I originally wrote this article more than a year ago. Over the break, while reviewing the site performance, it stood out as one of the most popular articles I’ve ever written. So, I thought I’d review it and see if there was anything that I needed to add. It turns out that there is plenty to add so I have rewritten it. The essence of the article is as true now as it was when I first wrote it. So, here we go, buckle up.
Over the years I have met, had lunch, dinner, drinks or meetings with a vast number of politicians. Some were great, most were average, but none, with one exception, were evil.
I grew up in a political family. We had cabinet ministers and prime ministers over for dinner. My mother never really liked most of them, and I got my healthy distrust of politicians from her.
I remember one night her telling Aussie Malcolm chapter and verse why he was going to be unemployed after the next election…and she was right, he was.
I remember the night Jim Bolger was sitting in front of Mum’s grand piano, sipping a Scotch, while Winston Peters was regaling others with stories while he stretched his arm across the mantlepiece, a fag in one hand and a Scotch in the other, warming his backside by the fire. Bolger was telling me, and a couple of others who were there, all about how Jim McLay was a really nice guy, but sadly nice guys finish last. Two weeks later Jim Bolger was knifing McLay to become the leader of the opposition, and then prime minister. Jim Bolger was even invited to my wedding, and I’ve still got the letter he wrote back.
It was my father who was asked, by the cowards in caucus, to meet Jim Bolger at the airport to tell him there had been a coup while he was overseas, and that when he got back to Wellington the numbers had been done and Jenny Shipley was going to replace him.
I remember Jenny Shipley coming to my sister’s birthday dinner at a restaurant in Newmarket. I can remember Maurice Williamson leaping on stage and grabbing an electric guitar to play at my sister’s 21st.
I once went to Maurice’s house in Epsom to spend a long afternoon playing loads of Deep Purple, the Who and other great music at volumes that left us both deaf. So much so we never heard the neighbours pounding on the door.
I can remember my grandmother telling assorted ministers visiting us at the beach house her ideas on health care and hospitals, and those being implemented.
I can fondly remember the smell of cigar smoke wafting down the hallway of Vogel House to my room from the lounge where Doug Graham was reading the newspaper at six in the morning.
I was in the National whip’s office and helped draft the caucus resolution that threw Winston Peters out of caucus, and I remember well Bill Birch (another MP I respect deeply) coming down to read the resolution before going to inform Bolger of what was about to happen. Those really were the days of smoke-filled rooms, especially when chain-smoking Doug Kidd and cigar-smoking Doug Graham were in the room.
I was standing beside Maurice Williamson when he was filmed after the 2002 election debacle and uttered his now infamous comment about needing to lance the boil within the party. That particular boil took nearly 20 years to get lanced properly.
I’ve been there and seen it all, up close and personal.
When it comes to prime ministers, I’ve met Robert Muldoon, David Lange, Jim Bolger, Jenny Shipley, Helen Clark, John Key, Bill English and Jacinda Ardern. I think that, of the current press gallery, only Barry Soper can claim a similar pedigree. Hell’s teeth, I can remember Barry when he had hair and was visiting Dad’s place.
In 2008, I even had lunch with Jacinda Ardern over three hours in Morrinsville. I know she remembers it because when David Cunliffe was Labour’s leader and they were planning the Dirty Politics hit job, the members of the Labour caucus were asked if any of them had dealings with me. Jacinda Ardern, to her credit, owned up about the lunch. Stuart Nash skulked at the back and said nothing.
Politicians, by their very nature, are narcissistic, self-absorbed and sociopaths. Very few of them have any compassion and those that do keep it quiet. To give you an example, when I had my stroke just one National MP bothered to come see me, and tipped up at the hospital even. No other National MP called, emailed or even sent a card. Only that one, very compassionate and deeply misunderstood MP. Only one Labour MP bothered to message me. No, it wasn’t Stuart Nash. It was another, and his text messages to me late one night were a treasure. He knows who he is, and I appreciated those texts and those sentiments as they were heartfelt and compassionate.
Politics is a blood sport, but I believe always that we need to get past tribalism and polarisation in politics, and we very desperately need compassionate people in politics.
There are very few politicians who I respect; there are none, with the exception of one, whom I despise. Helen Clark was a brilliant politician. I didn’t agree with her politics and still don’t, but she is one politician I can respect: for her immense will power, her stickability and her political skills. She fought to the very end. I have no respect for John Key. He thought he could sway a referendum on the flag. I told him he was wrong and would lose. It turned out I was right. That was the beginning of the end of him; he realised that he could no longer walk on water. But he also lacked courage: any man who rings another man’s father to pass on a message is gutless and beneath contempt. He bolted when he thought he couldn’t win again and left us with Bill English, a staid and dependable finance minister but someone who has tits for hands when it comes to leadership.
Most politicians enter politics stating all sorts of altruistic reasons why they entered parliament. Mostly they are lies, mouthing pithy sentimental tosh about making the world a better place. Parliament’s history is littered with MPs’ careers that achieved little other than enriching themselves at the taxpayers’ expense.
