Morgan Godfery is a senior lecturer in the department of marketing at the University of Otago. He has a background in journalism and public policy, including as a parliamentary staffer with the Labour Party. He is a regular opinion contributor to Stuff and on the 6th October he published an opinion piece relating to the Labour Party’s electoral victory in 2020 and their current slide down the polls.
His opinion piece started by stating that the Labour Party’s crushing majority at the 2020 election was never meant to happen.
The theory behind our MMP electoral system is that it guards against Parliamentary majorities. Under FPP, our former electoral system, parties would regularly win more seats than their actual party vote would otherwise entitle them to but MMP was meant to correct that, entitling smaller parties to a share of seats that mirrored their share of the party vote. This dramatically reduces the chances of the two major parties – Labour and National – repeating the FPP injustice where one of the parties wins a majority of seats without a majority of overall votes.
And yet here we are – the Labour Party holds 65 seats in Parliament winning a majority against the system’s very design. But Jacinda Ardern did it.
National was crushed. The left was carried on an incoming tide with the Greens winning Auckland Central, Te Pāti Māori winning Waiariki, and Labour winning electorates that were normally the deepest blue: Ilam in the poshest parts of Christchurch, Rangitata in rural Canterbury, and Northcote on Auckland’s North Shore.
What did each of those three parties share? A common vision and a clear plan for keeping Covid-19 from entering the country. Two years on – after an enormously successful vaccine rollout, a well-managed removal of border controls, and Omicron’s introduction – the Government’s opponents rewrite the period as somehow chaotic.
But the result from the 2020 election speaks for itself. After closing the border, introducing a wage subsidy and rent freeze at pace, banning evictions during Alert Level 3 and 4 lockdowns, and massively increasing investment in infrastructure to reboot the economy after the nationwide lockdown the voters rewarded Labour with a historic majority at the election. Some of the
Government’s strongest opponents paint that period as oppressive, but it achieved something only few other countries did: the virus was eliminated, people’s living standards were protected, and the economy immediately bounced back.
Yet two years on and the next election (2023) is closer than the commentators ever imagined. The polling average from the 2020 election to today indicates that Labour – with an assist from the Greens – and National – with its former beneficiary in Epsom at its side – are neck and neck.
But how did the gap close so quickly?
He talks about the parties having a common vision and a clear plan for keeping Covid-19 from entering the country. Then two years on – after an enormously successful vaccine roll-out, a well-managed removal of border controls, and Omicron’s introduction. The vaccine roll-out that was so successful that even two years later we are still seeing adverts explaining the need for people to be vaccinated and stories about how the program failed Maori, and if he were honest about the removal of the border controls he would have said that this came about after the failure of the controls to either eliminate Covid or stop it from entering the country.
He then goes on to describe inflation as something which is better than other countries around the world and the infrastructure deficit and shortage of health sector staff as being inherited.
He also goes on to claim that the 2020 Covid response was a world-leading success because Ardern named her aim – to protect New Zealanders from the death and disruption that the virus would cause among an unprotected population – and she undertook policy actions to secure that aim. The borders were closed and the alert level system was introduced. Wages were subsidised, renters were protected, and a testing and tracing system was constructed almost overnight.
I can only assume that he is wearing red tinted glasses and has been force fed a diet of Labour propaganda until he can recognise nothing else as most of these claims belong in la la land.
Firstly to claim that the 2020 Covid response was a world-leading success is nothing short of fantasy that is not backed up with any reality. There is no other country that followed NZ’s lead and locked down their borders like she did and that fact alone makes a mockery of his statement about world leading.
The policy actions he claims Jacinda Ardern and her government took (borders were closed, the alert level system was introduced, wages were subsidised, renters were protected, and a testing and tracing system was constructed almost overnight), are correct but what he fails to mention is that these actions are also the main reason that the cost of living has risen far in advance of wage rates, inflation has risen to record highs, house prices have risen that high that they are almost unreachable for most of the population, the tourism industry has almost closed down and staffing levels across many industries in New Zealand are critically short.
If he wants to know why they have slipped so far behind in the polls, it is not because they have forgotten how to do politics as he claims but the fact that Jacinda Ardern and her Government have failed in most of their election promises and the fact that they have been caught out pushing a hidden agenda that aims to prioritise decision making based on race.
