The British comedy series The Worst Week of My Life follows the humiliating misadventures of publishing executive Howard Steel (Ben Miller) in the week leading up to his wedding. The only problem with the show is that, like Meet the Parents, most of Howard’s pending in-laws are completely unlikeable — and Howard’s not much better. A bumbling, pathetic idiot whose problems are almost entirely of his own making.
This might be something for Jacinda Ardern to ponder, as she reflects on what Mike Hosking has dubbed her government’s “worst week”. Sure, the legacy media who’ve suddenly turned like wolves smelling blood might be a pack of creeps, but the fumbling idiot they’re targeting has haplessly made most of her own problems.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is facing the biggest media challenge of her tenure in charge of the country, as the combination of a tanking economy, a crime wave and an increasingly emboldened group of senior journalists and radio commentators have put the blowtorch on her performance.
Now, you might say that Ardern isn’t responsible for the tanking economy and the crime wave — but that’s to ignore the facts of her government.
The economy is tanking mostly as a result of her own government’s actions (and inactions): from Covid lockdowns to its multiple policy failures on everything from energy, climate panic, housing and infrastructure. On the crime front, the government has given every indication of being over-friendly to motorcycle gangs, while Ardern’s police commissioner was seen as so soft on crime, he was dubbed “Cuddles”.
As for the media — they’re just chasing tires. $55m can buy a lot of loyalty, but as soon as they sniff a cat running in the other direction, they’re off, barking and slavering. In this case, the cat is public opinion.
Opinion polls in recent months have increasingly underlined a sharp souring of Ardern’s popularity, matched only by the rapid escalation of criticism of her performance as PM by some of the biggest names in the NZ media.
The major Newshub-Reid Research poll released in November showed that support for Ardern’s NZ Labour Party had sunk 6 per cent to just 32.3 per cent – the lowest level of support since she became PM in 2017.
The bad press towards Ardern culminated last Thursday in one of the toughest media assessments of the PM’s performance since she took office.
That breaking-point was also entirely of Ardern’s doing. Having built her entire cult of personality around her alleged “kindness” and “empathy”, well, you can’t blame folks for noticing a distinct lack of empathy when she’s embarrassed in her own electorate.
[Mike Hosking’s] assault on the PM’s judgment came after an escalating wave of robberies and ram raids on convenience stores in New Zealand reached its zenith with a killing – not just anywhere, but in Ardern’s own inner-city Auckland seat.
A just-married worker at a convenience store in the suburb of Sandringham in Ardern’s Mount Albert electorate was stabbed to death after chasing down an offender who had robbed the store’s cash register.
But rather than immediately visiting the grieving family to empathise, something she has famously done for previous tragedies, Ardern instead persisted with a visit to New Zealand’s remote Chatham Islands – attracting widespread media and political criticism.
Ardern tried to weasel out of criticism, claiming that the grief of the family and the police investigation precluded her visiting. Which has never seemed to stop her before. More tellingly, no sooner had the criticism begun than Ardern spun on a dime, hastily arranging a visit, and then a press conference.
A press conference where Ardern made things even worse for herself.
In the wake of the killing, Ardern belatedly offered $NZ4000 subsidies for shopkeepers to buy ‘‘fog cannons’’, which allegedly prevent potential robbers from being able to see anything to steal […] Ardern later claimed that there was a global shortage of fog cannons and that there would be a delay.
But both of those excuses only buried Ardern deeper. The offer of subsidies for fog cannons was rightly seen as an admission of failure, from a government which has done nothing to reign in crime. Worse, the “global shortage” claim was blasted as an outright lie: suppliers contacted by the media said that they had plenty of stock to hand — but the government has never ordered any.
“The sum total is every day this week, the government has seen an avalanche of bad news, upset, anger, protest and disbelief, from one end of the country to the other, and I haven’t even got to the recession yet,” Hosking wrote.
The Australian
One suspects that it’s only just beginning. Such narratives tend to have a brutal momentum all their own.