Is Jacinda Ardern going to play Lucky Dip with her Climate Change Commision’s lunatic proposals, or is Ardern herself the luckiest dip of all?
While the left-media in Australia particularly credit Ardern with everything short of walking across the Tasman Sea, the inconvenient truth is that Ardern is simply very lucky to lead a sparsely-populated island nation that’s one of the remotest developed nations on Earth. New Zealand, even more than Australia (in whose lee it shelters), is largely shielded from the buffeting of geopolitical storms.
From climate change to Covid, New Zealand is indeed fortunate to live in its South Pacific bubble. This perception was reflected in an episode of 80s sitcom Family Ties; teenaged Jennifer Keaton’s Inconvenient Truth-style essay so frightens her teacher that he flees to New Zealand, the only place safe from nuclear fallout and toxic pollution.
But that’s television. In reality-land, it’s New Zealanders who flee the Magic Kingdom of Saint Jacinda.
Laura Tingle recently wrote in the Quarterly Essay that New Zealand has taken the ‘high road’ and we should learn from it […]
But here’s the key fact: per capita income in New Zealand is a mere three-quarters of the level in Australia. And over a very long time, there has been no significant narrowing of this gap.
Judged by the number of New Zealanders who live in Australia – there are close to 600,000 or 12 per cent of New Zealand’s population – the ‘high road’ is not a description that would ring true to these émigrés[…]
Super embarrassing, you might think. Actually, unremarked is more accurate.
It’s not for nothing that, as Simon Bridges noted, the government simply stopped counting how many Kiwis were getting the hell out.
It’s also notable that, for all their thundering about fleeing across the Tasman, Australia’s whining lefty journalists are rusted on here, firmer than a Hollywood star refusing to actually move to Canada.
But then, Australia’s left-media have a curious blind-spot for their Socialist Barbie. Ask an Australian journalist about Kiwibuild, housing prices, child poverty, Ihumatao, sexual harassment scandals… well, anything other than climate or COVID, and you’ll draw an even more slack-jawed stare than usual. But, hey, it’s, well, it’s the vibe and ah, no that’s it. It’s the vibe.
Then there’s the barking mad stuff recommended by her Climate Commission. Even Ardern had had the rudimentary good sense to slyly exempt agriculture from NZ’s emissions targets. It might be the country’s single biggest source of emissions, but it’s also its biggest earner.
Now the zealots who make up this commission are not of a mind to give those belching animals a free pass. Indeed, the commission’s chair likened farmers to whalers and we all know what happened to whalers, even the good one. That’s right: New Zealand agriculture is the past, not the future.
So, that would be New Zealand’s major earner gone. Hell, why not? Ardern has already destroyed New Zealand’s other big money-spinner, tourism, with barely a thought.
The whole Climate Commission report is a grab-bag of ivory-tower lunacy. Ardern will almost certainly plunge in with both hands.
If you are a saint, none of this stuff matters. She has committed New Zealand to net zero emissions by 2050. She has declared a climate emergency. She is listening to the science. She is a leader we should admire. Why can’t we have one like her?
Spectator Australia
So, all talk on pointless fluff, madcap policies which are driving New Zealand’s economy and society into the ground, and a foreign policy bent on turning the nation into a puppet state of genocidal communists. Oh, and more lockdowns.
Why would we want one like her is probably more the point. We’ve got enough hopeless idiots of our own, thanks.
When Donald Horne called Australia The Lucky Country, it was a backhanded compliment. What Horne meant was that Australia is so blessed by geography and resources that even the uselessness of our elites couldn’t stuff it up too badly. The same might be said for New Zealand: the Land of the Lucky Dip.
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