Despite all their foibles I sincerely believe that most are not evil: misguided maybe, but not evil. Not even Robert Muldoon was evil, but he was surely misguided. He tried his best when faced with economic doom and oil shocks. He was ill-equipped to handle the various crises that beset his government, but ironically the very power systems and energy self sufficiency we now enjoy – and our great renewable energy that the climate change advocates bang on about – were a result of Muldoon’s and Bill Birch’s foresight with Think Big. The very projects that Labour and others vociferously opposed.
Which brings me to the exception. Jacinda Ardern.
When I had that three-hour lunch with her I came away thinking that this woman makes a lot of sound and thinks she is informed and interested about the world and politics. But on reflection, at the time, I said to David Farrar, who was also there, that she was just mouthing slogans and platitudes. Bumper-sticker slogans and rehearsed lines. There was no depth there, and there still isn’t.
She is my exception, the one I believe is actually evil, and here is why I believe that.
She is fake, more fake than a $10 copy watch bought in the back alleys of Hong Kong. Like all politicians, she has claimed many, many things, about why she entered politics. She professes wanting to end child poverty – she even made herself the minister in charge of ending child poverty. She also claimed that climate change was her generation’s nuclear free moment. On both of those claimed driving forces for her entering politics she has failed massively and comprehensively. All the child poverty statistics are either materially worse or have barely budged. Her climate change commitments are a joke. She wrecked an industry on a ‘Captain’s Call’ and then presided over the largest imports of coal we have ever seen, into a country that is sitting on huge coal reserves. Every single signature election promise has been an abject failure. She told people she was going to make houses more affordable – their cost has more than doubled. She promised to build 100,000 KiwiBuild homes, but it turned out that she couldn’t build a house in a room full of Lego. She promised light rail to the airport and has failed to lay even a single centimetre of track. None of those things are evil, but they are all dishonest and show a predilection towards failure after bold promises.
She told us that she never lies, which was a lie. But since taking power she has grabbed unprecedented additional powers, moreso than even Robert Muldoon. With that power she locked us up, removed our freedoms and told us all it was for our health. Never before in the history of the world have so many healthy people been locked up and had their freedoms taken away, all on the pretext of protecting our health.
It was all to flatten the curve, she said, then to protect the hospitals, then to save granny, then that it would be short and sharp, but it ended up being the longest lockdown ever. It was all lies. If we needed more capacity in the hospitals then why haven’t they provided it? Why did they spend $55 million on bribing and corrupting the media instead of building a purpose-built ICU-only hospital in Auckland? Why did they fund cameras on fishing boats and wallaby pest eradication instead of hiring more nurses?
It was never about health; otherwise, the billions spent subsidising businesses to stay closed could have instead been spent on hospitals and health care. It was all about control and manipulation. She has gaslit everyone while smiling and frowning and stealing away your rights, your freedoms, and your democracy.
Her lockdowns have cost people their lives, postponed life-saving operations and cancer treatment, destroyed businesses, wrecked careers and, worst of all, scared people into being irrationally afraid, especially the children. Even though that is evil, that isn’t the real evil of this woman.
The real evil was her politicisation of our police force, coupled with her draconian lockdown rules, the creation of a Stasi-like snitch culture, creating a situation where mates are turned against mates, families are splintered and rent apart by the medical apartheid she has implemented; and her scapegoating, demonising and radicalising the unvaccinated and destroying social cohesion with her divisive, nasty, evil policies.
She said she never lies; she told us last year that Kiwis would not be penalised if they chose not to vaccinate, yet that is exactly what she has done: introduced social ostracism and punishments for daring to have free will. That is evil.
She is manipulative in the most extreme manner, like all sociopaths. Why else would she use sustained propaganda and well-known brainwashing techniques to tell us that ‘They are Us’… except for the unvaccinated, for them ‘They are Us’ is discarded. ‘Team of Five Million’ was a lie, because she has now separated New Zealand into ‘Us and Them’. What else can you call it other than manipulative to forbid going to the hairdressers unless you can prove you’d been vaccinated? That particular piece of nastiness was aimed solely at those naughty women who refuse to comply.
Removing freedoms from everyone, and then giving back the vaccinated some of those freedoms while callously using the media to help gaslight everyone into believing government permissions are freedoms, at the same time as creating two classes of citizen, is even nastier and evil. She’s convinced over 70 per cent of people that this divisiveness and nastiness are perfectly alright. She’s said it is OK to discriminate. She’s not even passed any laws to push her mandates; she’s just let businesses become her brownshirts in ostracising and demonising the unvaccinated. She’s allowed Aucklanders to be scapegoated even as she wrecked their businesses, jobs and dreams. It is never OK to discriminate. Yet that is what this evil woman has done.
The Kiwi ethos of egalitarianism was slaughtered on the altar of Covid, and the knife used to cut its throat was wielded by Jacinda Ardern.
