The Hard Left is Disappointed With Its Heroine

The Jacinda Problem: Where She Goes, We Go



Chris Trotter
Bowalley Road


She's With Me: It wasn't quite Mickey Savage's "where she stands, we stand; where she goes, we go", but Jacinda Ardern's open-ended support for Theresa Mays Brexit-beleaguered Britain came pretty close. What has become of "transformational" Jacinda? Can she still "do this"?

What's happened to Jacinda? What’s become of the young woman who captivated the electorate sixteen short months ago? The Jacinda who promised New Zealanders a “transformational” government inspired by the politics of kindness. Where has she gone?

Surely the New Zealand Prime Minister who earlier this week pledged to stand by Britain: “Whatever you decide about your place in the global community”; cannot be the same woman who turned up to Buckingham Palace proudly wearing a Maori cloak? That Prime Minister would never have boasted (in the right-wing Daily Telegraph of all places!) that “around four in every five New Zealanders still claims British heritage”. She would have left that sort of racially-charged rhetoric to Donald Trump.

Except, of course, it was New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, who said those things. The very same Jacinda Ardern who’s been guilessly decorating the “loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires” who gather every year at the exclusive ski resort of Davos in the Swiss Alps.

It would seem that we misunderstood the Labour leader when she promised us a transformational government.
Our naïve assumption was that she intended to transform New Zealand society when, clearly, it was herself she was determined to transform.

There will, of course, be a great many Kiwis who cannot get enough of their PM’s global celebrity status. Seated on the same stage as Sir David Attenborough. Discussing mental health with Prince William. What’s not to like? Jacinda is only going where Bono has so boldly gone before.

And yet, while our prime minister is rubbing shoulders with the good and the great at Davos, thousands of New Zealand’s most vulnerable citizens are without adequate accommodation and forced to rely upon grossly over-stretched food banks to feed their children.

While she earnestly discusses mental health issues with William Windsor, her Health Minister back home is, disgracefully, holding the cloaks of New Zealand’s DHBs while they attempt to stone the Resident Doctors Association to death.

While she lends her most solemn and concerned expressions to Sir David Attenborough’s desperate pleas for urgent action on global warming, her “green” government is frantically fabricating new and ever-more-ridiculous excuses for, once again, letting New Zealand’s farmers off the climate change hook. . . .

How sad that it has come to this. . . . How tragic that, sixteen months later, so few of those same citizens have the slightest idea what the “this” that she enjoined them to “do” actually is.

Jacinda is the most accomplished ambassador for New Zealand to have graced the global stage since David Lange bowled-over the Oxford Union. That is not, however, enough. Jacinda is not New Zealand’s MC, she’s our PM.

It’s time for her to start acting like one.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 25 January 2019.