It looks like I was right, just a few years ahead of myself.
It was four years ago that I predicted that Jacinda Ardern’s career would follow a similar path to Kevin Rudd’s: a skyrocket burst of sky-high opinion polls, followed by ignominious collapse amid a concatenation of policy failures.
I reckoned without Covid (after all, who outside of a Wuhan lab, could have predicted it, in 2018?): the first year of the pandemic was a political godsend for governments across the antipodes. From WA to Queensland, governments were re-elected with massive swings. New Zealand was no different.
But then reality set in.
Without a Covid pedestal to pose on, Kiwis were suddenly able to see Ardern for what she really is: an incompetent administrator whose government has failed at nearly everything. Even the continued undying loyalty of her Team of $55 Million hasn’t been able to hide the evidence of complete collapse that New Zealanders see all around them.
Ardern’s poll numbers are plunging, even further than Rudd’s (it’s worth keeping in mind that, even at her peak, Ardern never came within cooee of his popularity). Rudd’s colleagues had the knives out long before his polling was as bad as Ardern’s.
Naturally, media who aren’t paid by her government are starting to run a dead pool on her prime ministership.
[Few] will be surprised if Jacinda Ardern resigns before next year’s election. Since the 2020 election, support for the Labour government has fallen from 50 per cent to the mid-to-low 30s. Ardern’s personal popularity has dipped as that of National’s new leader, Christopher Luxon, has risen. The slide for Ardern and her party seems inexorable.
There’s a simple reason for this: as I reported recently, New Zealand is inexorably inching towards comprehensive state failure.
Wherever you look — whether it’s a failing health system, fuel and food price rises, increasing gun violence, crimped building supplies, or opposition to co-governance with Maori in water management — the government is taking a battering on nearly every front.
But it’s health — traditionally, a Labour government’s greatest strong point — where Ardern has failed most miserably.
The crisis in health care is the most immediately damaging issue for the government — not least because Ardern’s strict elimination policy for Covid was sold to the public during 2020-2021 as the best way to avoid hospitals being overrun. And now they are.
It can’t all be blamed on Covid. After nearly three years of Covid, with high rates of vaccination and the country still at “orange” in Ardern’s bizarre “traffic light system”, New Zealand still has one of the lowest ratios of intensive care beds in the developed world. The government was also warned, in writing, a year ago that a staffing crisis was impending. It’s done nothing about it.
Instead, Health Minister Andrew Little has embarked on a bureaucratic reshuffle that includes effectively doubling the number of clipboard-holders and box-tickers, by creating a racially-separated system for Maori.
Nothing says so clearly that the Ardern government has run out of options than its desperate attempt to co-opt a court ruling from the other side of the world which has absolutely no effect on New Zealand.
Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson also latched onto the US Supreme Court ruling on Roe v Wade to float the idea that Luxon cannot be trusted to keep his word not to change the law if he leads the next government.
The Australian
At the same time, New Zealand is in the grip of what by its formerly law-abiding standards is a crime wave. What is Police Minister Chris Hipkins’ response? Celebrating “diversity” among police ranks. This, on top of the government openly cosying up to outlaw motorcycle gangs, including handing over cash payments and plum taxpayer-funded roles to gang leaders.
The only thing keeping Ardern in a job is her political debt to the powerful Maori caucus and the simple lack of anyone of even her mediocre talent in Labour’s ranks to replace her.
