Opinion
Half a year has passed since Labor were tossed out of office, and just over a year since Jacinda Ardern scuttled off to whatever cushy globalist sinecure awaits Klaus Schwab’s minions, denying New Zealand voters the chance to pass their own judgement. Which perhaps explains the appearance of, not one, but two retrospectives of Ardern’s, ahem, “achievements”, have appeared in The Australian in recent days.
Perhaps they’re intended as antidotes to the blind hagiographies of the Princess regularly gushed by the likes of the ABC and The Guardian. Whatever, I’m sure they’ll provide grimly satisfying reading for BFD readers.
The sheer pervasiveness of Ardern’s failure is impressive. You can be as woke as folk, as shiny as tinsel, as popular in Manhattan as a Tom Collins cocktail, and still make a humungous mess.
Ardern never implemented even her own very meagre policy commitments. She promised to build 100,000 affordable houses but ended up building 1000. How can building houses be beyond a modern government?
Kiwibuild and the Auckland light rail are the two totemic failures of Ardern’s reign, but they’re just the big ol’ mouldy cherries on top of the collapsed cake.
Every day, you read new reports outlining just how badly key indicators went under Ardern. She was elected in 2017. In 2018, core government spending was about 27 per cent of GDP. In 2024, it’s forecast to be 33.4 per cent. That’s an astonishing expansion of government spending, comparable to the insanity Australia endured under Gough Whitlam. New Zealand is now in recession.
According to Eric Crampton of the New Zealand Initiative, in a $NZ405bn ($370bn) economy, it’s a $NZ25bn increase, or more than $NZ18,000 for a family of four.
But worse in a way is the comparison of spending to taxing. According to Crampton, while spending went from 27 to 33.4 per cent of GDP, taxation only went from 27 to 29 per cent of GDP. That opens up a disastrous deficit. No country can stay on that path for too long. But a small country with a narrow economy is courting absolute disaster that way.
The problem, as ever, is socialists running out of other peoples’ money. Sure, it looks great for the first term or two, as the leaners spend the transferred wealth on junk food, ciggies and booze. It’s great for the new cohorts of public servants left-wing governments inevitably recruit. Not to mention the mainstream media living fat on PIJF money.
But sooner rather than later in a small economy like New Zealand’s, the bills come due.
And in the meantime, the kids are getting dumber and the gangs and ram-raiders bolder.
Thus Ardern’s soft policing policies and disasters in education have led directly to a massive rise in crime. In 2023 police received 962,521 emergency calls and reports. This was a staggering 50 per cent increase from 2019 […]
NZ’s education results under Ardern were woeful, with the nation falling on every standardised international measure […]
The size of the NZ public service has increased massively, but service delivery has declined.
The Australian
One of the biggest issues for Kiwis — and, consequently, the one the media most tried to downplay — was co-governance.
But it was Covid which, as it did for so many incumbents, really saved Ardern’s bacon in 2020. And it’s the issue on which the single biggest turnaround in public sentiment took place since.
In large part, no doubt, because the fog of government/media-induced panic has lifted at least somewhat. More importantly, the harsh reality of the full extent of policy failure has become more and more obvious.
Ardern’s announcement in June 2020 that the virus had been eliminated in New Zealand proved to be somewhat premature. The curve wasn’t flattened. That was delayed until March 2022, when the country eventually crawled out from under the bed.
At the same time as Ardern was earning undeserved praise from the fawning global media, their great bugaboo, Sweden, was being damned for doing the opposite in nearly every respect to New Zealand’s supposed saviour.
Yet, the outcome was in some ways no different — and in two very significant ways, much, much worse.
The chart measuring Covid cases in New Zealand from April 2022 mirrors the chart for Sweden two years earlier: a steep rise to around 2.5 million cases within the first six months, at which point it begins to flatten. New Zealand’s official tally of Covid deaths per million is 1163, 40 per cent higher than it is among the thermometer-dodging South Koreans. It is higher than every state in Australia, except Victoria. It is three times higher than Singapore and 40 per cent higher than the global average […]
The health benefits of lockdowns were marginal at best. The costs to our social fabric and wellbeing were incalculable.
As are the economic costs.
New Zealand was second in the Covid spending rankings at 19.3 per cent of GDP. The US was in first place at 25 per cent of GDP. By contrast, South Korea spent 6.4 per cent of its GDP on pandemic management, and Sweden spent just 4.2 per cent. It would be unfair to criticise Ardern based on hindsight. Like Scott Morrison, she was not to know the path the pandemic would take, nor that attempts to flatten the curve would eventually be futile.
Bollocks, not to put too fine a point on it. Not only had decades of pandemic planning specifically ruled out lockdowns — plans which were thrown aside in an instant, for no other reason than to copy China — but even by the first months of the pandemic, we knew lockdowns weren’t working. As early as mid-April 2020, The BFD was publishing articles where prominent epidemiologists, rather than attention-seeking lab techs, stated that lockdowns would cause more harm than good, and that “eliminating” the virus was a fool’s errand. A few weeks later, we reported on more evidence that lockdowns made no difference to pandemic outcomes, and made many other health and economic outcomes far worse. The evidence just kept growing.
If even a few scrappy journalists could seek out the data, there’s no excuse at all for the likes of Jacinda Ardern.
The New Zealand economy will be burdened with the long fiscal tail of the 2020-2022 pandemic for years, if not decades, to come […]
Its debt-to-GDP ratio has risen from 27 per cent in 2019 to 37 per cent today. The cost of servicing debt is a significant budget item.
Worse still, it has the second-highest structural deficit in the world, according to the World Bank’s data. The gap between what the government is committed to spend and the revenue it can raise has considerably widened.
The Australian
The new government is making many strides in unwinding Ardern’s legacy in such areas as co-governance (though it remains woefully wedded to climate alarmism and ridiculously terrified of the increasingly toothless NZ media), but the economic disaster Ardern left in her wake will take much longer to undo. The cuts to public spending so far announced will only go so far.
For New Zealand voters it ought to be a harsh lesson learned: marry a glossy, women’s mag princess in haste, repent at leisure.