> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://goodoil.news/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # I’ve Seen Flatworms with Greater Self-Awareness - URL: https://goodoil.news/ive-seen-flatworms-with-greater-self-awareness/ - Published: 2026-11-04T00:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-03T23:59:59.000Z - Description: It’s like Al Capone lecturing on non-violence and tax compliance. - Author: Lushington Brady - Tags: AUS Politics, NZ Politics As [I wrote recently](https://goodoil.news/jeff-knows-hubris-when-he-sees-it/), when **Jeff Kennett** warns politicians that hubris will be their downfall, it’s best to listen: he learned the hard way. That kind of self-awareness, though, appears entirely alien to **Jacinda Ardern**. So, when she witters about politicians ‘driving public mistrust’ and ‘binary thinking’, you can bet she’s doing so without the slightest whiff of self-reflection. That the ‘pro-Palestine’ Ardern did so at the Opera House, though, was kind of appropriate. This is, after all, the deplorable epicentre of the left’s three-year-run of virulent antisemitism, where, just two days after the worst massacre of Jews since WWII, thousands of ‘pro-Palestine’ activists chanted “Gas the Jews!”. “They are us,” to coin a phrase. > [Politicians are worsening](https://www.stuff.co.nz/world-news/361053785/ardern-calls-out-political-leaders-over-crisis-trust?ref=goodoil.news) polarisation and failing to fix the core issues driving public mistrust, former prime minister Jacinda Ardern says. > > Ardern delivered the blunt assessment of modern political discourse during a stage talk alongside author **Anna Funder** at the Sydney Opera House, the Guardian reported. That would be the same Anna Funder who helped fund a ‘pro-Palestine’ activism stunt, bombarding federal MPs with pro-Hamas, anti-Israel propaganda. Journalist **Julie Szego** [specifically noted Funder’s hypocrisy](https://szegounplugged.substack.com/p/the-charades-of-australias-literati) in hyper-focusing on Israel for defending itself against murderous ‘Palestinian’ Muslims, while ignoring much deadlier violence in conflicts in Syria, Sudan or Nigeria. Strangely, too, Funder, who made her name with the book, *Stasiland*, made no mention of the quasi-Stasi state of Ardern’s Covid policies. > “We have a responsibility not to engage in binary thinking, not to engage in the language of violence, \[but\] to rebuild trust by building financial security in a time of deep insecurity,” Ardern said. This, from the woman who cheerfully bragged about turning New Zealand into a two-tier society where only the politically compliant had full rights. “That’s what it is, yip, yip.” Binary thinking? Ardern wrote the book on it. Her Covid regime divided the country into the clean and the unclean, the vaccinated and ‘the unvaccinated’, with the latter barred from cafés, gyms and, in some cases, their own jobs. Dissent was not debated but diagnosed, and the 2022 protest on parliament’s lawn was met with sprinklers, loudspeakers playing **Barry Manilow**, and the sneering contempt of a government that had decided it alone possessed the ‘single source of truth’. If you want to know where New Zealand’s distrust came from, you need look no further than the Beehive. Then there is *He Puapua*, the leaked blueprint for carving New Zealand into separate legal and political tiers by race, which Ardern’s government implemented piecemeal while insisting it wasn’t doing any such thing. Co-governance of water, a separate Māori Health Authority and a constitutional ‘conversation’ nobody had voted for. Telling a country that you’re uniting it, while sorting its citizens by ancestry, is not so much a failure of leadership as a masterclass in gaslighting. This brings us to ‘financial security in a time of deep insecurity’. Ardern launched her 2017 campaign by making child poverty her moral crusade, promising to lift 100,000 children out of it by 2020\. By her own measure, the tally was 44,000\. That, at least, is around 20 times more than the number of houses her flagship KiwiBuild ever actually built. Child poverty sat, stubbornly, at around 18.8 per cent of children, precisely where it was when she started. She had made the fight against child poverty the centrepiece of her political identity and the statistic had simply declined to move. Meanwhile, houses became unaffordable, rents soared and foodbank queues lengthened. The Prime Minister of Kindness gave the country a veritable library of simpering photo-ops and very little breakfast. Ardern, naturally, is the victim here. Social media, you see, manipulates information. She was ‘so naive’ about it: > “I was so naive not to think about the fact that that meant the manipulation of information.” Naive is one word for a government that spent two years running its own information monopoly. Another, perhaps, is ‘Ministry of Truth’. And so we arrive at the ‘crisis of leadership’, which Ardern has diagnosed with the clinical detachment of a woman who left the scene of the crime. Trailing in the polls, loathed by a large swathe of the electorate, she resigned in January 2023 with the memorable explanation that she had ‘no more in the tank’. Having fled office, she then fled the country altogether, decamping to the multimillionaire enclaves of Sydney’s wealthiest suburbs and the lecture circuits of Harvard, where she can lecture the world on kindness without having to face the people she left behind. > “We have not just a crisis of trust; we have a crisis of leadership.” Indeed. And the one who knows best what a crisis of leadership looks like is the woman who gave Kiwis one, then packed her bags. --- 💡 ****If you enjoyed this article please share it using the share buttons at the top or bottom of the article.**