Remember when Jacinda Ardern made a big song and dance about her “wellbeing budget”? Of course, the legacy media fawned at La Ardern’s feet, as they always do — but how has the “wellbeing budget” turned out in reality?

Like everything the Ardern Government does, reality is grimly detached from spin.

Mental wellbeing is worse and more people have been feeling lonely since the Covid-19 pandemic hit, but the Mental Health Foundation says Covid-19 is not solely responsible.

Of course it isn’t: it’s the Ardern Government’s response that is responsible.

Covid didn’t confine people to their houses: the Ardern Government did. Covid didn’t lock New Zealanders out of their own country: the Ardern Government did. Covid didn’t refuse to let people be at their loved-ones’ bedsides for their last days on earth: the Ardern Government did. Covid didn’t ban children from school and force them to wear masks everywhere: the Ardern Government did.

All of these intolerable, petty cruelties and more — the job losses, the business closures, the isolation, the manufactured social division — were imposed by the Ardern Government. Without exception, based on completely false ‘expert advice’.

Stats New Zealand’s 2021 Wellbeing Statistics show more than 28 percent of the population reported poor mental wellbeing, which is nearly five percentage points more than the last survey in 2018.

There are also more people feeling lonely.

Being isolated from each other will do that to you.

The media almost admit it.

Wellbeing principal analyst Dr Claire Bretherton said the data clearly showed life in a pandemic.

“The difference in mental wellbeing, for example, is a really important one that we think reflects what’s been happening in New Zealand over the past couple of years,” she said.

RNZ

But, if the legacy media and this Government’s assorted camp-followers actually admitted that Ardern’s Government has bollixed ‘wellbeing’ as comprehensively as they have everything from Kiwibuild to child poverty, that sweet river of taxpayers’ money would dry up.

So of course they blither about ‘rainbow communities’ and colonialism, instead.

Anything but admit that everything their fairy princess touches turns to excrement.

Image credit The BFD.

Punk rock philosopher. Liberalist contrarian. Grumpy old bastard. I grew up in a generational-Labor-voting family. I kept the faith long after the political left had abandoned it. In the last decade...