from trivialities like whether it might be more polite to treat boatloads of asylum seekers as human beings rather than an opportunity to scrape up the pinhead vote in marginal electorates.