Trotter on Jacinda

Chris Trotter writes:

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.

Ouch. He seems disillusioned.