No doubt Labour’s spin doctors will be getting ready to smear the author of a NZ Herald article as just another ungrateful immigrant.
But what Ali Shakir has written is pretty powerful stuff that should make Labour’s brains trust quake in fear. First, some background:
I was 39 when I arrived in Helen Clark-led New Zealand in 2008. Having lived most of my life under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, and barely managed to survive the mayhem that followed his regime’s overthrow in 2003; New Zealand seemed like a place where I could finally find peace.
And practice what I’d only heard and read about: democracy.
Prior to voting, I was keen to go through the policies of all competing parties. It didn’t take long though to realise that I was on the same page with Labour. Progressive, liberal and pro-social justice; what more could I have asked for?
I still remember my enthusiasm as I slipped my first ballot into the box, and my disappointment at their loss. I kept voting for them in the consecutive elections, nonetheless, until they made it in 2017. The Labour Party didn’t actually win, but managed somehow to form a coalition that led Jacinda Ardern to become our 40th, youngest and third female Prime Minister. That was one of my happiest memories in Aotearoa.
Nice bit of background, and shows just what an impact democracy has when people are exposed to it after years under a dictatorship.
Now for some reality:
Hardly a day goes by without a friend from overseas emailing or texting me about how fortunate New Zealanders are to be led by Ardern, and how impressed they were with her decisive response to Covid-19.
There’s no denying that the Prime Minister is trying to save people’s lives, and it sure takes guts to shut down a country for weeks on end, jeopardising its economy, but there was no alternative. Many hospitals are struggling with lack of funds, some facilities are in pretty poor shape. The health system is so vulnerable that larger outbreaks could lead to an absolute disaster. And it’s not only the health system this Government has failed to fix. Poverty, infrastructure, housing crisis, to name a few, the Labour Party made huge promises, but delivered very little.
And that right there is the problem for Jacinda Ardern. She says she is happy to stand on her record, thinking that like a rich man’s wallet, it makes her taller. But her record is one of failure. Her reputation is a creation of foreign and local media and it is unearned.
Halfway through their first term, the Labour Party seems to have given up on the fight for change, and settled for investing in Ardern’s stardom as a means of securing a solid working majority in the coming election. Meanwhile, tackling the other issues only as they came to the surface, doing just enough to save face. A tactic that proved to be working very well.
A friend of mine described the Ardern phenomenon, saying it’d created a different atmosphere in the country. I think that’s very true. It is a well-known fact here, albeit not often discussed in public: No matter how talented; Kiwi actors, singers, writers — and politicians, I dare add — are not big until they’ve made it big in the United States, and understandably, the United Kingdom.
Over the past year and a half, Ardern was ginormous. Many of us felt elated, as if on a high at the sudden surge in global recognition of the Prime Minster. And New Zealand.
Shouldn’t I be proud of being a citizen of this privileged country? Isn’t it the perfect redemption of my painful past in the Middle East? It did feel like that at first, until the side effects became too obvious to ignore.
There is not much use being on the front cover of Time and every other woke publication known to people if you don’t actually deliver. The media have attempted to beatify Ardern, based on nothing more than slogans and cheap publicity shots. The reality is far from the glamourous headlines:
The international glorification of Ardern, I noticed, was filling her and her party with a sense of great accomplishment that was, sorry to say, not always deserved. It was painting a rosy picture of life in New Zealand to rub in the faces of Trump’s and Johnson’s supporters. To be then recycled locally through flashy headlines, citing this or that posh American or British publication or platform.
For many Kiwis, adoring the Prime Minister became synonymous with patriotism, and it would manifest in various ways and places, including ones where it shouldn’t.
It has become sickening. It can’t be anything other than deliberate politicking that Woman’s Weekly launched a new magazine with Ardern on the cover just before the election. It was designed to reinforce her stardom.
But it’s gone too far, and now people are revolting, and saying it out loud.
Criticism and calls for accountability, online and in real life, are often met with insults and ridicule. The opponents on the other side are not holding back either.
Throughout my 12 years of living in New Zealand, political polarisation has never been wider, and more alarming.
Is this a healthy electoral environment? Do I really want to be part of it? I asked myself many times. The answer was always a bitter “no”.
And so I‘ve decided, with great reluctance, to be a passive voter. I’m leaving my ballot blank this year.
This voter is clearly sick of the celebrity nature of Jacinda Ardern, and so heartily sick of it that they aren’t even going to vote.
Thus the folly of Labour’s small target, promise nothing, let’s keep moving campaign is exposed.
They’ve done nothing at best, gone backwards in many areas, and stood still rather than moved.
Like John Key, Jacinda Ardern has wasted her popularity and achieved three-fifths of five-eighths of stuff all. The difference between John Key and Jacinda Ardern is that John Key kept the economy in good health, while Jacinda Ardern has buried ours and is still digging a massive hole for us all called debt. The sad thing is that she thinks she’s built the equivalent of Mt Rushmore, with just her face on it.
If this voter won’t vote, how many others are now thinking the same way, or worse still for the Labour party and Jacinda Ardern, they’ve decided that there is a better way?
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