Can The Ship Be Righted?

"Proverbial drunken sailor"

John Armstrong is a seasoned left-of-centre commentator upon NZ politics.  He appears to be in despair at the nonsense and incoherence leaking from every bilge pump in the Labour-led Coalition.

Stop the rot. And stop it quickly. That has to be Jacinda Ardern’s absolute priority on her return from overseas.  The incumbent three-party governing arrangement was displaying all the coherence and co-ordination of the proverbial drunken sailor long before the Prime Minister left for the relative sanctuary of a Winston Peters-free New York.

The unwieldy contraption has since appeared to be even more sloshed in her absence as its components stumble from one mini-crisis to the next minor scandal with such regularity that you can almost set your watch by it.  This three-headed hydra needs to go on the wagon — and pretty darned soon.  [One News]

He proceeds to give PM Ardern some public coaching on what needs to be done to sort things out.  You know that a government is in deep trouble when a journo/commentator feels compelled to coach a PM publicly and provide an eight-point agenda for righting the ship.  Armstrong is actually burning  his own brand as a neutral observer and commentator by needing to go this far--but such is the urgency that weighs upon him.

For our part we are coming to the view that Jacinda Ardern is a flake.
  She is showing signs of gross incompetence as a prime minister.  We begin to suspect that Ardern's MO is to sprinkle pixie dust left, right, and centre in the vain hope that magic will transpire like mushrooms out of the compost.  Her particular pixie dust recipe consists of little more than vacuous platitudes pronounced left, right, and centre.

It is an attribute and prerogative of Deity to create ex-nihilo by speaking reality into existence.  When human beings  attempt the same it is risible.  It is an embarrassment.  Commentators like John Armstrong are feeling the nation's pain.