Supporters want to do good but now questioned how well they were doing themselves
Jacinda Ardern never understood that her guilt transfer policies that once thrilled the middle class now dismayed it.
The main reason that Miss Ardern missed the signals about her tarnishing moral robes was paradoxically her success in winning over the media to the justice of her causes from the outset of her premiership.
They tip toed around her – as did her own MPs.
The impression gathered momentum throughout the past year that Jacinda’s attentions were on more distant horizons instead of the mundane ones such as the price of groceries and the maintenance of law and order
An uncertainty began to settle over health and education.
Was the emphasis on what was being delivered? Or on which language it was being delivered in?
Jacinda Ardern pre-branded her first 12 months in office as the “Year of Deliveries.”
In her last 12 months in office there gathered within her well-to-do urban following questions centred on what was being delivered? Who was doing the ordering? And where were they based?
Were these deliveries three dimensional? Or were they internationalist notions designed to impede and generally trip up local unity and productivity?
It is symbolic that her resignation was close to the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because it was here that her cause of causes, globalisation, became unhinged.
Food “security” could no longer be taken for granted. So if New Zealand was responsible for feeding at least 40 million people beyond its own boundaries what exactly was it achieving in doing its utmost to encourage the putting out of business of farmers?
The surprise remains that there was any surprise.
Miss Ardern in announcing to a student gathering the curtailment of oil and gas exploration had laid out her agenda. Neither was it any coincidence that the students were the first to know. In so many ways Miss Ardern’s tenure was a continuation of student union activism.
Its timing was perfectly synchronised because of a huge swing away from technical and applied education and training in favour of the abstract tertiary social sciences.
The encouraged closure of the nation’s sole refinery at Marsden Point had repercussions still never understood such as that it meant the disappearance also of valuable by-products used from everything from road building materials to foodstuffs.
Miss Ardern’s early rhetorical triumphs blended with her wide-eyed over-promising still even last year created an impression that she was awaiting the opportunity to unleash the early magic.
This sense of anticipation grew more acute with the Occupation as groups disaffected by the sterner dictates of the Covid era converged on Parliament in the middle of Wellington.
The movement had actually begun in Canada, regrouped in Auckland. So there was plenty of time to prepare for it by, for example, removing all the parking places around Parliament itself.
There was a feeling that Miss Ardern would now mystically disperse the Occupiers with an “I feel your pain” type of speech.
In the event she was nowhere to be seen.
The Occupiers stayed, and stayed, and stayed until they were finally removed in a main force tough police action.
In the interval the Occupiers blocked off central city university halls so that students could not attend their lectures and public servants similarly could not get into their offices.
The urban progressive core constituency was shaken. How could this all have taken place and so close to where they lived?
The urban media now sprung to Miss Ardern’s defence by claiming that the Occupation, as it became known, was the work of the far right.
This conflicted with visual evidence that demonstrated that the disgruntled were a cross section of New Zealand society.
It was now that there began to start a series of attacks characterised by ram raids on small businesses in Auckland and these went on and on.
Once again the urban progressives began wondering where exactly was Miss Ardern?
Why was she not, for example, performing a workaday Member of Parliament stunt such as at least venturing out into the night in a police patrol car?
She seemed disinterested.
The urban educated professional class progressives want to do good and more importantly still want to be seen doing it.
They also want and expect to do well personally.
