Jacinda Ardern claimed in 2017 that she never told a lie in politics. Either she lied about that, or she’s just so stupid that she actually believes the demonstrably untrue things she so often says.
I’ve written before that there are three kinds of liars in politics: liars, damned liars and bullshit artists. A damned liar plies the political art of lying on an altogether more damnable level of darkness than your average politician. A bullshit artist babbles mundane untruths that they have deluded themselves into actually believing.
Like her political bestie, Hillary Clinton, Ardern is a mixture of the last two especially.
New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, was born in 1980 and claims because of the poverty around her, by the age of 17, she was drawn to the Labour party. One wonders which Labour party that was? The only Labour government she would have known was the one led by David Lange which stood out as a beacon for free markets and smaller government the world over […]
The Labour party she says she was drawn to was about deregulation. Prime minister David Lange and his finance minister Roger Douglas, corporatised several government departments and sold privatised state assets. They used monetarist measures to control inflation, floated the dollar and allowed markets to set interest rates. They slashed subsidies and trade tariffs and turned a moribund economy into one that was internationally competitive. New Zealand shifted from being one of the world’s most regulated economies to one of the freest.
In fact, Ardern is drawn to policies that are drawn more from the legacy of the New Zealand PM she was born under: Robert Muldoon. Both love authoritarian big government and saddled their countries with a legacy of debt.
Like so many authoritarian leaders, Ardern is now confronting the enormous social and economic damage her Zero-Covid strategy has inflicted. She too has capitulated to street protesters demanding their lost freedoms be returned and finally admits ‘that long periods of heavy restrictions have not got us to zero cases’.
Even Ardern’s claim that she did not consider protesters’ demands seems an obvious lie. When the teargas had settled, the simple fact is that the protesters got much of what they asked for. Perhaps Ardern is just a bullshit artist who really believes that that’s just a coincidence.
As the country opens up to spiking infections, struggling businesses are facing new government imposts and red tape. For a country already suffering poor productivity, low wages, a widening wealth gap, unaffordable housing, skills shortages, shallow domestic capital markets, a lack of diversification and under-investment in infrastructure, the latest policies seem inept.
If these structural issues are not enough, Ardern’s commitment to Zero-50 emissions could be the last straw. A recent Ministry for the Environment paper finds that converting sheep and beef farmland to pine forests is significantly cheaper than nearly any other option. Good luck with that.
As for her self-proclaimed virtues of kindness and commitment to human rights — those seem hard to square with her obvious infatuation with the Chinese Communist Party.
China’s colonisation of New Zealand is accelerating. Indeed, Beijing sees New Zealand as a useful Trojan Horse in its fight with Canberra. Moreover it is a valuable platform from which to penetrate Five Eyes intelligence. When 32 per cent of NZ trade goes to China and, with an economy running close to the edge, Beijing is ideally placed to pursue its ambitions […]
Wellington’s never-ending welcome mat and, its recent actions and words, demonstrate that, despite protestations to the contrary, Ardern’s New Zealand increasingly favours China over Australia and America. Which means for ordinary Kiwis, to paraphrase Trump advisor General H.R. McMaster, she believes servitude is better for them than sovereignty.
Spectator Australia
This is perhaps the one thing Ardern really does have in common with Lange: Lange was willing to sacrifice New Zealand’s strategic alliances on the altar of ideology. But it’s one thing to ban American warships from your ports, quite another to welcome China’s agents of debt-trap diplomacy with open arms.
Ardern might actually believe her own bullshit, but while it’s easy for fools to fool themselves all of the time, she can’t fool everyone else indefinitely.
