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.

Earlier this week a mysterious object was left in a bus shelter in the middle of Hobart. There was a fair bit of scurrying around and excitement until eventually it was confirmed that it was all much ado about about nothing (after all, it is Shakespeare Week) and everyone went back to getting on with their lives. I was going to draw some sort of parallel with election campaigns, but you can probably do that for yourself. Only a week and a bit to go!

Alright, just one more gall bladder joke (except for the one in tomorrow’s Sunday Telegraph which is my favouritest gall bladder cartoon of all). I know, I know, but no jury that contained a majority of political cartoonists would convict me.