It had to happen. She may have a nice smile and seem like a decent enough person, but Jacinda is simply not prime minister material, and it is finally beginning to show. Her inability to answer questions because she simply does not know the answers is becoming legendary. Her absences from the house have seen her labelled as the #partimepm. Her tendency to dash off overseas at every opportunity and leaving the mess behind her, is an obvious ploy. Dare I say, her other trick, of wheeling out the baby every time she is in trouble, is becoming extremely obvious too.
Her popularity would have waned sooner, had it not been for the Christchurch massacre. Whilst no one would have wanted it to happen, the mosque shootings were a godsend for Jacinda. The whole world praised her for her empathy and compassion. She handled the situation well but her knee jerk reaction to ban semi-automatic weapons has shown her up for the amateur she really is. In a supposed attempt to make everyone feel safer, she has given us all reason to feel much less safe than we did before, as law-abiding citizens give up their guns; but the gangs, of course, do not.
Matthew Hooton believes her popularity has fallen by 16 points, to 35%. Sure, it is still a long way ahead of Simon Bridges’, but it is a very big drop in popularity in a very short time. It seems that people are finally starting to see through her.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says losing some of her popularity is the result of taking on serious challenges in Government.
“When it comes to the personal ratings what I equally accept is that when you are in Government and taking on big challenges and difficult conversations and hard debates there are going to be people who disagree with you,” Ardern said.
“We are not going to make progress on some of these big difficult issues unless we are willing to confront hard conversations.
“If you simply govern just to maintain popularity it probably means you are not taking some of those big issues on.”
But she is not taking on any of the big issues. Kiwibuild is a big failure. Mental health has a lot of money allocated to it, but with little or no progress so far. Child poverty and homelessness get worse and worse and, this week, we found out that suicide rates are the highest ever. Ever.
Did she mean that telling Fletchers to stop working at Ihumateo, putting a commercial agreement and property rights at risk and then boarding a plane to go to the islands and leaving everyone else to sort out the mess is her idea of dealing with the ‘big issues’?
Ardern’s government has moved on the controversial issues like abortion and climate change and has ploughed money into mental health, which she describes as one of the long-term challenges facing New Zealand.
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Wasting billions of dollars on “climate change” when we contribute less than 1% of global emissions is madness; and most people know it. Many people, while agreeing that abortion should be removed from the Crimes Act, do not want to see late-term abortions, and they are horrified at the prospect. As for the money being ‘ploughed’ into mental health, the latest suicide statistics would suggest that this is just another case of allocating money but having no idea how to spend it – which is something that this government is famous for.
So Jacinda is dreaming if she thinks her popularity is in freefall because she is tackling the ‘hard issues’, because she isn’t tackling any of the hard issues at all. She wouldn’t know where to start. It is much more likely that people are seeing her for what she really is – a decent enough person, but someone who is way out of her depth, who does not understand some of the basic concepts of government, and should never have been put where she is in the first place.
That is the truth about our prime minister. We all know it, and she probably does too.