What else can you call the blatant lies over the ‘vaccines’ being “safe and effective”, when the evidence is now mounting, building and cascading that they were neither safe nor effective, other than evil? She said explicitly that if you take the vaccines that “you won’t get sick, and you won’t die”. That was an evil lie; one which, sadly, many, many people have found out to their detriment.
The vaccine mandates and segregation of society by vaccine status directly led to the protest at parliament. That protest saw the ugly truth about Jacinda Ardern and her totalitarianism and pure evil as she stomped, literally this time, with actual jack boots, over the rights and freedoms of people who just wanted to be heard. Watching the stormtroopers of the regime stomp all over people in a brutal act of suppression of people who dared to stand against her was heart-rending. Her attempts to rewrite her brutal history are just as evil as her move to assault protestors.
On that day, as I watched, I knew that she had plumbed further into her pit of evil. We now had her unmasked. Pure, unadulterated evil, masquerading as ‘kindness’. The mask had slipped, now we saw the face of evil. Consequently, her and her party’s ratings have inexorably slid downwards.
All lies incur a debt to the truth, and eventually that debt must be paid. We are now seeing the truth exposing all the lies and no one was more in front of the people lying than Jacinda Ardern.
Add to that the racial divisions she has fostered and extended through her government, and we as a nation are now on the cusp of the destruction of everything Kiwis once stood for. The Kiwi dream has become a dark and awful nightmare, where we live and exist only with the permission of the government.
We are more divided than ever before. We are meaner, harsher and nastier than before. Her actions did that. The evil is that she pretended it was kindness.
Now we have the spectre of state-imposed apartheid but called blithely by a much nicer name, “co-governance”, where, by virtue of who your ancestors are, you now have additional preferential treatment. It has been rolled out across councils, into the health system and now through the confiscation of water assets from the councils. All of that has placed control in the hands of the tribal elites.
We are heading down the awful path that leads to the depredations of South Africa, Zimbabwe and Rwanda. When race is what is used to separate people, you get division, you get animosity, you get violence, and eventually, you get civil war.
Jacinda Ardern placed us on that evil pathway. She even says that democracy, in its truest sense, one person, one vote is “overly simplistic”. She said that to Jack Tame as she dismissed concerns over their rapid rollout of race-based policies that were never campaigned on.
The government of Jacinda Ardern, since 2020 and their absolute majority, has morphed into something far worse than we have ever seen before. She and her government are exponentially worse than the government of David Lange, who forced Rogernomics onto the nation with policy settings never campaigned upon, nor even enunciated in a manifesto or anywhere else. It’s worse because it is fundamentally changing the constitutional foundations of our country.
Where we were once seen as an egalitarian nation, a liberal rights-based democracy and a free land, we are now seen as a third-world backwater dabbling with racist legislation and the awful consequences that engenders. That is a truly evil agenda and one which must be fought every inch of the way.
Domestically, this country is in serious trouble. This Labour Government has emptied the prisons, put violent criminals back on the street, de-powered the police and gone soft on crime. Add in the powder keg of economic hardship and it is little wonder then that crime is out of control, where even dairies and bottle shops are seen as valid targets for ram-raiding violent criminals. If you live in Auckland, you now live in fear. How is that anything but evil?
A government’s job is to protect the well-being of its citizens. To encourage self-reliance, to stop crime and to enable a conducive environment for free enterprise and free will to flourish. Instead, we have crime, murder, mayhem and economic disaster. That is truly evil.
Ardern’s evil mask slipped again with her speech at the United Nations, where she railed against free speech. She described free speech as a “weapon of war” and implored the United Nations to act against it. That is evil.
She has been enabled in her evil assault against this nation by a complicit and corrupted media, shackled by the terms of their Public Interest Journalism Fund agreement and the millions in largesse gifted to them by the munificence of the government. That tamed and compliant media are as culpable as Ardern herself for the slide in standards in New Zealand. They’ve been tainted and corrupted by the money, and they’ve used it to sublimate society to the point where many people simply nod and agree and behave more like Pavlov’s dogs than functioning human beings. The media, at the behest of Jacinda Ardern, with evil intent, has done a top job of brainwashing and closing down debate. Unless things change the next election will be close.
As I’ve elaborated, I’ve seen them all, from Muldoon to Ardern. Not even the excesses of Helen Clark or Robert Muldoon were this bad. The Ardern regime is exactly that, a regime. She is evil. She has systematically and deliberately destroyed this nation and, for that, she deserves to be run out of town on a rail.
Jacinda Ardern has done something no other politician has achieved in my estimation. She has made me despise her personally, simply because she is actually evil. I disliked Muldoon and Clark, but I actually despise Jacinda Ardern.
Her platitudes, her much-vaunted compassion and her so-called sincerity are all fake. She is a very, very shallow, manipulative and insecure person, drunk on the power voters handed her. She is desperate to be seen as a hero in the world’s eyes, when in reality she has become a shabby, desperate despot, worse than Robert Muldoon and Helen Clark.
Jacinda Ardern is a black-hearted woman, not the caring persona she has cultivated.
She deserves nothing but opprobrium, and I will spend every waking moment working to remove her from office. It’s personal now.
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