As the Team of $55 Million continue to write just what they’re paid to, New Zealanders too often have to turn to overseas media for anything approaching objective reporting (at least, from the legacy media: The BFD is just one of a handful of independent media within NZ’s shores bent on keeping the bastards honest).
The only problem is, as I often point out, most overseas legacy media know almost nothing about NZ politics (even less than I do!). All they know is the guff peddled by the likes of Stuff and glossy women’s magazines.
Which is why fairy floss like this gets passed off in even a supposed conservative journal of record.
For a year Jacinda Ardern has been trying to find time to get married – an event she now accepts is unlikely before the election due next year.
“We had loosely said this summer, but then we were just too slow and our friends are too busy, so we’ve probably left it a little bit too late,” Ms Ardern, 42, said of her long-delayed plans to marry the filmmaker Clarke Gayford, father of her daughter Neve Te Aroha, 4. “Barring something spontaneous, I can’t see how that’s going to happen.”
As The BFD’s own Cam asked: who the hell puts off a wedding because your friends have other arrangements? I mean, it surely couldn’t be because she knows Kiwis will see it for what it is: a cynical, indulgent effort at buying distraction from a collapsing country. Of course not.
Bernard Lagan is a New Zealander by birth but fled his native land decades ago like so many others. So perhaps he might be excused for writing such clueless, rose-tinted guff (complete with long-outdated, women’s-glossy header photo, from back when his object of socialist onanism looked somewhat less like Skeletor).
Have the barf-bags ready, BFDers, for such passages as this:
Ms Ardern made her name on the left when, upon her sweeping re-election in 2020, she secured New Zealand’s first majority government in 20 years and the world’s most openly gay parliament, and one in which women held half the 120 seats […]
Her civility, empathy and compassion, especially after the massacre of 51 Muslim worshippers in 2019
Then comes the incomprehensible twist: why, oh why, don’t New Zealanders love their princess like they used to?
Yet two years on her government is eyeing defeat. One of the nation’s most watched polls last week put Labour support at its lowest since Ms Ardern became leader, with the real prospect that her government will be rejected.
How can this possibly be? She’s kind — kind, you ingrates!
And her “ambition”. Can’t forget the ambition. Results don’t count for anything, you see – it’s what you say that matters. As is all too often the case with the left, saying the right things is elevated above actually delivering.
She is also the victim of her own aspiration, having undertaken to defeat homelessness and lift children out of poverty. After promising to build 100,000 extra state houses for the poor – 10,000 by 2021 – the government had produced a mere 1366 by July.
Instead, thousands of homeless people are crammed into motels with the government paying the bills, while the numbers of families on housing waiting lists has soared by 400 per cent.
Some of us might call that rank incompetence but, no, it’s kindness.
In fact, it’s Jacinda’s kindness that’s the root of all the misperceptions that she’s running the country into the ground. Even NZ’s surging crime rate is all down to some misguided rapscallions misunderstanding her kindness.
Billowing youth and gang crime in a country that thinks of itself safer than most has alarmed many – and much of the increase have occurred on Ms Ardern’s watch. Ram raids are up by 500 per cent. Gun crime in Auckland, the largest city, has increased by more than 50 per cent in a decade, much of it attributed to the arrival of bikie gangs.
High levels of truancy allied to the young age of many of the criminals, emboldened by the knowledge that youth sentencing laws provided mild consequences, have led to widespread perception that Ms Ardern is soft on crime.
“That’s one of the reasons why Ardern is becoming unpopular,” Greg Newbold, emeritus professor of criminology at the University of Canterbury, said. “Because this whole kindness thing means people can do what the hell they want, especially young offenders. That’s the perception.”
The Australian
A perception fuelled by the way that Ardern, her police ministers, police commissioner “Cuddles” Coster, and even the Human Rights Commissioner, have endlessly pandered to criminal gangs. From police not just standing by but actually enabling gang parades to shut down highways and suburbs, to doling out millions in taxpayer funding for, astonishingly, drug and domestic violence programs run by gang lords.
Does this sound like a surfeit of “kindness” – or a gangster state?
Oh, come now: Jacinda’s not a bad leader – just misunderstood.
If only you ingrates would see that as clearly as legacy media journalists can.