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The Biggest Fail
Each subsequent failure by the coalition government leaves me searching my vocabulary for a word so pathetic, so pitiful, so derisory to adequately describe the fathomless depths being reached with each never-ending flop. It feels like digging a hole so deep, you’ve reached the core of the earth and further progress becomes upward.
Metaphors and similes certainly provide a wider range of application, and I prefer to produce my own where practicable. Not being a highly qualified man, I guessed F was the poorest academic grade that could be applied, but figured New Zealand’s wussified system would probably extend no lower than D with a heart symbol.
Google is everyone’s cold, heartless friend. It confirmed New Zealand does use F as the lowest possible grade. However, other jurisdictions have less sensitive labels for truly miserable students. Europe has an ECTS scale (European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System) which uses a 7 level range (A,B,C,D,E,Fxx, F) to easily interpret the variety of unique national systems. It wouldn’t be too foreign outside of Europe, either.
- Singapore gives Junior Students a U for scores below 40% while Secondary Schools apply an F9.
- What Turkey lacks in creativity, it compensates for with sheer bluntness: FF.
- Ireland’s NG for 0-9% is described by Wikipedia as ‘unworthy of marking’, which is odd considering NG is a genuine mark.
- Students in Iceland who submit papers unworthy of marking will find an O swirled on the front. That drives home the non-grading of your feeble attempts.
- Ontario uses an R instead of an F for those scoring lower than a D- (0-49%). Curious given this is the province which authored the C-16 gender pronouns bill, motivating Jordan Peterson’s furious opposition and subsequent international fame.
- South American countries apply a bit of linguistic flair when needing to communicate that you’re intellectually hopeless:
- 0.00-9.99 out of 20.00 is Desaprobado in Peru’s one of a kind scale
- Uruguay’s minimum R (Regular) is as bad as it gets, below RB (Regular Bueno)
- Colombia rates students scoring 0.0-3.9 out of 10 as Deficiente (D)
- My favourite of all is the result of Denmark reforming its 13 skale (13 scale) system to the syv-trins-skalaen (The 7 Step Scale) in 2007 easing the comparison with the newly established ECTS (see above). Should you ‘Ringe’ in Denmark, you’ll be scored -3.
This Labour-led government gets a big -3 from me.
I’ve said before that my favourite feature of this government is their incompetence. If this wasn’t the most bumbling, disorganised and clueless New Zealand Government I can remember, then pursuing their socialist agenda might do some real damage. That was before COVID-19 inspired one of the world’s most restrictive lockdown regimes. What can they claim to have achieved in this current term now?
- Closing the Partnership school model
- Closing the borders over a long and half-hearted series of attempts
- Closing down the country (even that was technically illegal for the first nine days).
Unfortunately, making stupid promises is almost as damaging as following through on those promises because until 2017, New Zealanders were quite rational in expecting the Government to do most of what it said. Nearly three years after promising to build light rail down Dominion Road to the airport, the Government has shelved the plan. The promise’s damage has already been done as small businesses fled in anticipation of construction in parts of Mt Roskill and Mt Albert. News that the Government is no longer planning to build the rail won’t reverse that damage because unpredictability is terrible for business.
Unpredictability doesn’t remain isolated to one region of the country or sector of the economy. The Ihumatao fiasco was initially a simpler question of how to deal with a group of squatters. The land being occupied is private, the relevant iwi has settled their treaty claim and Fletcher Challenge planned to embark on a 480 house development in a city desperately short of new stock. A naive nosey by the Prime Minister into the dispute isn’t incredibly expensive only for Fletcher Challenge. It leaves the rest of us questioning our faith in the Treaty claim process and sanctity of private property. If such fundamentals are brought into question, we all wonder who might be next.
The news headlines during the lockdown didn’t include much reason to celebrate but they were reassuringly regular in that the Prime Minister would appear on television at the same time each day and convey a message that was warmly communicated regardless of the content. Now her Bachelor of Communication Studies threatens to fall from the wall; returning to Alert Level 1 is a stark reminder that more than one individual makes up this government. Most of them are appallingly equipped for the task, some having exhausted any trace of humility or humanity that might have engendered any sympathy.
At time of writing, Doctor of Theology and Minister of Health, David Clark hadn’t yet attempted to pin all blame for COVID-19 re-entering New Zealand on the well respected Director-General of Health. The man who accompanied the Prime Minister on her daily address to the nation while the slimy minister got busted repeatedly breaking the lockdown rules, has had the country turned against him by the minister almost as effectively as the PM and DG got the country on their side. Surely Jacinda Ardern might finally fire somebody?
One sort of unpredictability that may give New Zealanders a reason for optimism, following such an abrupt return to reality, will surely be the polls! At the beginning of the year, there was reason to believe the 2020 election result could get close. During the lockdown, they overwhelmingly predicted a Labour party landslide. Now the rest of the Government have so effectively reminded the country they work with Jacinda too, surely they will swing back just as quickly?
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