Ardern No Ringmaster

Shambolic Three Ring Circus


Mike Hosking
NZ Herald

So it's WhatsApp is it?

With the dropping of what we assume to be the final tranche of Derek Handley documents, have we finally found ourselves at the end of this tortuous and appallingly handled fiasco?

Why it took the Government so long to get here is really the story of this sorry saga.   This all ultimately resulted in nothing.

The original intent was to have a rockstar as our tech guru, but with "Labour Recruitment Incorporated" in charge, we have no one - and a person out of a job.  And a political drama that in the end involved Handley, Clare Curran, Chris Hipkins, Grant Robertson, Megan Woods and, of course, Jacinda Ardern.

Handley is bitter, which is one of the sadnesses of the whole affair, given it was Handley, if you read the messages, who did the contacting, who showed the enthusiasm. He's clearly a Ardern fan and wanted in on the stardust.   And having been exposed to their particular style of operation has been eaten up, and spat out.

In the wash up I don't think we can claim a scandal, there seems to be no smoking gun. Which once again leads you back to asking: just why is it that Ardern's style of leadership appears to be so shambolic and Machiavellian.


She refused to deal with Curran in the first place the way she should have. Curran excused herself eventually after seeing what she was doing was beyond the pale.

The party was ordered by Parliament's Speaker no less to produce the paper trail.  They mucked around, stalled and procrastinated. Hipkins failed to do so, and Robertson showed up and did a half baked, give the fingers to the Speaker, sort of job.

Then Ardern gets dragged in having claimed she had nothing to do with it, only to have text messages, emails and now Whatsapp messages showing she was very much involved, and very much interested.

Why? Why oh why didn't she, when asked, just clear the decks and tell the truth?  What was she trying to hide? What value did she think she had in feigning no interest, and no contact?  She's up with a drama that's lasted weeks, that has hijacked her New York trip, that has an aggrieved and angry bloke who was once a fan. The job is still vacant and the chances of it ever being filled being, pretty much, zero.

And to add insult to injury, despite all of this not a single one of them, not Ardern, not Robertson, not Curran, only Woods had been courteous enough to actually pick up the phone and say sorry to Handley.  That is just simply bad manners; they don't know how to behave. And perhaps we can conclude they don't know how to govern either.

Take this - add the Meka Whaitiri leak that got blown hopelessly out of proportion as well, given it never needed to be as secret as Ardern made it, and you have to wonder - why the hell are they making this stuff so hard?

And is the simple truth, naivety and inexperience are doing them in?