Wendy
Word from The Beehive is that Ardern never meant 2019 to be her ‘Year of Delivery’, it was just a ‘spin-line produced on the fly by her top spin doctor to get his boss out of a tight situation’.
So was it simply a case of ‘the spin doctor made me say it’? A crafty way to get out of a tight jam? Sadly a bit like that old stand by ‘the dog ate my homework’, not readily believed by many people.
Turns out her top speechwriter is taking the fall for the failure of his memorable line that turned out to be a fizzer. Apparently we should not blame Ardern because the catchphrase was never meant to be taken seriously. It was nothing more than a manufactured sound bite.
Yeah right. Because it was a massive failure we are told it was not a serious proposition. Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? Do these people think that we, like Pooh Bear, have very small brains?
This pathetic attempt of avoidance of accountability by this shallow and inept government is like a massive two-finger salute to the people of New Zealand.
The ‘Year of Delivery’ line has been a stick gifted to the opposition by Ardern to beat her government with throughout 2019 as their failures have mounted up and probably helped keep National’s poll ratings up.
Hint to Ardern’s Brains’ Trust: Don’t publicise your failures, you just encourage us to re-examine your deeply flawed decision making. Suck it up and move on. Explaining is losing.
Bryce Edwards in his ‘Style over Substance’ opinion piece in The Guardian, New Year’s Day, bemoans the overuse of spin doctors in New Zealand and questions the integrity of National for their overuse of social media to attack the government and mount their 2020 campaign. In their rather effective videos, National is apparently copying others’ successful ideas and appealing to the public’s emotions. Shock horror!
Nice try Mr Edwards. I am struggling to see the correlation between a huge fail (and backtrack) by an ill-prepared Ardern in her use of a spin doctor’s phrase to mislead the public, and the Opposition successfully doing their job of holding the government to account; to which the opinion polls seem to attest.
Political campaigns are battlefields; the spin doctor is part of that. (I agree there are too many, but they don’t seem to be helping our beleaguered PM do they?)
The part-time prime minister (PTPM) catchphrase coined by Simon Bridges during one of Ardern’s less productive times, seems to have caught on. If there wasn’t a grain of truth in it, there would be little mileage in it. Whilst it is endearing of Mr Edwards to come to Ardern’s defence, these are mild responses and not noxious, hate-filled expletives and actions like so much from the left when National was in power.
None of the media was concerned then. They thought it was entertaining to keep repeating ad nauseum in their nightly newscasts, Don Brash and Steven Joyce being unceremoniously attacked by the public. No media protection squad then. And like Jesus, the poor victims just turned the other cheek.
If the government had spent more time taking advice and following it, putting in the hard yards and perfecting policy maybe their ‘Year of Delivery’ would have eventuated. And their spin doctors would not have to work overtime defending the indefensible and making excuses for a prime minister who is lazy, incapable of admitting her mistakes and couldn’t deliver on her promises.