They have been attacking our democratic rights and trying to steal our private property with their Three Waters proposals. They have claimed that this is needed as it is the only way that we can achieve a safe standard of water quality and they have used the incident in Hastings where a public water supply was contaminated from run-off as justification. But the problem is that their own experts have advised that they need to be very careful as the facts don’t actually back their claims.
The government kept stating that the case for change had been proven but in fact that is in some doubt when you take into account the reports from some influential consulting firms that have analysed the proposal.
The Australian business consultants Farrierswier warned, “The analysis is high-level and directional and should not be relied on to project actual expenditure, revenue and pricing outcomes.”
The engineering consultancy group Beca expressed concerns that it may underestimate the cost of reforms.
The economic advisors Castalia, warned, “The Government’s policy process appears flawed and is focusing on high-risk options that may not deliver benefits.”
Yet the Minister was still adamant that the project would go ahead and she would not rule out the use of legislation to force councils to adopt the model proposed.
Her Labour government has set up a separate Maori Health Authority and given it the right of veto over the total Health budget. This is nothing more than a system of apartheid for the Health department.
Right now, all across the country, thousands of scheduled hospital treatments are being cancelled, patients are being sent home, specialists are being overwhelmed, doctors are unable to cope, and staff shortages are threatening services at every level.
The outcomes being promoted for the new Maori Health Authority are an intention to improve Health of Maori. Te Hiringa Hauora thinks that cranking up Maori interest in traditional approaches to health care will improve outcomes.
This is based on assertions about the “evils” of colonization and the damage it did to the Maori world view and it seeks to use today’s health money to promote spirituality, cultural identity and whanau development to “decolonize” Maori futures.
There is an idea being promoted that taxpayer money from Vote: Health should be spent on Maramataka Maori, the Maori lunar calendar and forecasting based on the moon cycles, star systems and tides which will lead to an appreciable betterment in Maori mental health.
The truth is that Maori life expectancy in 1840 was about 30 years. Today after all the so-called evils of colonization, education, better food and scientific advances, Maori life expectancy is in the 70s.
As such talk of Maori solutions to health spreads I believe that it’s a reflection on the naivety of Jacinda Ardern’s government and Health Minister Andrew Little, who seems to believe in miracles.
However, we can look to the past to find a solution that has been proven to work. It’s called parental care and responsibility for the children they produce.
Until Jacinda Ardern became PM, New Zealanders were largely trusting of their Prime Ministers, secure in the knowledge that if they deviated too much from the straight and narrow, the Fourth Estate would hold them to account.
Not so anymore. Labour’s $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund ‘bribe’ has put paid to that.
As a result, through her own actions, Jacinda Ardern has gravely undermined trust in the Government for many New Zealanders.
To refresh our memory, two incidents stand out.
The first was her claim on 19 March 2020 that her Government is the ‘single source of truth’: “Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has quashed rumours that the Government is set to announce a total lockdown across the country to combat coronavirus. She stressed for people to only trust official Government sources as misinformation only fuelled public panic. ‘I cannot go round and dismiss every rumour I see on social media, as much as I’d like to. When you see those messages, remember that unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth’.”
Four days later she announced the start of the world’s most stringent nation-wide month-long lockdown.
Her lie marked the transformation of New Zealand into what at times resembled a totalitarian regime – with the PM’s Orwellian call for “kindness” used to disguise the cruelty and heartbreak that was being caused.
Not only was her lockdown against Ministry of Health advice, it was also illegal. She hadn’t even bothered to ensure she had the legislative authority to impose the dictatorial restrictions she had announced. Those restraints not only crushed basic human rights, but, by calling on “the team of five million” to ‘dob in’ neighbours, family, and friends flouting her draconian rules, Jacinda Ardern divided society.
The PM then used the world stage to paint herself as a hero in saving lives, ignoring the human cost of locking down New Zealanders for weeks on end – denying urgent health care, preventing social interaction, and destroying businesses. The resulting “excess” death toll was thought to be well over 1,000 – people who died as a consequence of her lockdown.
The second incident was the scandal of vaccine mandates.
On September 9th 2020, just five weeks before the General Election, Jacinda Ardern promised there would be no forced vaccinations. She said those who chose to opt-out wouldn’t face any penalties at all: “‘No, and we haven’t for any vaccination in New Zealand applied penalties in that way,’ Ardern told The AM Show, after being asked if there might be sanctions for refusing a Covid-19 vaccine.”
