New Zealand’s Labour Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern makes the country a laughing stock
FIRST Canada, then France, and now New Zealand has elected an inexperienced populist with no time for proper public scrutiny, writes Piers Akerman.
Opinion
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Don’t let political correctness stop you from laughing at the latest Kiwi joke — New Zealand’s new Labour government.
And surely it cannot be misogynist to question the skills of the new Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, the 37-year-old neophyte who now joins the ranks of other weird gen Xers, French President Emanuel Macron, 39, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, 45, as a populist novice leader.
She has reached the heights through the bizarre alchemy of her country’s MMP (mixed member proportional) voting system under which each voter gets two votes, one for the political party they support, and one to choose the MP to represent them in the electorate in which they live.
Neither major party received an outright majority and though the National Party had given New Zealand nine years of stable and prosperous government took the largest share of the votes by far (44.4 per cent in the election) and won the largest number of seats, 56, to Labour’s 36.9 per cent of the vote and 46 seats, both parties were forced to negotiate with the two piddling protest parties, the Greens, with eight seats and Winston Peters’ New Zealand First Party, with nine seats.
It should have been clear from the outset of this tedious process (the election was held on September 23) that Peters, who has held two previous governments to ransom, would throw his lot in with Labour this time round.
Bill English, who served as former Prime Minister John Key’s deputy and Finance Minister, before taking the prime ministership on Key’s sudden retirement last December, was clearly not prepared to compromise the National Party’s record of good stewardship to accommodate the glory-seeking Peters.
Ardern however, a former president of the International Union of Socialist Youth, who worked in the office of former NZ Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark and former UK Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair, (she might have joined Bernie Sanders’ team in the US and Jeremy Corbyn’s UK effort if she had had the time) had no such scruples. She has happily gone along with the ratbag Left-wing radicals to grab power.
With a Labour-Green-Peters coalition holding office across the “Dutch” (as Kiwis call the Tasman Sea), we can expect to see a number of not-so surprising developments.
First, the NZ currency will probably continue the drop in value which began with the uncertainty about government on Friday.
Second, Australia will gain from an influx of savvy Kiwis who will demonstrate that they are not as flightless as their avian namesakes and flock to Australia while it still offers greater economic freedoms. This option would close should Labor leader Bill Shorten win office, as currently seems likely.
Third, dole-bludging Kiwis can be expected to leave Australia to take advantage of the Ardern promise to restore a loafers’ paradise courtesy of a restoration of a generous welfare state (a goal shared with both the Greens and Peters). But they may return should Labor win and compete with NZ’s welfare state (see above).
Fourth, NZ’s sheep population and to a lesser extent its cattle will find themselves the uncomfortable butt of even more fart jokes as the NZ power troika move relentlessly toward Labour’s target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050, damaging its sheep meat exports and dairy export industries.
With just 4.69 million people, and about 30 million sheep and 10.4 million cattle, you know which sector will bear the brunt of the No Farts rule.
Peters has long played kingmaker on both sides of the political fence to gain political power. He was deputy Prime Minister in coalition with a National Party government and Foreign Minister in coalition with a previous Labour government.
He even lost his seat in his own electorate at the recent election — which says something about the regard with which he was held by those who knew him best.
The tragedy for New Zealand is that its Labour Party was once praised globally for its economic initiatives if not for its loopy ideas on social and defence policies.
The economic miracle that existed over the past nine years had its genesis in reforms that were engineered by Labour Finance Minister Roger Douglas who swept away the stagnating statist policies heavily regulated economies after the Muldoon conservative government lost office in July, 1984.
Gone were massive government bureaucracies, quangos and numerous economy-stifling boards designed to flatten enterprising individuals into submission.
New Zealanders were forced to consider their place in the global economy and on the back of hard work and resourceful characters, the nation leapt forward.
Peters has justified his self-serving decision to reward Labour and himself with the thought that Kiwis “voted for change” (only when construed through the tortured vote manipulation of MMP) and that his view that “capitalism must regain its human face”.
By all measures, New Zealand with unemployment under 5 per cent and a projected surplus of 2.8 per cent of GDP in 2022, outdoing all other 25 advanced countries except Norway which enjoys tapping its North Sea Oil assets (no Green problems with those), and supporting a large population of Pacific Islanders, has shown an extremely human face to the world.
The big lesson for Australian politicians in this is that, again, an inexperienced populist can win office and defeat a well-regarded government with a record for delivering stability and prosperity if the change is made close enough to an election so that any character flaws can be covered up by a compliant media.
People on both sides of the divide in Canberra have noted this and neither Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull nor Bill Shorten can afford to be relaxed.
The only upside for Australia is that the inherent instability of the incoming New Zealand team might give voters here a moment to consider whether it would be that wise to adapt the new Shaky Isles model of government at the next election.