The incentive structures inherent in modern politics encourages all politicians to alternately champion or repudiate unworkable solutions to problems that themselves are likely exaggerated or fabricated from whole cloth.

The parties are just brands competing against each other to appeal to different segments of the same market, offering essentially the same product in different packaging. Getting your competitor to adopt a market position that you've already prepared a response to is a neat trick.

This is par for the course, and I don't understand why anyone would expect anything different.