Just two weeks after the election, “Stop the boats” has become “Don’t mention the boats”. The Abbott government hopes it can make the asylum-seeker issue go away by media-management. But keeping inconvenient reports out of the press is not as simple as, say, purging uppity public servants. Like every other regime that has tried to rule by disinformation, the Coalition will quickly learn that suppressing the free flow of information makes stopping boats look easy.