As I’ve written many times, now, Jacinda Ardern is more and more shaping up to be New Zealand’s Kevin Rudd: a fresh-faced leader who rockets up to record highs in the opinion polls and sets the media swooning like a pack of teenage girls – and then collapses in ignominy and defeat in just one term. Ardern’s career is rapidly following the same trajectory, and hitting the same beats as Kevin Rudd’s.
Rudd quickly acquired a reputation as a narcissistic, globe-trotting PM more concerned about strutting at the UN than attending to domestic affairs. Even on the home front, Rudd was quickly seen as all talk and photo-ops, no substance. Rudd became particularly notorious for his “brain-fart” policies on “progressive” causes like climate change, which sounded good scribbled on the back of a coaster, but quickly collapsed into defeat and debt.
Is this all starting to sound familiar?
But that hasn’t stopped the earnest immersing themselves into heroic levels of virtue signalling…And no one talks about stuff more than our serial thought bubbler, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern […]Politically speaking, this is why she has the issues she has. This is why the gloss has come off the shiny veneer of Ardernism.
A Newspaper
Lyndon Johnson supposedly remarked that “If we’ve lost Cronkite, we’ve lost America”. When Kevin Rudd lost the Australian media, he lost his party and lost office. If Jacinda Ardern has lost ‘A Newspaper’, she should be very worried indeed.
Things aren’t looking much rosier for her over at Newsroom.
Jacinda Ardern’s election campaign was high on hope (remember relentless positivity?); hope for the homeless, hope for decisive action on climate change (“my generation’s nuclear-free moment”, she described it at her campaign launch); and hope for a new sense of coming together as a modern, progressive and compassionate nation. Upon coming to office, it was accompanied by a strong expression of energy and enthusiasm which persuaded New Zealanders that new times were indeed upon us.
There have been some stunning highs and many lows since those heady days. Sadly, the Prime Minister’s greatest high came in reaction to one of our country’s greatest tragedies…But there have been other (and more) times when the response has not been nearly as impressive, or sure-footed, and where the level of hope invested is not being repaid in Government actions.
One of Rudd’s government’s biggest Achilles’ heels was its woefully incompetent meddling in housing and infrastructure: “Building the Education Revolution” (blowing billions paying cowboys to put up school halls), the “Energy Efficient Homes Package” (blowing billions paying cowboys to put in dodgy insulation, which actually led to the deaths of several workers) and the NBN (blowing billions paying cowboys to put in fibre optic cables).
Again: sound familiar?
KiwiBuild is an abysmal joke that has dashed the hopes of many and virtually destroyed the credibility of the Minister responsible, while housing very few […] As for the “nuclear-free moment” of climate change, the gap between the hope created by the rhetoric and the level of actual achievement is nearly as wide.
Then there was Rudd’s “closing the gap” grandstanding on Aboriginal affairs. For all the hot air, apologies and extra millions, the gap got wider. Again – familiar?
On a smaller scale, is the brewing Ihumatao situation. The Prime Minister was very quick to step in […] yet, [the] initial activist enthusiasm has waned considerably, much to the chagrin of the occupation organisers, who clearly and reasonably assumed that a Prime Ministerial intervention actually meant something.
Disappointment has now turned to anger.
Like Ardern, Rudd arrived in a puff of fairy-dust. But then the clock struck 12 and the glass slippers came off – and it was all over with shocking suddenness.
Voters are prepared to give a Government space and time to implement its policies, if they have a confidence the Government knows what it is doing. But that tolerance goes quickly if the public gains the feeling that it does not really know what it is doing, or grossly oversold its policy programme at election time […] At the same time, some have noticed that the Prime Minister seems more and more detached from the day-to-day grind of government.
newsroom.co.nz/2019/08/23/765629/a-government-of-dashed-hopes
Australia had “Kevin747”, New Zealand has its “PartTimePM”. It remains to be seen how similarly their stories come to an end.