Jacinda Ardern once said that she’d “never told a lie in politics”. That was, of course, a lie. Since then there have been many instances where her lying ways have been caught out. Kiwibuild, all lies. Light rail to the airport within four years, another lie. MIQ was performing wonderfully, yet more lies. Reducing child poverty? It went up. On and on it goes. No wonder her nose continues to grow.
The latest is her promise in the 2020 election campaign not to pay any more subsidies to corporate bludgers Rio Tinto over the aluminium smelter at Tiwai Point. You guessed it…it was another lie.
The government offered to pay millions of dollars to Rio Tinto just months after promising in the election campaign it would not give a direct subsidy.
The offer is revealed in 25 pages of letters released to RNZ under the OIA, between the mining multinational and ministers over a deal to keep the Tiwai Point smelter from closing early.
Rio Tinto was urgently seeking a deal to deliver a big cut in its $60 million-a-year power lines – or transmission – charges.
While campaigning in Southland ahead of the 2020 election Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said: “We have said we do not believe we should be giving a direct government subsidy to Rio Tinto, so that’s not what we will be doing.”
Three months later, the government wrote to Rio Tinto, which owns 80 percent of New Zealand Aluminium Smelters (NZAS), with an offer of a payment to begin the very next month, in January this year.
“To achieve a managed exit for the smelter and in consideration of our respective interests, the New Zealand government will provide a Transmission Transition payment to NZAS of [blanked out],” it said.
“This payment would start from January 2021 until December 2024.”
Radio NZ
A clear cut and demonstrable lie. In fact it is now beyond a joke that the Prime Minister continues to claim that she has never told a lie in politics. Perhaps that was the start of her lying ways.
Jacinda Ardern has gone from a politician unblemished by a litany of lies in 2017 to one now drowning in a sea of them. Not one thing the government has promised to deliver has ever materialised.
Their big promises lie broken and discarded on the floor of the Parliament in a brazen display of over-promising and under-delivering never before seen in this country’s democratic history.
Word has it that some of the more honest actors in the Beehive have suggested that Pinocchio be adopted as the Government’s mascot.
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