Despite the endless temper-tantrums of the left, we in Australia are lucky that we have at least some counterweight to relentless group-think in the mainstream media. Unlike the endless, mindless fawning of most, left-leaning, news media, papers like The Australian retain enough of their critical faculties to see easily through the manufactured fraud that is Jacinda Ardern.
The Oz even employs editors perspicacious enough to notice what I’ve been telling BFD readers for months: Jacinda Ardern and Daniel Andrews are the idiot twins of the Antipodean left.
They excel in woke gesture and progressive symbolism. Their achievements in real policy terms are thin or negative.
Greg Sheridan, The Australian’s foreign editor, tries manfully to list Ardern’s strengths before launching into criticism, but only succeeds in damning her with faint and, in any case, mostly mistaken praise.
Ardern has done three positive things. She has just about eradicated COVID-19. She has navigated the politics of the virus so well she stands on the brink of electoral triumph. And she responded with moral clarity and decency to the Christchurch massacre.
Firstly, she “eradicated” nothing. The Wuhan plague remains stubbornly persistent in New Zealand, albeit at low numbers. But those owe nothing to any actions of Ardern’s. Claiming that Ardern’s belated rush to extreme and – in their first nine days, illegally-enforced – lockdowns “eradicated the virus” is a classic case of mistakenly correlating cause and effect. As I’ve also been writing for months at The BFD, the evidence quickly emerged and has only gotten stronger that lockdowns do not work. The simple fact is that New Zealand – isolated, with a tiny population and no mass transit systems to speak of – was never going to be hit as hard as the US or UK.
It’s also hard to see the “moral clarity” or “decency” of exploiting a tragedy to enforce authoritarian restrictions on the basic rights of New Zealanders.
The only accuracy is that Ardern has navigated – although “exploited” would be the more apt word – the politics of the Wuhan plague with all the adroitness of Xi Xinping.
And that’s all the good Sheridan can find to say about Ardern.
However, she has still been a poor Prime Minister, elected almost by accident under the Byzantine protocols of her country’s eccentric electoral system, though she won far fewer votes than the National government she replaced[…]
But undoubtedly part of the international Jacindamania comes from the fact she is a young left-wing woman who gave birth in office and took maternity leave. That is all wonderful but it has no bearing on policy achievement[…]
Her list of undelivered election promises is staggering: 100,000 affordable homes promised, 600 built; homelessness to be eradicated, it increased; zero carbon emissions by 2050, emissions went up; reduce child poverty, it went up; regional public service emphasis, more public servants based in Wellington than before; light rail from Auckland airport to CBD, abandoned. But then came the virus and she could do her high priestess of the woke religion stuff, day after day.
As Sheridan notes, much of Ardern’s international fame comes from her posturing as the “anti-Trump”. But even that is mostly a fraud. While Ardern struts and mouths platitudes about rescuing refugees from the wicked clutches of Australia, the numbers tell quite another story. Australia’s annual refugee intake is 20 times New Zealand’s. Even adjusted for population, Australia’s generosity still exceeds New Zealand’s four-fold.
But the grim reality of even Ardern’s self-declared great achievement in this so-called “COVID election” is far, far less than she or her media cheerleaders would have voters believe.
Even on COVID-19, the Ardern government has done much less than it seems and at much greater cost than other countries have paid[…]
The Ardern government was a bit slow to realise how serious COVID-19 was and when it finally responded it did so with overkill[…]This has come at a massive cost to NZ, which saw its economy shrink by more than 12 per cent in the second quarter this year compared with 7 per cent in Australia, even allowing for the fantastic cost of the Andrews government’s failures in Victoria.
As I’ve repeatedly written, Ardern has locked New Zealand into a losing strategy: having made “eradication” (however false) the metric, Ardern cannot and will not open the country’s borders at least until a vaccine is developed and in widespread use. This is years away at best. In the meantime, New Zealand’s economy is suffocating.
Two of New Zealand’s most important export industries are tourism and international education, and neither can meaningfully restart before a vaccine arrives.
As has also been previously noted, Ardern’s policy is essentially selfish. Like Prospero in The Masque of the Red Death, Ardern is hiding away in Castle New Zealand and leaving the peasants in the outside world to their fate. A curious policy, it must be said, for one who so endlessly parrots globalist rhetoric.
That’s the point with progressive politics. It has almost nothing to do with competent government administration and useful policies reliably delivered, and almost everything to do with gesture, narrative and the endless recital of the progressive line.
But, largely thanks to a self-interestedly fawning local media and a devastating pandemic, Ardern seems set to win a second term.
With Peters gone, and the Greens more influential, she will move left in her second term, presaging a lost decade for our beloved cousins across the ditch. One consolation: the best of them will come here.
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