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Dr Muriel Newman
nzcpr.com
Dr Muriel Newman established the New Zealand Centre for Political Research as a public policy think tank in 2005 after nine years as a Member of Parliament. A former Chamber of Commerce President, her background is in business and education.
On Thursday, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced he would be stepping down as leader of the ruling Conservatives in the face of mounting pressure from the party.
While he will remain, prime minister, until a replacement is chosen, his resignation has triggered a contest within the party to find a new leader and PM.
Boris Johnson had led the Conservatives to a landslide election victory in 2019 on a platform of delivering on the Brexit referendum and orchestrating Britain’s departure from the European Union.
But, dogged by a series of scandals – including the holding of illegal Downing Street parties during the Covid lockdown along with claims that he lied about the promotion of a party ally accused of sexual misconduct – calls for his resignation gained momentum.
Even though the Party was haemorrhaging support and losing safe seats in byelections, it was the resignation of nearly 60 elected members of his government that finally forced him to abandon his attempts to hold onto power.
As a result, Boris Johnson has become the third Conservative leader to have been forced out of office by his own party in the past seven years. David Cameron resigned after calling for and then losing the Brexit referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union, while Theresa May stepped aside after three years of trying and failing to pull Britain out of the EU after the Brexit vote.
This week’s NZCPR Guest Commentator British journalist Melanie Phillips provides insight into these developments and outlines what the Conservatives will need to do if they are to have any chance of winning the next election:
“If the Conservative party is actually thinking straight (not something that can be assumed at all) it will understand that it won’t see off Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party unless the Tories elect a leader and prime minister who will understand two key things about the majority of the British electorate.
“First, whatever view that leader may take about anything, what the public want above all is a government that is competent and run by a prime minister they can trust…
“Second, those who voted for Johnson because he had actually ‘got Brexit done’ became terminally disillusioned and withdrew their support because they saw him squander the chance for Britain to use its newly restored independence to take off economically and free itself from what had held it back for so long.
“Instead, Johnson embraced higher public spending and a bigger state – straight out of the Blairite playbook – while also forcing the elderly and the poor to choose between heating and eating as a result of his lunatic Net Zero policies, which catastrophically drove up fuel prices while threatening to turn out all the lights.”
Crucially, Melanie Phillips believes that the new leader will need to do what Boris Johnson himself did before he ‘crashed and burned’ – and that is, make Britain believe in itself again and give it hope for the future.
There are many lessons for New Zealand from the events in the UK.
Importantly, Boris Johnson owed his electoral success to traditional Labour supporters voting for him and Brexit – just as Jacinda Ardern owed her electoral success to traditional National supporters voting for her management of Covid.
However, while the new Conservative leader has an opportunity to retain Labour supporters at the next election if they are successful in building a strong independent economic future for the UK, the prospect of Jacinda Ardern winning support for her Covid management has now disappeared.
As predicted, once the harsh elimination restrictions imposed by the PM were relaxed, with no natural immunity against this highly contagious virus and a vaccine that doesn’t prevent infection nor transmission, New Zealand has suffered escalating case numbers and a mounting death toll.
Both Boris Johnson and Jacinda Ardern have suffered a loss of public trust and confidence in their leadership. For the former British Prime Minister, it was largely the result of a series of missteps, while for our ideologically-driven Prime Minister, government incompetence is largely to blame.
Who could possibly have imagined when Prime Minister Ardern announced at a World Economic Forum meeting in Switzerland that New Zealand was leading the world in the use of “wellbeing” as a measure of government success, that under her watch public services would fail so badly that an elderly woman would be left to die while living in a car parked on the side of the road in a residential suburb of Auckland – even though concerned neighbours had contacted authorities on many occasions.
Or that a woman suffering from a severe headache would be effectively turned away by the Emergency Department of Middlemore Hospital at 1 am because it would be many hours before she could be seen – only to arrive back three hours later in an ambulance, unconscious from such a “massive” brain haemorrhage that she died the next day.
Such shocking stories of the State failing the very people it should be serving, are just the tip of the iceberg. Right now, all across the country, thousands of scheduled hospital treatments are being cancelled, patients are being sent home, specialists are being overwhelmed, doctors are unable to cope, and staff shortages are threatening services at every level.
No rational Prime Minister with genuine empathy for the public wellbeing she spoke so proudly of in Switzerland would do what Jacinda Ardern has done and authorise a $500 million overhaul of the entire health system in the middle of a pandemic – just to satisfy the ideological demands of her Maori Caucus for co-governance.
It is scandalous.
By disestablishing community health boards and sacking health leaders, our Prime Minister has left the health system rudderless and in meltdown.
Meanwhile, the new power-hungry Maori Health Authority, which intends to prioritise health care in New Zealand on the basis of race rather than clinical need, is swamping health staff with bureaucratic demands, instead of allowing them to focus on managing the crisis.
