Having left Kiwis the legacy of a cost-of-living crisis, falling education standards for our poorest children & racial division, former PM Ardern is now shacked up in the Kennedy School at Harvard University, enjoying the pleasures of being on the receiving end of the University's $US 60 billion endowment. She recently gave a rousing speech there, saying the secret to great government policy is to "bring in the public". Did the out-of-touch Harvard folks not hear about the landslide defeat her Labour Party just suffered because it was hard to find anyone she brought with her? Nearly every policy she enacted has been reversed these past months because the public slam-dunk rejected them.
Ardern frequently attacked the 1980s market reforms of Roger Douglas, Richard Prebble & company, saying they had not brought in the public & were a disaster. Yet those reforms, be it an independent Central Bank, lower personal income tax rates, GST, elimination of farmer subsidies, floating dollar & more, are still in place 40 years later - whereas it's hard to find a single Ardern "reform" still there one year after she left office. Her government turned the vaccinated against the unvaccinated; Māori against non-Māori; rich against poor; farmer against environmentalist. Her motto became "divide & conquer"; not "bring in the public". Big Media are desperate to paint Luxon, Seymour & Peters as dividers. But we, the people, know the truth. The seeds of division were laid and cultivated by Ardern.
Harvard's Kennedy School of blah-blah should be ashamed of itself for becoming a place that jumps on bubbles, even after they've burst, where the faculty hire former politicians whose partisan views align with their own. Its seminars now resemble group therapy sessions, lacking in academic integrity. The School is not searching for the truth, which is meant to be the ethos of a university. So what was the lesson of Ardern's time in politics? She was perhaps the most charismatic leader NZ has ever known - a Case Study of a long line of world politicians who've led their country to ruin yet for a time were wildly embraced by the public due to their charisma. She relied on (terrible) advice & saw her job as "selling it to the public", which she did with extraordinary talent. But that advice led to never-ending lockdowns even after most of our population were vaccinated (because Prof. Michael Baker advised elimination was "sustainable"), spiraling debt, more monopolies, unaffordable prices and inflation. Ardern gained personal mojo & success - yet cost the nation its mojo & success. We must regain it fast and get back to where we once belonged.
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