If the media can drag themselves away from their favourite pastime of criticising Mayor Brown, they may see a similarity between the government’s big boo-boo on school closures to Mayor Brown’s tardiness in declaring an emergency for an unprecedented weather event… Or not.
Both appeared ‘out of their depth’. The government has had over 5¼ years to get their act together: Mayor Brown, three months. With a fast-moving civil defence situation where things change in an instant, decision-making is fraught, as the government has also found.
However this has given the media the fuel they need, and I see once again another vicious cartoon of Brown online. The day Ardern jumped ship there was not one vicious cartoon of the chief rat fleeing the sinking ship. In Britain, she would not have been so lucky. No one and nothing is sacred there. With so many media outlets, coverage is a bit more balanced – like what the Herald‘s marketing promises but never quite attains.
Here she got a much gentler farewell from her fully paid-up media who now have her destined for martyrdom with sorrowful images of her accompanying accusations of misogyny (yawn) and protestations that the Cindy moniker is so demeaning. Can’t you hear the violins?
Barry Soper may hit the jackpot with his article comparing Ardern to other PMs accompanied by a photo of her in red with her head fetchingly on one side. Will he outdo the longevity of the questionable article on the TVNZ website of journalist, not news maker, John Campbell, who opines, ‘I have been a slow dull student of our history,’ posted on 21 September 2022? I could not bear to open it to learn his ponderous reasons.
As Brown (who does not enjoy Cindy’s media support as her political life crumbles) has found, it is best to keep objective in text messages to ‘friends’ or your message may end up on the front page for the mayor-hating media to gorge on. Who is advising him?
Following fast on the heels of two media polls showing Labour up and the genial Hipkins as everyone’s fave PM, we find his Government up to their old tricks again. This time making spur-of-the-moment, broad brush decisions following the freak Auckland weather event.
Mayor Brown had suggested schools stay closed on Tuesday given that the weather bomb was still approaching. Not to be outdone, the MOE generously gave (overjoyed) children another week off school, without any consideration of how this would inconvenience Aucklanders, hundreds of thousands of whom are hardly affected by the weather event.
After an outcry from schools and opposition politicians, the ministry apologised for tardy communication.
Now they are backtracking and suggesting that some schools could open before the 7th of February, and they are making decisions on a daily basis, which is similar to what Brown had originally suggested.
They literally could not organise a piss-up in a brewery.
This week I saw with horror a headline online ‘Three Waters appoints three CEOs’ and my worst fears were realised. The PM may have changed but it is clearly business as usual.
Is this the kind of bread-and-butter stuff affecting struggling New Zealanders that Hipkins our new PM was talking about addressing? Fine words Chris, but behind the scenes nothing has changed.
It is the same circus with a different ringmaster.
