Authoritarian regimes almost always cultivate a Cult of Personality around their Dear Leaders, and the Ardern government was no different. Introducing the so-called “Public Interest Journalism Fund” was a master-stroke that effectively gagged the New Zealand media with the apron strings of government funding. But in any case, like a nymphomaniac prostitute, it was merely a matter of paying for what they would have been happy to do for free.
Anyone who doubts the fatuous slavishness of the Ardern Cult need only consider such nauseating propaganda as Taking the Lead: How Jacinda Ardern Wowed the World, a children’s book that rivals such Soviet propaganda as the Pavlik Morozov cult, or the Hitler Youth.
But even the cults of Stalin and Kim weren’t boostered by that most odious of modern excrescences of authoritarianism, the cry-bully.
And now here was Ardern – the Adele of Antipodean politics, every trespass against her public judged more in sorrow than in anger because she really did mean well– quitting her role as prime minister of New Zealand after five years and fighting back tears as she delivered her dying swan-song […] So much for the crying bit – but what about the bullying? Ardern’s velvet glove concealed a pretty heavy iron fist.
There’s little need to rake the coals of Ardern’s nasty, bullying regime: BFD readers, like Kiwis in general, know them all too well. The real question is why a Dear Leader allegedly so beloved of the volk, oops, “whanau”, is suddenly scurrying out of a limelight she clearly very much enjoyed.
If it was any other politician, her desire to escape a spotlight she seemed to find quite enjoyable as she posed for selfies in shopping malls might cause cynics to speculate that there was a dirty great scandal on the way and that this was just a politician looking to get the hell of out Dodge before the storm broke.
Ardern’s claim to have “nothing left in the tank” (an odd fossil-fueled metaphor for such an assiduous climate cultist) seems rather at odds with the facts. Ardern has, after all, been on an undeclared holiday for nearly all of the summer. The country was supposedly saved from Covid by last year. So, what could possibly be driving her from office?
In 2020 Ardern’s Labour party took more than 50 per cent of the vote – the first time a single party has achieved this since 1951 – but it’s likely that it would now poll less than 25 per cent. And it might be the ladling on of the virtue-signalling which has made former admirers of Ardern even more disillusioned than they would be with regular politicians. In an unprecedented act, she insisted on also becoming minister for vulnerable children when she became PM, stating that child poverty was the most important issue facing her new government. Five years later, family poverty is in a terrible state. In opposition Ardern was rightly appalled about the number of children living in cars; after five years of her government, that number has quadrupled.
Which is as much to say that Ardern has miserably failed on every single concrete policy goal she ever set herself. All she had left was fluffy pap about “kindness” — a propaganda narrative as fake as Stalin bouncing a toddler on his knee. After the naked, violent brutality of the storming of the Freedom Village outside the Beehive, it was a narrative few but the most devoted cultists were still buying.
Once more, the demise of a female political leader has made me feel something I’m sure I’m not meant to feel – and that’s nostalgia for the sheer inappropriateness of Margaret Thatcher, barging her way into the twentieth century global village and behaving as no female politician ever behaved before or since. Though I was fascinated by Mrs T, I never once voted for her – I pretended I did, but the tribal pull of my Communist upbringing was still too strong. But watching Ardern shuffle moistly off of the world stage, I do wish that Attila the Hen was still here; how no-nonsense she was compared to the trans-maids of Labour and the Tory dullards May and Truss who sought to imitate her style. I’d love to see her reaction when faced with the idea that women can have penises or that policemen can work from home. Or indeed, the equally outrageous idea that a woman who reaches the top of the political greasy pole at the age of 37 can be some kind of secular saint – rather than just a fresh take on a carpet-bagger, whose shtick is now revealed as wearing perilously thin.
Spectator Australia
The Ardern cultists wringing their hankies about “unprecendented”, “misogynistic” abuse directed at Ardern are the same people who hooted and horked in chorus at Thatcher’s passing.
We see right through them.
