by Amy Brooke on The Spectator Australia
Conveniently removing herself from facing those few journalists with enough integrity to ask her the questions she is adept at dodging, Jacinda Ardern, recently visiting overseas countries on a charm offensive, has long been widely thought to be laying the groundwork for her move into the global network of high-fliers.
Now, in her carefully contrived, emotional announcement, ‘Let’s get married, Clarke,’ she has given notice she intends to resign as PM on February 7, setting October 14 as the date for this year’s general election. It was already widely suspected she would soon step down, abandoning a rapidly sinking Labour ship.
Repudiating suggestions she has plans for a job at the UN or elsewhere on the world stage, Ardern declares she just wants a good rest. However, we would have to be particularly gullible to not take this with a grain of salt, given her clear early signs of being ambitious. Working for Labour prime minister Helen Clark, then for Tony Blair’s government, she emerged, aged only 28, as President of the International Union of Socialist Youth, addressing her fellow travellers as comrade. Her far from in-depth, academic degree – (she graduated from university merely with a Bachelor of Communication Studies in Politics and Public Relations) – nevertheless assisted her to position herself as a mistress of empathy, earning widespread acclaim from the Left, world-wide.
Earmarked by the World Economic Forum (WEF) as a Young Global Leader, she supports the WEF’s Great Reset agenda, headed by the fanatical, apparently megalomaniac and anti-Christian Klaus Schwab, who applauds communist China’s brutal government. Ominously, she has also thrown her support behind the World Health Organisation’s tyrannical attack upon the independence of nations worldwide by seeking to control them with binding international health regulations.
Ardern’s instincts are unfailingly autocratic, to the extent of ignoring the wishes of the 90 per cent of New Zealanders who do not want the country’s name to be altered to the inauthentic Aotearoa, and who have overwhelmingly opposed the Three Waters legislation – which basically hands over the control of drinking water, wastewater and stormwater (recently surreptitiously extended to Five Waters, to include hydro and coastal waters) from local government councils to powerful, corporations of quasi-tribal, part-Maori organisations. The planning behind the infamous He Puapua report which Ardern initially claimed to know nothing about, while her ministers were working on ways to implement it – and which is basically an attack on the constitutional foundations of the country – was only revealed when her government was forced to release it, initially heavily redacted. Its intent is to replace democracy with a co-governance system – as a result of the power moves by a small, extremist group of part-Maori apparently obsessed by this part of their genetic inheritance – even to the exclusion of a far greater proportion of European ancestry. In fact, possibly the greatest damage Ardern has done to New Zealand has been her deliberate promotion of racial divisiveness, to the extent of renaming our public institutions in newly-invented, supposedly Maori terminology which over 90 per cent of the country does not understand – with inevitable consequences.
Very possibly no other New Zealand prime minister has become so universally and deeply disliked, to the consternation of the far-Left, inveighing against those who, acutely aware of the damage she has caused, were increasingly supporting a petition so far signed by nearly 100,000 people, asking her to go.
Ardern’s repeated exhortation to New Zealanders to be kind to one another meshed oddly with telling the population not to speak to neighbours when Covid entered the country, and the appalling decision to refuse to allow people to visit ill and dying relatives during her government’s imposed lockdown, leaving them to die alone, with entry to the country denied even to desperate family members. The compassionate image she presented at the time of the tragic Christchurch massacre was somewhat compromised by her wearing the hijab, the symbol of female oppression which Middle Eastern women have been fighting for so long, their protests bringing them imprisonment, torture, even execution, as in Iran today – an appalling situation in relation to which she and New Zealand feminists have been culpably silent.
Equally puzzling is that in spite of her government’s compliance in receiving New Zealanders living many years in Australia – with very tenuous connections to this country, but with criminal convictions – there has been no move to send back the Australian who committed the appalling Christchurch massacre. However, it provided the perfect excuse for Ardern’s government to review gun control legislation, compelling New Zealanders to surrender targeted weaponry. Gang-related shootings, however, have now reached unprecedented levels, as has juvenile crime, particularly in relation to repeated ram-raids, coinciding with declining school attendance and on-going truancy.
The consensus is that Ardern is quitting as she was due to lose the next election catastrophically. Her popularity has skydived as the accumulation of damage her far-Left government has done is increasingly obvious, not only the litany of failed undertakings and profligate government spending – but the quite shocking attack on our democratic principles.
Given the practice of MPs of awarding themselves lucrative benefits for their selfless overseeing of the interests of the country, taxpayers are annually obliged to bestow a special financial thank-you, in perpetuity, on those who qualify. As a former prime minister, having served for a certain time, Ardern will receive an annuity of $57,000 per year, and after she dies, her surviving partner can be paid half this amount. She could also be paid for scheduled travel within New Zealand, if related to her former role, and can command a chauffeur-driven car. She and Clarke Gayford can have the use of a self-driven car, and he also qualifies for free travel within New Zealand on business relating to his role as her partner.
Moreover, as implied by another former prime minister – (by no means considered intellectually gifted, but never reluctant to boast about his supposed achievements) –New Zealand’s leaders deserve whatever they can get. A highly questionable notion – particularly given the damage Ardern has inflicted upon the country. What rather comes to mind is that, ‘A good tree does not bring forth bad fruit’.
I totally agree with this article. I was completely blindsided by Jacinda Adern and regret it to my dying day.
A lot of people got taken in, some even thought she was pretty but the features are extreme.
If something seems to be too good to be true it usually is, and even her parting words were that people were going to read something into her departure that isn’t there. Why mention it at all?