The incompetence of the Ardern administration is not only confined to the health sector.
Remember Kiwibuild? After promising to build 100,000 affordable homes over 10 years, to enable first-home buyers to enter the housing market, after four years, only 1,366 homes have been built. At this rate it will take another 288 years to reach their target!
Meanwhile, over $1 billion has been spent on emergency housing, and the waiting list for a State house has escalated from 5,000 in 2017 to over 27,000 today.
Then there’s Labour’s wasteful spending – including $53 million on planning, announcing, and then cancelling, a cycleway across Auckland Harbour.
Or, the massive $1.9 billion that was announced with great fanfare to address problems with mental health, that seems to have disappeared almost without trace, even as demand for assistance skyrockets.
And how about the Ministry of Transport’s plan to spend $197 million by 2024 on road safety and education campaigns to support their ‘Road to Zero’ strategy – instead of spending the money on fixing roads!
Rather than removing the red tape and bureaucracy that’s holding the country back, Labour is busy creating more.
And while other countries are now abandoning extremist Net Zero commitments, our Prime Minister remains more obsessed than ever – even though her carbon tax is now fuelling inflation across the whole economy and putting huge pressure on household budgets.
Ever since being first elected, Jacinda Ardern has been big on promises and expensive public relations campaigns, while often failing to deliver results. Hers is a government fixated with what the PR strategists call “optics”. For our Prime Minister, it’s all about headlines and photo opportunities, rather than substance.
That’s why Labour has put so much emphasis on funding the mainstream media – including through their $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund – to ensure their support. It’s also why they are planning to spend over $370 million merging Radio NZ and TVNZ into one ‘captured’ State-run organisation.
The reality is the Ardern Government can only get away with ‘solving’ problems through press releases and new committees as long as a friendly media turn a blind eye to their litany of failure.
For instance, their announcement of a new Grocery Commissioner has conveyed the impression that the Government is dealing with food price inflation – but any journalist worth their salt would soon discover that Labour’s Net Zero policies are largely to blame.
Or what about Labour’s announcement back in 2021 that the long-running Ihumatao dispute was being resolved through the establishment of a new committee – when any investigation would reveal that no progress has been made over the last year and a half because Maori can’t agree on the membership of that co-governance committee!
In the end, it’s not just the lies and broken promises that are causing a loss of trust in Jacinda Ardern’s Government – nor the wasteful spending, the cost-of-living crisis, the housing crisis, the health crisis, the crime crisis, or even the education crisis.
While all of these are damaging and justification enough for this failing government to be ejected from the Beehive in disgrace, an even greater disgrace is the way in which they have divided our nation by race. That’s the greatest act of shame that they must be held accountable for.
Clearly what matters to Prime Minister Ardern is not defending our democracy and standing up for the Rule of Law, it’s cosying up to the iwi elite, introducing tribal rule through co-governance, and rebranding all of our government departments with unpronounceable names “gifted” by Maori.
In education it doesn’t seem important to the PM that school truancy is at record levels, or that New Zealand is leading the world in declining standards – with more than 40 per cent of school leavers now unable to read and write properly – what appears to matter most is that those attending school are indoctrinated with a sanitised view of New Zealand history.
The race-based ‘capture’ of education is now so advanced that even graduating students at our tertiary institutions are being held to ransom – forced to submit to compulsory Maori cultural propaganda in order to receive their qualifications.
In hindsight, the erosion of trust in Jacinda Ardern can be traced back to the 2020 election, when she deliberately failed to inform the public that if elected, she would be prioritising co-governance and tribal rule – which are central to He Puapua and the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
With the power to govern alone, instead of working in the best interests of the country, Jacinda Ardern has abused the public’s trust by cementing in radical changes that have undermined our economy, weakened our democracy, and endangered public wellbeing.
With the media in their pocket and Covid on the loose, the elite cabal that is dictating so many aspects of our lives with brazen arrogance is responsible for the essential character of New Zealand being transformed from a relatively happy-go-lucky country that was doing well by world standards, to a deeply divided society that is in decline.
It’s therefore not a surprise, to learn that the latest consumer survey from MYOB shows that more than a million New Zealanders are actively considering leaving the country to seek a better quality of life – with some 200,000 having already made concrete plans.
Under Jacinda Ardern’s leadership, those with get up and go, are getting up and going… overseas.
While Boris Johnson was an asset to his Party in 2019 when the Conservatives won the election in a landslide, now he’s become a liability, he’s been forced to resign.
Jacinda Ardern is in the same situation. She was an asset to Labour in 2017 and 2020, but with a million people so disillusioned with the state of our nation that they are considering moving overseas, she too has now become a liability.
For the sake of New Zealand’s future, Jacinda Ardern needs to go.
