Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has confessed to what we have known all along. She makes most of her decisions based on emotion rather than facts and logic.
[…] ?Very little of what I have done has been deliberate. It?s intuitive. I think it?s just the nature of an event like this. There is very little time to sit and think in those terms. You just do what feels right.?
She crosses the office to her desk and pulls an A4 sheet of paper from a drawer. It?s been folded in half, and in half again, and again. Printed on the back is the running order for an event she hosted in Auckland the night before the attack. On the front are a series of notes, scrawled in Ardern?s rounded handwriting, growing more hurried and less legible as they cross the page. A handful of words have been highlighted in bright orange.
One person custody may be other offndr.
Act
of exraordnry
violence. It has no place in NZ.
They are us.
?These are my notes for the first press conference,? she explains. ?I was in a hotel room. We only had a short amount of time to prepare.?
[…] Gun law reforms, intended to ban all semi-automatic firearms, were expedited, with cross-party support. An inquiry was commissioned, tasked with asking, among other things, whether an emphasis on jihadi terrorism had meant New Zealand intelligence agencies were looking the wrong way.
theguardian
An emotional leader is a leader to fear. An emotional leader is not someone who we can trust to make the hard choices or the right decisions. In the aftermath of the terror attack, New Zealand is now faced with an undemocratic gun law that has been rushed. The government has not followed due process and the draft law is so poorly written that all guns could end up being effectively banned.
Our free speech is now under serious threat with the push (only months after the government finally got rid of the blasphemy law) to bring in ‘hate speech’ laws which will effectively be blasphemy laws via the back door. Having a leader in charge of our country who does what “feels right” is a terrifying thought.
Would you want a surgeon to do what feels right, or would you want him or her to put in hours before your surgery looking at your x rays, reading your medical notes and weighing up what could go wrong so that he or she is prepared for all eventualities?