Should We Stop Damning the Dame?

I normally get to the Weekend Herald (the only one in the week worth spending money on) on the weekend of publication, but the weekend before last was an exception. I finally got to open it last Friday. My habit is to peruse the business section first and a regular read is Fran O’Sullivan. Her headline read: It’s Time We Cut Jacinda a Little Slack. Hmm... She was, of course, speaking from a business perspective but that sector is no more enamoured with Ardern than the rest of us.

O’Sullivan thinks we should move on. She’s right and I have. However, that doesn’t mean we dismiss from our minds a period that can only be described as the reign of a tyrant. Covid was the weapon Ardern used to implement her ideas of socialist control. We were weaponised well and truly. These ideas were formulated during her involvement with the International Union of Socialist Youth, an organisation of which she was president. She gave one speech that frequently used the word comrade.

In the case of Covid we were the comrades – ‘the team of five million’, as O’Sullivan has referenced in her article. She thinks the use of that phrase (which Peter Blake coined to unite all behind the America’s Cup) was masterful. Really? This was the Dear Leader pulling the comrades into line. Fran says it worked. People stayed home she says. Of course they did. Was there an option? Step outside your front door and you risked police accosting you. Neighbours were told to dob in anyone seen doing so.

O’Sullivan also thinks Ardern’s handling of the one o’clock (first Jessica, then Tova) press conferences was also masterful. At this point I googled the dictionary definition of masterful. There are two meanings: one is ‘powerful and able to control others’; the other is ‘performed or performing very skilfully’, which I’m sure is the one O’Sullivan had in mind. In Ardern’s case I think the first meaning is the more applicable one.

O’Sullivan calls those press conferences ‘the podium of truth’. You would if you believed the lie: “We will continue to be your single source of truth… When you see those messages, remember that unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth.” Did those words emanate from the mouth of the now Dame Jacinda or did they come from the mouth of Xi Jinping? We could be excused for thinking we were under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party.

In Tiananmen Square, the military was used against the protesters. In parliament’s grounds the dame’s ‘political protector’, Trevor Mallard, didn’t bother getting the army out of bed: he simply switched on the sprinklers and gave the protesters a jolly good soaking. With his name maybe it was as understandable as it was bullying, one of his favourite pastimes. Politicians were told by Mallard to ‘duck’ the protesters, but they could observe them from behind their sanctuary walls in the building.

O’Sullivan says lives were saved. But lives were also lost by people not being able to access their required medical treatment, not to mention from the vaccinations. If your loved one was unlucky to die, last minute ‘goodbyes’ were forbidden. Stupid signs appeared on motorway gantry’s saying ‘Be Kind Stay Safe’ when everything we were being subjected to was anything but kind. Not one to be ‘judged’, the pink-haired lady broke the rules and went for a swim in Judges Bay. If you’re a friend of the PM, you can please yourself, evidently. Any recriminations? No, simply an error of ‘judgement’.

O’Sullivan describes Ardern’s handling of the mosque massacre in Christchurch as empathetic. It probably was, but we could have been spared the visit to the fancy dress hire in order to masquerade around looking like one of them. That seemed a bit over the top. In fact, when you think about it, a lot of her prime ministership was theatrics. Drama galore, but precious little to show for it beyond steering the ship of state into an iceberg of debt. We are still in the process of financially ‘thawing out’ and there is not a lot of financial warmth around.

So Fran, we can move on but cutting the dame some slack doesn’t come that easily. The comrades were excessively shackled and the economy suffered to a greater extent than was necessary. Ardern got plenty of plaudits from her left-wing buddies internationally but they didn’t have to endure what we did. And that’s the difference. She didn’t ‘run out of gas’ as she proclaims: rather she ran out of the means to continue her bullying and, realising the game was up, scarpered as all cowards do.

The reality is Jacinda Ardern was never qualified, fit or capable of carrying out the duties required of a prime minister. The highlight of her premiership was a fawning and misguided public mistakenly giving her a second term in a landslide victory. It didn’t take long for the voters to wake up to the error of their ways. Whereupon the tide turned and Ardern fled to another bastion of socialism: Harvard University in Boston. Her fancy dress there consists of mortar board and gown.

Talking about the title of her book, A Different Kind of Power, Ardern says “I think, you know, there are different ways to lead.” There certainly are and her way is not one to be recommended unless the comrades are happy and willing to live under the equivalent of the hammer and sickle. Having to spend two terms of government looking at the front of her, most were more than pleased to see the back of her.