The biggest contrast between Lockdown ’21 and the original ’20 edition, in technical terms, is that this time the pollies won’t shut the fuck up.

Remember last year during the “we’re all in it together” version, the best thing was we hardly heard from all but a handful for the duration?

This time it’s quite the opposite, which is not surprising given the absolute clusterfuck, another technical term, we’re witnessing.

This morning we’ve had the ever helpful NSW Nationals leader and Deputy Premier John Barilaro admitting “we’ve lost control” of the state’s current outbreak.

No shit, Sherlock.

Yesterday we had one of his federal counterparts, Queensland Senator Matt Canavan, declare on national TV that NSW shouldn’t be in lockdown as COVID is no worse than the flu.

Yep, this crap from an actual member of the government.

But what do you expect when the Defence Minister Peter Dutton was at the same time tweeting out smirking emojis about a former Labor prime minister in the equivalent of a children’s sandpit fight.

It all started when it as revealed that Kevin Rudd had personally reached out to the global head of Pfizer for more vaccines. Cue Health Minister Greg Hunt denying the story and childishly refusing to name Rudd or “the said person” or “the individual in question”.

Then we had the company itself put out a statement yesterday which, depending which side you’d taken, demolished Rudd’s claims or might have confirmed them.

If anyone had been paying attention, Pfizer had only last Friday released a similar letter clarifying the current prime minister’s morning spin that he had “ramped up” extra Pfizer supplies this year.

Within hours of Morrison’s media marketing blitz, the company issued an extraordinary press release noting there had been “no change” to the contractual arrangement to supply 40 million doses to Australia.

Nothing like a crucial global pharmaceutical corporation having to call bullshit on not one but two prime ministers of a First World country in the space of four days.

So, after a solid day of the Rudd-Hunt-Pfizer-Dutton soap opera yesterday, most Australians were just thinking FFS — an acronym for the technical term “for fuck’s sake”.

Meanwhile, another debate was raging on social media in reaction to the first of the long overdue government vaccination advertisements which, again depending which side you were on, were either too silly or too scary.

No wonder by late afternoon trending on Twitter was the acronym WTAF, which stands for “what the absolute [or actual] fuck”.

Time, then, for another former Labor leader to weigh in.

Bill Shorten was being interviewed on ABC’s Afternoon Briefing when he came out with this: “Let me just say for the record as a politician, the vaccine rollout in Australia is a shit show.”

When the ever-professional host Pat Karvelas noted wryly that he swore on national television, Shorten doubled down with, “I’m just saying what 25 million Australian adults are thinking”.

Fuckin’ oath.

While some people noted his mispronunciation of shitshow as two words, incredibly more people were offended by Shorten’s language about the vaccine shitshow than the actual vaccine shitshow.

Actually, I thought he was restrained but, given his obvious unfamiliarity with swearwords, I can help with a more appropriate and officially recognised technical term to describe the current situation with pollies mishandling the pandemic.

“Shitastrophy” — a word officially used for “massive mess-ups, fucked-up situations and epic fails”.