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Who’ll Be the Next to Go?

Three down… plenty more to go

These three are just the start. The Good Oil. Photoshop by Lushington Brady.

Many years ago, I lumped together then NZ prime minister Jacinda Ardern with France’s Emmanuel Macron and Canada’s Justin Trudeau as the Golden Trio of Wokeism. I also predicted their imminent demise. Well, can’t win ’em all. Especially when, as no one could have, I failed to foresee the Covid pandemic or the unexpected ballot-box boost it delivered to incumbents around the world.

Belatedly, though, events caught up with Ardern and Trudeau. Macron is hanging on by the barest thread.

But, did I get the last one wrong? At the time, Joe Biden was just another corrupt, grifting senator. Now that his presidency has come and gone, though, he’s joined Ardern and Trudeau in the pantheon of mercifully departed wokeist wreckers.

Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, Jacinda Ardern. Three of the very worst democratic leaders in the world in the past decade.

Each brought fantastic harm on their respective nations. Each was once hugely successful, the very toast of the town. Yet each has been repudiated and run out of office, all of them resigning, unwillingly, ahead of schedule in order to avoid catastrophic electoral defeat.

Which is in itself rather telling. All three of them dodged the ultimate accountability at the ballot box. Nothing could more clearly indicate their disdain for democratic process.

Their successive demise is emblematic of the death throes of wokeism.

All three were essentially postmodern centre-left leaders who practised the politics of symbolism. This had two fundamental problems. It actually made the social issues it was meant to address worse. And it was a massive misdirection for the energies of government away from the core tasks of economic management, economic growth and national security.

That all three leaders were a failure is incontrovertible.

Canada’s standard of living declined sharply under Trudeau. Like the Biden administration, Trudeau championed ‘progressive’ policing models – and oversaw a surge in violent crime. Violent crime in New Zealand similarly rose 33 per cent under Ardern. The post-Floyd crime surge in the US was even more staggering.

[Trudeau] was the Canadian avatar of identity politics and naturally, as a result, race relations got much worse in Canada on his watch.

Last year there were race riots. To bring this about in polite, sleepy Canada requires almost a negative political genius.

New Zealanders would like a word about co-governance.

Productivity and economic growth plunged under Trudeau. Canadians have suffered negative per capita growth over the past couple of years and recession has been avoided only by huge immigration, at a rate that most Canadians didn’t want.

New Zealand might not have been swamped with millions of third-worlders, like Canada and the US, but for its population size, the immigration rate is one of the highest in the world. But if Ardern and Trudeau were catastrophic for their respective nations, Joe Biden was a global catastrophe.

Biden didn’t just fail, he failed on the grand American scale.

All three leaders invested in feel-good symbolism with an almost demented disregard for how the physical world works […]

All three leaders injected race and gender into every aspect of life and policy.

All three exhibited an almost complete indifference to how wealth was generated, instead embracing a dreamland in which maximum climate change commitments not only had no wealth offset, but magically created wealth out of thin air, literally. The problem is the world just didn’t work that way.

The only thing differentiating the three was the scale of disaster they were able to wreak. To take the ‘Middle Earth’ vibe that New Zealand trades so heavily on, Ardern was Saruman to Biden’s Sauron: working mischief ‘in a small mean way’. Where, for instance, Ardern turned the blunt instrument of the police on freedom protesters, Biden mobilised the entire power of the state against his opponents, from the J6 show trials to the litany of official lies regarding his and his son’s shady business dealings.

The US, having thrown off the dead hand of wokeism at the ballot box, is buzzing with new vigour. New Zealand is beginning to wonder whether, like the Brits, they’ve merely swapped one woke womble for another. Australians, as demonstrated by the renewed and growing enthusiasm for our national day, as well as plunging opinion polls for Anthony Albanese and his government, are itching to slough off our own womble.

The Western tide has turned. The sooner Christopher Luxon wakes up and stops swimming the wrong way, the more likely he is to save himself from drowning.


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