The old saying “A leopard doesn’t change its spots” remains as fresh as ever thanks to our departing Prime Minister. Speaking as the Oracle of Truth from the Podium of Truth she outlined her reasons for her resignation, choking back the tears. Whether the tears were in recognition of the BS she was spouting or from a bully who had lost the fight is debatable. Most probably the latter.
One of the things she will be remembered for is the number of lies she told during her premiership. Her lies are the stuff of legends. If anyone has kept a list it would be worth sending to the Guinness Book of Records. If I were to choose one it would be the Covid one where she told us the government was the only source of truth and nothing else we read was to be believed. Having bought the media off to spin her narrative, she hadn’t left us much else to read.
Given what has subsequently come out about what was hidden from us (the truth), the government was the one outfit we should not have believed. We now know that every afternoon at one o’clock we got fed at best a load of misinformation and at worst a pack of lies. From memory, misinformation was the very thing about which Jacinda gave a ‘keynote address’ to the United Nations, saying it must be stopped.
And so to her announcement of her decision to resign. There she was, expecting us to believe that the reason she was standing down was that there was not enough “gas left in the tank”. Was this another blatant lie? I was waiting for a journalist to have enough spine to ask the one question that needed to be asked: ‘If you were ahead in the polls would you have had enough gas in the tank?’ (Ironically, one of the first things she did as PM was to make a ‘Captain’s Call’ to ban oil and gas exploration).
Did she go to the gas station and then decide not to fill up or did she go only to find her bully boy colleagues manning the pumps and refusing to engage the nozzles? If it was the latter, maybe that explains the tears. Or was it the realisation that her popularity had evaporated faster than the fumes dispensed from the pump? We will probably never know, but when it comes to ‘bums on seats’ there will be more than a few MPs feeling anxious about where their posteriors might land post-election.
The lady is the author of her own demise. She managed to tarnish her Covid reputation by ‘bending her knee’ to the Mahuta Mob and engaging in the electoral debacles of co-governance and Three Waters; both electoral suicide for Labour. The fact that she failed to discipline Mahuta for stepping out of line says a lot about her so-called leadership.
Most of her ministers have failed in their portfolios. In truth, her negatives far outweigh her positives and she will rightly go down as the worst prime minister in this country’s history. When dealing with the economy she and Grant displayed a ‘spray and walk away’ attitude. Looking at the welfare statistics you could be forgiven for thinking half the country is unemployed while businesses are crying out for staff. Thousands are waiting to be housed and Rotorua has been ruined as a result.
She arrived as something of a saint but time has revealed her to be a bully, so it is with a mixture of pleasure and relief that we can say sayonara, auf wiedersehn, adios, cheerio, adieu, goodbye and, to be politically correct, Haere ra.
