Jacinda Ardern: Incompetent

It took me three years to learn that New Zealand's dear leader is actually incompetent. What passes for stardust is in fact, in one word, luck. In 2017 she got lucky. She didn't win the general election that year, she came second behind National, but she won the coalition negotiations. Winston Peters, the leader of a tiny fringe party of disaffected and mostly old National and Labour voters, decided to anoint her prime minister by entering coalition with the Ardern Labour party.

And then bad things started to happen. There was the terrorist who shot up two mosques, followed within a year by the White Island volcanic eruption which injured many tourists. These were events Ardern reacted to as anyone would expect, as a human. She looked good.

But then along came COVID-19. Now she is expected to make hard decisions, life and death decisions and she just can't do it. She's a ditherer, that's why I'm deciding to call her ditherer Jacinda. Her main opponent is wee Simon Bridges, the National party leader. He's a little man with little ideas and too much ambition. Ditherer Jacinda and wee Simon Bridges should hook up, they're meant for one another.

What decided the matter for me with ditherer Jacinda was her press conference on the 5th of April 2020. She gave a whole diatribe about what a wonderful job she'd done with COVID-19. Err, but no she hasn't, all she's done is virtually bankrupt the country. Clearly she's living in some parallel universe, not the real world. Most of her time was spent making it look like the government was doing things, when it is the New Zealand people doing it.

And NZ is already a country with social distance between people. Most live in houses separated by metres, in their own bubbles, that's why the virus hasn't spread that fast. It was never going to get out of hand, relying on overseas modelling was always stupid as NZ is a country that could easily hold 50 million, with only 5 million in it. Everyone is dispersed, effectively limiting the spread.

Ardern talked of a 'false dichotomy' of economy vs lives. What she really meant, in context, was health comes before the economy. She wants to shut down any question of the level of lockdown given the low level of Coronavirus cases. But the choice of economy vs lockdown is a conundrum if not a dichotomy. The choices are not mutually exclusive, it's a riddle, but if you favour one over the other you either end up with too many deaths which is bad, or only a few deaths but a broken economy and no income to fund the health care system in the future, which is also bad. The two are symbiotic and getting the balance right is clearly not something this dithering prime minister has time for.

I'm left with little faith NZ even knows how to come back from this disaster. What is certain is I won't be around to meet the cost, that will be left to my children and grandchildren. This crisis has been a massive theft by Baby Boomers of Millennial and Gen Z inheritance.