Can It Really Be This Bad?

Embarrassments Aplenty 

We have kept a weather eye on NZ politics for over thirty years.  Never before have we been confronted with a Prime Minister who would daily present herself to be a thorough going incompetent.  We knew Jacinda Ardern was flakey.  We did not realise just how much of a flake she really is.  

Columnist Matthew Hooten puts it this way, telling us that Ardern excels in making much ado about very little:

But as head of government, it was soon obvious she has no ability to formulate and progress an agenda, transformational or otherwise. There is nothing behind her words.  All her Government’s major initiatives have failed.

Despite its advance billing, the Wellbeing Budget was unconnected to the Treasury’s Living Standards Framework, earlier hailed by Finance Minister Grant Robertson.

Ardern has ruled out further rebalancing the tax system away from wages and towards capital gains. 

KiwiBuild has entered the Kiwi vernacular as a synonym for failure. Poverty, homelessness and suicide have all worsened. Fees-free tertiary education has had no material impact.

Perhaps most cynical of all was this week’s Suicide Prevention Strategy which, after two years in office, consisted mainly of setting up a new Suicide Prevention Office. By the time it gets its mission statement, logo, offices and espresso machine, another thousand families will have mourned a loved one.

This seems to have been Ardern’s sole strategy through her 11 aimless years in Parliament: emote over a problem, then propose a working group or other process as a substitute for taking responsibility, decisions and actions herself.  (NZ Herald, cited in Kiwiblog)

Can Ardern be that flakey? Yes she can.
  Labour excels in bringing forward political talent (or so it tells itself).  It recruits young people from a very early age (late teens) to become worker/functionaries in the Party.  It steers them towards Parliament.  It surrounds them with the heady prospect of changing the world.  These wunderkind come forth with the strange notion that issuing speeches really will transform the world.  They parade around with pretensions to become god-like.  They are the special elite who speak, and so it came to pass. 

And if things get a bit hot and sticky, why they can run off and grand-stand at some UN dinner,  at which they will proclaim how the world must needs be transformed.