Realists say ‘tanks for nothing’ as woke folks’ saint failed to achieve basic policy goals

Realists know when former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said she no longer had ‘enough in the tank’ to continue governing, she knew New Zealand had tanked, writes Piers Akerman.

Progressives – the Leftists – judge themselves by how other progressives see them and that’s why Jacinda Ardern is viewed as a saint by the woke folk who are moved by the vibe.

Realists, who can handle hard truths, know that when the New Zealand Prime Minister said she no longer had “enough in the tank” to continue governing, she knew that under her leadership, New Zealand had tanked.

Ardern supporters will principally remember her emotional responses to her nation’s two 2019 tragedies, particularly for hugging survivors of the appalling March Christchurch massacre in which 51 people were murdered and wearing a hijab in solidarity with some Muslim women, and the December White Island volcanic eruption which killed 22.

Feminists will laud her for being the second leader of a nation, albeit one with a total population smaller than either Sydney or Melbourne and decreasing with every departing aircraft, to have a child while in office, and global warmists will applaud her pledges to reduce the world’s so-called greenhouse emissions.

Those who aren’t moved to tears by the crooning of kumbayah will recognise the former president of the International Union of Socialists as a leader who failed to achieve her basic policy goals of lifting children out of poverty and ending homelessness.

Then New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern following a gathering for congregational Friday prayers and two minutes of silence for victims of the twin mosque massacre in Christchurch. Picture: Marty Melville/AFP

Anthony Albanese, who thinks he knows how to ride the vibe (particularly when it comes to milking the natural sympathy for struggling Aboriginal Australian communities) should pay close attention to Ardern’s failed leadership.

International acclaim is not enough to secure domestic support when climate change policy initiatives which cannot possibly affect the global temperature do affect the hip pockets of ordinary voters.

New Zealanders, like many Australians, blindly believed they were being saved from the ravages of the Covid pandemic when Ardern instituted lockdown restrictions that Beijing’s hardliners would have marvelled at – at least until they realised how damaging they were to the economy.

Jacinda Ardern instituted Covid-19 lockdowns. Picture: Brook Mitchell/Getty Images

Kiwis were left stranded abroad by Ardern’s strict measures which required New Zealanders seeking to return to go into a lottery for the available quarantine beds, giving new meaning to the flightless nature of the native bird.

The homeless, promised the world or at least 100,000 homes by Ardern, saw barely one per cent of that number of new dwellings, a profound policy failure reminiscent of Albanese’s pre-election promise to reward voters with a $275 reduction in their energy prices even as it was obvious to all that the Russian invasion of Ukraine three months before the May poll would scotch that pledge.

Ardern, who entered parliament as an unelected list candidate under New Zealand’s disastrous mixed member proportional election system which gives everyone two votes, one for a candidate and one for a party, has also smashed the guidelines of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi with the Maori and talks of co-governance.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Picture: Evan Morgan

Those who support Albanese’s championing for the insertion of the as-yet-undetailed indigenous Voice to be inserted into the Australian Constitution as the “right thing to do” because it would make people abroad feel better about Australia or give Australians a warm gooey feeling about themselves should look at the damage done to New Zealand’s once formidable national unity and consider the actual consequences of embracing an undefined constitutional change on Australia.

As with Australia, where those identifying as Aboriginal are over-represented in the crime statistics and prison population, so too, in New Zealand where people identifying as Maori are disproportionately engaged in crime and imprisoned.

Though making up less than 20 per cent of the general population, more than 50 per cent of those in prison are Maori, and in the case of women, about 60 per cent.

Ardern governed disastrously with the Greens as her partners and pandered to divisive figures as she unwound the economic reforms introduced nearly 40 years ago under Labour’s Roger Douglas.

Successive National and Labour governments built upon Rogernomics to give New Zealand an outstanding economy with market solutions and balanced budgets.

Ardern’s only economic solution has been to snuggle up to China as closely as possible without offending Australia, the US and the other nations in the Five Eyes security intelligence alliance.

Those Kiwis who can take flight are leaving their country because Ardern’s delusional policies extinguished the opportunity it once offered its residents.

Albanese should put the vibe aside and face hard facts for a change.