Andrew Bolt points us to an article of Nicole Hasham’s in the Sydney Morning Herald, which audaciously tries to argue that Labor were the ones who really stopped the boats. Here is the graph they rely on:

This is the same trick that the ABC’s fact check tried in February 2014. It works, like this: take a very small section of a graph on a subject which is highly volatile and then claim a trend in favour of your argument. Now where have we seen the Left do that before?

At least the ABC used actual arrival numbers rather than the absolutely useless raw boat numbers used by the SMH:

For those of us whose cities are not yet under water from rising sea levels and who have graduated past year 2 maths, how about we expand the data set a little bit further:

As you can see, there were various stages under Gillard (June 2010 – June 2013) where the occasional lower month came along. Even Rudd himself had a lower month in April 2010 before he was knifed. Of course, none of these anomalies even remotely indicated that Labor had any control of the situation.

Human traffickers and country shoppers are not stupid. At no stage did they take Rudd or Gillard seriously.

One government actually stopped all boat arrivals, while the other farted around for six years, cost us billions of dollars and created all sorts of other problems. I’ll leave you to decide which was which.