Jacinda Ardern – ‘contemporary comrade’, speaker in platitudes, and recipient of a degree in communications from Waikato University under Marx and Nietzsche – views kindness as nothing more than a ‘curative agent’. In her ‘Economics of Kindness’ statement piece on the government website, she says that “her country hopes to … lead the world with a new economic approach built on improving people’s wellbeing“.
In policy terms, this means income redistribution through tax-and-spend. It also means a commitment to social dystopia, where the short-term “positive outcomes” brought about by greater permissiveness are seen to outweigh the long-term ill effects. Very much the ‘let-them-eat-cake’ approach of Marie Antoinette. Here we see the introduction of no-questions-asked abortion through to full term, even as a form of contraception, and, from this September, the proposed legalisation of both marijuana and euthanasia.
Legal marijuana is only “kind” to the bohemian, hedonistic and self-centred metropolitan liberals inhabiting locales such as Grey Lynn who, not surprisingly, vote Labour and Green. Holding professional jobs, and seeking ‘experience-’ and pleasure-driven ‘lifestyle choices’ for themselves and their offspring, typically focused on contemporary ‘music’, recreational drug use and casual (if politically correct) sex between (consenting) persons, they find the official sanction of a drugs conviction extremely inconvenient when, for example, applying for entry visas to Los Angeles, or seeking admission for their social-justice lawyer children to the Bar.
Legal marijuana, to almost everyone else, is a nightmare: to the silent and orderly majority, who have to deal with the social changes inimical in a drugged-up society, such as a populace raving senselessly, increased crime, and violence. And to the burgeoning social underclass, who will become increasingly trapped in the hopelessness of this brave new world of narcotics. Those most affected will be the ones Labour purports most to help.
Euthanasia (or legalised killing) fits a similar pattern. First to benefit will be self-determining social hipsters planning their ‘intersectional’ Bahá’í send-offs, timed to a moment of their own choosing. The greater risk is to middle New Zealand, which will come to equate the value of life with financial pressure. Most at risk will be the poorest among us.
Ardern has rigorously pursued a borderless, totalitarian world where a ticket to New Zealand means the nation will import any new arrivals’ problems, unflinchingly accept every aspect of their culture, and financially support them indefinitely. Whereas in reality we cannot help the people who are already here, and each new arrival pushes those at the bottom further down the ladder.
Ironically, in dealing with COVID-19, Ms Ardern closed the borders out of ‘kindness’ and imprisoned the nation in an indefinite purgatory from which no one can escape. Those who arrive, mainly from the Third World, are greeted with taxpayer largesse.
Labour’s domestic policy is, as ever, centred around physical dependency. The major achievement of this parliamentary term is the colossal number of people, 2.8 million in total, or 57 percent of the population, who are now on some sort of benefit.
People are being positively encouraged not to labour for themselves. By contrast, in 2 Thessalonians 3:12 the apostle Paul ‘exhort[s] by our Lord Jesus Christ, that with quietness they [the idle] work, and eat their own bread.’
Labour’s foreign policy, in general terms, is to advance the United Nations’ internationalist agenda by means of creepage, precedent and the domestic absorption of international law. In the absence of meaningful debate, the democratic consent for this erosion of sovereign national control is thinner than most politicians would care to admit.
The nation-state has been effectively ambushed by the global integrationists. Having been a young Prime Minister, Ms Ardern’s next move will probably be to the ‘mothership’ UN to carry on the Clark ‘Trojan horse’ agenda of godless, Marxist multiculturalism.
Traditionally the role of government has been to provide an economic framework and a backdrop against which enterprise and civic life can freely take place. The last Labour Prime Minister who professed to any degree of Christian influence in this undertaking was David Lange (1984-1989).
Ardern is our first openly anti-Christian head of government – a God denier – carrying on the ‘work’ which Clark undertook more surreptitiously. Both pursued a ‘diversity’ agenda, but Ms Ardern is the first to worship openly at the temples of both radical secular atheism and Islam.
She is also the first to move socialism in New Zealand beyond the ordering of the physical and political landscape and into the ordering of emotions. With her ‘kindness agenda’ she is not only telling the ‘team of five million’ what to do, but what they should think and feel. The most frightening thing about this tactic is its popularity – and the number of ‘woke’ people who really do appear to like it.
Outside of George Orwell’s 1984, the state which has proved itself the most apt at playing such mind-games with the general populace is North Korea. We are rapidly catching up.
Overall, the advance of state control, the loss of our liberty to supra-national powers, and the subjugation of the population behind a propaganda blitz, doesn’t seem all that ‘kind’ to me. But perhaps it works in a country stripped of its Christian heritage, where kindness has lost all hereditary meaning and where, without the accoutrements of a shared common culture to bolster us, it is reduced to simply a behavioural code, a love of Dear Leader, and a ‘pleasant disposition’.
We shall know Ms Ardern by her fruits, which are in every way the antithesis of those which are conventionally ‘kind’. She does admittedly (sometimes) succeed in conveying a pleasant, disposition. Whether that is real or fake is impossible to tell.
