Look back to April 20, 2020, when Uri Friedman, in The Atlantic, reported that “Jacinda Ardern’s leadership style, focused on empathy, isn’t just resonating with her people, it’s putting the country on track for success against the corona virus.”
Well, not now. Jacinda Ardern’s leadership style is focused on power and control. She has cried havoc and let slip the dogs of war.
“The military order Havoc! was a signal given to the English military forces in the Middle Ages to direct the soldiery (in Shakespeare’s parlance ‘the dogs of war’) to pillage and chaos. The ‘let slip’ is an allusion to the slip collars that were used to restrain dogs and were easily ‘let slip’ to allow the run and hunt.”
phrases.org.uk/meanings
The government dogs are running and hunting and look where we are today. She has set one of us against another. He Puapua. Three Waters. Vaccination mandates. Friend against friend. Family against family. Protesters again out in force.
The freedom fighters promised multi-city gridlock and delivered. Next weekend Groundswell will again take to the streets. People have had enough.
No doubt our haughty PM will once again dismiss those out there protesting in order to have our basic rights upheld as not representing the vast bulk of the population. What a tone-deaf and arrogant attitude.
I did not think that I would ever see people take to the streets in ever-increasing numbers in the way we are now doing. This is noo zil’d, we don’t do things like this. This is not us. We are peaceable, biddable, and compliant – up to the point we have now reached.
We don’t accept what is happening. We won’t, any longer, stand by and be part of its damage.
Teachers about to be removed from the classroom as undesirables. By Police.
Nurses losing the jobs they love at the very time they are needed in increasing, not decreasing numbers.
By now we all know people, friends and family, who are being affected by business closures, job losses actual or imminent, precious relationships distanced because of differing views.
We are hurt beyond belief at the inability to be part of the security of lives we have built around family. The weddings, births and deaths that mark our progress as people and as participants in meaningful rituals.
The statelessness of thousands of our citizens, trapped in a never-ending MIQ story. The emotional loss and grief is unrelenting and enduring. The economic and social destruction will resonate for years to come.
Just to be clear. I am double-vaxxed. I do not subscribe to dis- or misinformation nor promote either. I just want to be able to have my rights, and those of others, upheld and respected.
The readiness with which MSM categorises all of us as anti-vaxxers and spreaders of mis- or disinformation and dangerous loonies because we wish to make our own minds up on the medical procedure we are faced with, is a constant reminder of the master-servant relationship for which they have been bought and paid.
Back to Uri Freidman’s words of eighteen months ago.
“Jacinda Ardern, the 39-year-old prime minister of New Zealand, is forging a path of her own. Her leadership style is one of empathy in a crisis that tempts people to fend for themselves. Her messages are clear, consistent, and somehow simultaneously sobering and soothing. And her approach isn’t just resonating with her people on an emotional level. It is also working remarkably well.
People feel that Ardern “doesn’t preach at them; she’s standing with them,” Helen Clark, New Zealand’s prime minister from 1999 to 2008, told me.”
Well, our PM is not standing with us now. She went to Auckland only as a grudge visit and skedaddled as soon as her plane ‘Jacinda One’ was ready to head back to the safety of Wellington. Did they even have to do a shut-down and start-up procedure? Such was the brevity of her visit, to a bemused business and a vaccination centre.
A Research article, Pandemic leadership: Lessons from New Zealand’s approach to COVID-19, by Suze Wilson, first published May 26, 2020, analysed Ardern’s leadership.
“This case study analyses the leadership approach and practices of the New Zealand government, led by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, in the response thus far to the COVID-19 pandemic. It reports on how a shared sense of purpose has been established, that of minimizing harm to lives and livelihoods, for which the government has sought – and secured – New Zealanders’ commitment.
Key leadership practices comprise the government’s willingness to themselves be led by expertise, its efforts to mobilise the population, and to enable coping, all of which serve to build the trust in leadership needed for transformative, collective action such as the pandemic demands.
At the time of writing, New Zealand appears well on track to achieve its ambitious goal of achieving rapid and complete control over the COVID-19 outbreak – not just ‘flattening the curve’ as other countries are struggling to do – at least in part due to these leadership contributions.
A framework of good practices for pandemic leadership is offered drawn from this case study, in the hope transferable lessons can be taken to aid others in the continuing struggle to limit the harm COVID-19 poses to lives and livelihoods throughout the world.”
journals.sagepub.com
One definition of political leadership holds that:
“Political leadership implies both a political and operational dimension. Strong and structured political support, with ministers determining the overall direction of the Strategy, taking ownership and responsibility, aligning policies and funds, and providing the resources and status for decision making, is crucial.”
alpine-region.eu
That is not what we are experiencing. I wonder what Uri Friedman and The Atlantic would make of the leadership of our illustrious PM should they revisit the article and update it in terms of what we see today with what more resembles chaos theory, with no one having any idea what is going to be in the headlines when they wake each morning.
John Matson on December 23, 2008, in Scientific American, reported on an experiment conducted by Physicist Tristan Gilet, then a visiting student at MIT from the University of Liège in Belgium, and John Bush, an MIT mathematician: Chaos Theory Simplified: Just Follow the Bouncing Droplet, A droplet on a soap-film trampoline yields a shoestring chaos theory model.
“Two researchers have created a strikingly simple model of chaotic behavior, in which variations in initial conditions become so tangled and magnified by the system’s dynamics that the outcome appears to be unpredictably random.
“Such chaotic systems come into play in describing financial markets and weather patterns, as in the famed butterfly effect, in which the beating of a butterfly’s wings can theoretically cause enough of an atmospheric disturbance to significantly alter later weather outcomes.”
The PM might well take notice of the increasing beating of butterfly wings, as there is a growing groundswell of discontent. To amend the words of Uri Friedman, her messages are unclear, inconsistent, sobering and concerning. Her leadership is not resonating with an increasing number of people.