So much for this Government’s trademark kindness. Matthew Hooton writes about the lies and smears of Chris Hipkins and his eventual forced apology to journalist Charlotte Bellis that came as a result of those lies and smears.
Hipkins has now apologised to Bellis, but only after threats of defamation proceedings.
Making his words even more hollow, the public apology comes five months after Hipkins must have been advised that his smear was untrue and more than three months after he apologised to Bellis privately.
For five months, Hipkins has allowed the public to believe that Bellis had twice been offered government assistance to return home from Afghanistan but had turned it down – implying she was some kind of drama queen making a political point, rather than a mum-to-be wanting to give birth in her hometown of Christchurch rather than Kabul.
NZ Herald
It was a smear, and it was a lie. That’s this Government’s trademark kindness for you. Stand up for your rights as a Kiwi citizen, and get smeared and lied about by government ministers.
For her part, Jacinda Ardern says the main thing is that an apology has now been given.
I believe the sequence of events smells of the public apology being cynically delayed until the Government was required to release official information revealing its lie and after Hipkins had been relieved of his Covid responsibilities in last week’s Cabinet reshuffle.
Were Hipkins still Covid-19 Response Minister when it all became public on Wednesday, Ardern would have had to sack him. He still remains Minister of Education, Minister of Police, Leader of the House, fifth-ranked in Cabinet and Minister for the Public Service, making him head of the entire Wellington bureaucracy.
Once, Hipkins remaining in Cabinet at all would have been untenable. But standards have progressively fallen, first under John Key’s Government and further under Ardern.
NZ Herald
Ardern’s excuses and actions merely condone the lies and smears. That’s what ‘kindness’ from her now means…smears and lies.
Bear in mind too, that the MIQ system was found to be unlawful. Why hasn’t this Government apologised to all the thousands of others affected by their unlawful refusal to let them return to their home country?
Advised that the system was of dubious legality, the Government’s practice seems to have been to take seriously only those applicants with the means to sue – and even then to wait just before an actual hearing to back down.
The priority was not helping desperate New Zealand citizens return home. It was avoiding embarrassing Ardern and Hipkins by preventing court judgments that might find the system unlawful.
The Government is not appealing these High Court judgments. Yet it has also made clear that it will not be apologising to anyone.
NZ Herald
Sorry seems to be the hardest word for Jacinda Ardern.
If more were needed to reveal the Government as a mere focus-group-driven PR charade, five years since the Prime Minister appointed herself Minister for Child Poverty Reduction and declared that her Government would build 100,000 new homes, KidsCan founder Julie Chapman reports that “poverty is the worst it’s been for families”, mainly because of housing.
The State of Child Health Report from Cure Kids, in partnership with the Paediatric Society, the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and Otago University’s Child and Youth Epidemiology Service, found that New Zealand’s rates of dental disease, respiratory conditions, skin infections, acute rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease are too high relative to other resource-rich countries. For dental disease and respiratory conditions, hospitalisation rates continue to worsen.
According to the Government’s Children’s Commissioner, Frances Eivers, “on many measures, New Zealand is currently one of the worst places in the developed world to be a child.”
There comes a time when governments simply must be thrown out. It’s bad enough that the Ardern Government has proven incompetent at delivering any of the things it was elected to do. Its performance over Bellis shows it has now joined some of its most infamous predecessors in the slime.
NZ Herald
Dare I say it, it seems that both Chris Hipkins and Jacinda Ardern have been playing “Dirty Politics”.
I can’t wait to see the back of these evil clowns, who dared to, and in fact did, persecute their own citizens in a vainglorious attempt to be the best in the world at something other than failing to deliver.
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