When hard core lefties like Tim Watkin are struggling to sing your praises for your achievements then you know you are in trouble, or should be. But for some reason the voting public are looking past the over-promised, under-delivered Labour party and strangely thinking of given them another go.
We are even seeing Jacinda Ardern brazenly promising things she promised last election, or claiming she hasn’t failed on things like Kiwibuild, claiming instead that they just didn’t succeed.
So when Tim Watkin starts outlining just what a fraud Jacinda Ardern is, it pays to take heed. And it is a very long list of abject failures.
If Ardern and her party were running on their track record alone, it would be a much tighter race.
In 2017, Ardern rode to victory on a commanding personal performance after her last minute replacement of Andrew Little, a tiring National party and three key policies that a sufficient number of New Zealanders were demanding action on. Housing, poverty and climate change.
In the three years since, the coalition she has led has struggled to get traction on any of the promises its dominant member made on those issues.
With housing, we all know Kiwibuild promised 100,000 houses in a decade and that last year Phil Twyford was sacked as Housing Minister as the party admitted it had failed.
Even in the second leaders’ [debate] Ardern was on the back foot over housing, saying again it had tried and failed to rapidly build more houses.
Labour’s housing policy released yesterday admits just 602 Kiwibuild homes have been built as of last month; estimates earlier this year had it taking 400 years to reach its 100,000 target at this year’s rate of building.
We also know that Ardern forever gave up on her promise to introduce a Capital Gains Tax, when she couldn’t win over New Zealand First.
But most people have forgotten another big housing promise – to abolish Auckland’s urban boundary, which Twyford blamed for helping “drive land and housing costs through the roof” and contributing to “a housing crisis that has allowed speculators to feast off the misery of Generation Rent.”
Auckland Council takes a different view and the boundary remains.
Worse, house prices nationally have risen a further 27 percent under a government that promised to fix the affordability “crisis” and this week the average asking price for a house in Auckland topped $1m. Rents are up 3.3 percent on the year to July.
And while more state houses are being built, the number of New Zealanders on the state house waiting list has leapt from 5844 to 19,438.
Prices, rent and waiting list all up and not nearly the 16,000 Kiwibuild houses that were promised to have been built by now.
Talking about promises of 100,000, Jacinda Ardern also made a bold one relating to child poverty in 2017.
On Morning Report Guyon Espiner asked her about her commitments on reducing child poverty.
Espiner: “You will pledge to lift 100,000 children out of poverty by 2020?
Ardern: “Guyon my goal is to eradicate child poverty in NZ, so I’m happy to be ambitious about the targets”.
After a couple of questions about eradication, Espiner doubled back to the core promise.
Espiner: “I just want to clarify, are you committing this morning to lifting 100,000 children out of poverty by 2020?”
Ardern: “On 50 percent of the median income, yes.”
Helpfully, this government set up a suite of measurements for child poverty and so here in 2020, we know exactly how far short this government has fallen. Almost.
The latest data we have is up until June 2019, which was released in February this year.
So is Labour on track to meet that 100,000 promise when the data for this year is released?
Not even close. As of June 2019, using the 50 percent measurement Ardern herself used (after housing costs), it had got 12,100 children out of poverty.
Labour may argue there is a lag time and that number will have been seen to have skyrocketed when the 2020 data is released […]
And what about climate change? The issue Ardern famously called her generation’s “nuclear-free moment.”
Labour and the Greens were able to pass the Zero Carbon Act, aiming for zero net carbon emissions by 2050. Yet for now emissions continue to rise and are on track to keep rising until 2025.
A plan for the government’s vehicle fleet to be emissions-free by mid-2025 is now being called a “laughable dream.”
Compared with other countries, New Zealand’s efforts to reach our Paris Agreement goals has been deemed “insufficient”.
At this election, Labour is headlining its promise of 100 percent renewable energy in New Zealand by 2030. We’re already at 84 percent, but it sounds good, right? Because it will lower emissions.
However, the government’s own Interim Climate Change Committee (ICCC) advised against it.
“Such a solution is very costly, particularly in terms of achieving the last few percent of renewable electricity,” the ICCC wrote.
Costly both to your back pocket and the environment.
You see the 100 percent goal could see residential electricity prices rise by 14 percent, the ICCC estimated. And the higher prices would slow the decarbonisation of the economy as a whole, meaning more emissions.
“The Committee recommends that the Government prioritises the accelerated electrification of transport and process heat over pursuing 100 percent renewable electricity by 2035 in a normal hydrological year because this could result in greater greenhouse gas emissions savings while keeping electricity prices affordable.”
Labour has ignored that advice.
So on its three key issues, Labour has failed to match its own promises and goals. Ardern reasonably points to New Zealand First as a handbrake on housing and climate.
She says her government has “made a good start” on these issues and needs more time. They remain her priorities. But the timeframes she gave were of her own making and she has failed to achieve them.
New Zealanders from today can vote on whether she and her team gets the more time she’s asking for.
As they head to the polls, the track record remains her greatest liability.
Jacinda Ardern tells us she is standing on her record. That record though won’t give her any additional height. In fact in many areas they’ve gone backwards and therefore she is actually standing in a hole her government dug.
But still the media gush along with the unquestioning public. Good on Tim Watkin for outlining the litany of failure.
Jacinda Ardern is the biggest political fraudster of our time. Even more of a fraud than Winston Peters is often described as. She promised big and delivered small.
Enough is enough. But for the Chinese plague, this fraud would be run out of town on a rail.
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