Laboring the AZ point … Sharma’s sham … Bill calls a shot … Laming to the slaughter

Borat and sold Could we just lay off Kazakhstan, an actual country with real citizens and not a fictional land created to house a hilarious backward stereotype? Not only does it have to suffer the indignity of having sports events use the theme from Borat instead of its actual anthem, it has to live with being used as the example of some foreign “shithole” we’re somehow doing worse than.

So of course when it was pointed our vaccination rates are worse than (get this) Kazakhstan, Labor’s Jason Clare mined this for an attack ad against Scott Morrison. We’re losing to Kazakhstan! Where Borat is from! Can you imagine!

Seriously, guys, come up with some new material.

Bill Shorten is VERY happy to get AZ, thanks a bunch The ALP’s approach to Australia’s vaccine rollout disasters has to be to cleave to the mantra “he had two jobs” — trashing the federal government’s hotel quarantine program, and Scott Morrison’s failure to secure Australia enough doses of Pfizer. Labor has gone particularly hard on the latter, which has involved trashing the AstraZeneca that actually is available to a level that borders on the irresponsible. This approach has hit its apotheosis with the preselecction of Dr Michelle Ananda-Rajah, an infectious diseases expert and physician who was trashing AZ before it was cool.

So we can’t help but wonder if there’s something pointed in former leader Bill Shorten’s post on Instagram yesterday, a beaming mid-jab pic captioned: “Have now had my second AZ jab. Very happy to be fully vaxxed. Doherty Institute has confirmed the AZ is as effective as Pfizer. Time to get those jabs in arms, friends.”

Sharma Chameleon I guess we can’t blame it for trying. A government that will do anything to avoid accountability can’t sit back and let people accuse it of royally botching the vaccine rollout just because it has. So we’ll give Wentworth MP Dave Sharma some credit for attempting to shift the onus from government and back on to individuals with his utterly tone deaf delight at Sydney’s eastern suburbs making the top 10 most vaccinated in Australia: “Let’s keep it up … go and get vaccinated!”

Yeah, we’d love to, buddy. Any reflections on what it says about availability that 23% gets you into the top 10?

Return of Laming Two days ago member for Bowman and man whose only crime is to have too much empathy Andrew Laming tweeted for the first time in five months, regarding the vaccine rollout: “Devastated that nearly six months on, our frontline COVID workers are not yet fully vaccinated.”

He goes on to talk about employers’ obligations to swap the unvaccinated to safe roles, but it’s slightly weird to point out terrible vaccination rates given, you know, the government he’s part of is responsible for it.

This follows a letter sent to his constituents on July 30 in which he manages to walk back his non-apology even further than he already has. He said he had apologised to anyone “genuinely upset” by his “political debate”, but that he’s concluded not one of the complainants was genuine. Laming insists that all his communication is “legitimate and work-related”, and that he will continue to “serve our Redlands community now and into the future”.

Could Laming’s implicit criticism of the government’s rollout and “I’m not going anywhere” rhetoric — despite being deselected as the LNP candidate — imply he’s planning a tilt at the next election as an independent or minor party candidate?