Her subsequent introduction of vaccine mandates turned that promise into a lie. It also made a mockery of her “be kind to each other” mantra, as again, she violated human rights, created serious financial hardship, and further divided society.
When the High Court ruled in February that vaccine mandates for Police and Defence Force staff were unlawful, they also revealed that the Ministry of Health had advised the Prime Minister that mandates were unnecessary.
In spite of that, Jacinda Ardern deliberately deceived the ‘team of five million’ into thinking mandates would limit the spread of Covid-19, when in fact, they had nothing to do with health, but were being used as weapons of coercion, to force compliance with her vaccine strategy.
After the last election the Prime Minister happily claimed that her government would be the most open and transparent government ever and she also at one time claimed that we should treat them as the one source of truth and that her government would be one of kindness.
Well if I was going to rate them on those statements alone I would have to say they get a huge fail.
I have never seen a government in this country that has gone through an election and then ignored their own manifesto so badly after being elected.
Not only have they failed to follow their manifesto in any real terms they have actually been found to have had a hidden agenda that is a direct attack on our democratic principles of government.
The most obvious example of this is the He PuaPua report which was hidden from not only the electorate but also from the government’s own coalition partner until it was forced to bring it into the open after the election by a copy being leaked.
This whole report is about giving a co-governance role to Maori and has many recommendations contained within it that lead to that end result.
The Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern stated that the report was not government policy but in fact many of the recommendations from within that report have been implemented or are in the process of being implemented. Nearly every one of those recommendations is an attack on our democratic principles. The report is supposedly about addressing the requirements of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and to comply with some “interpreted” partnership outcome from the Treaty of Waitangi.
Let’s be honest for a change and state plainly that Maori, by their own proudly proclaimed history, are not Indigenous to New Zealand and there is no mention of partnership anywhere in the Treaty document.
Maori proudly tell of the journey of their ancestors to New Zealand by canoe from Hawaiki. This fact then makes them just an earlier immigrant species than the Europeans and others.
Jacinda Ardern cited child poverty as her reason for entering politics. When she first ran for Prime Minister, she declared climate change was her ‘generation’s nuclear free moment’.
On both of those, she has failed comprehensively. All the child poverty statistics are the same or worse and her climate change commitments are a sad joke. She has basically shut down the coal mining industry in New Zealand (supposedly to eliminate the use of fossil fuelled energy) and then sat and watched as we have imported millions of tonnes of dirty coal from Indonesia, so that we have been able to keep the lights on without saying a word.
We are sitting on huge coal reserves yet we are importing dirty coal and her government says nothing because it may show how stupid her decision was to try to claim the high ground in the name of reaction to the effects of climate change.
I cannot think of a major policy from her election manifestos that has not been a failure. She told us she would make houses more affordable; yet their costs have risen so high that first home owners cannot even hope to buy let alone actually be able to “afford” to buy in the current market.
She promised us 100,000 Kiwi-build homes, but actually only succeeded in sacking her Minister after his failing so spectacularly.
She promised Auckland would get a light rail system from the city centre to the airport and has failed to lay even a single centimetre of track.
These examples and many others all go to show that her government has made a bad habit of failure after bold promises, over its terms in office.
In early 2019, she said that she would promote a new ‘economics of kindness’ which was demonstrated shortly afterwards in her first ‘well-being budget’. We have all seen the results of that budget (for example it earmarked funds to fix mental health, but her government could not find any projects in the first twelve months, on which to spend the money).
Jacinda Ardern has shown great expertise in communications making almost daily TV appearances throughout the coronavirus crisis and this huge level of exposure on almost a daily basis in the run up to the 2020 election must have been of immense help in promoting her government leading up to that election.
In the 2020 election campaign, she should have struggled to explain why her governments promises had failed, but no one asked any accountability questions and she was elected with an absolute majority based on the public perception of her image.
The gap between people’s impression of her leadership and her actual performance as a leader has widened appreciably since the election and it is way past time the people of New Zealand started demanding accountability for the government promises that have failed.
She promised the people of New Zealand that she would provide the most open and transparent government and at one time even stated they were the one source of truth and we should only believe the government.
Overall the truth is not quite so rosy though because when you look at the government’s statistics, on practically every single metric her administration has failed.
Child poverty levels have risen under Jacinda Ardern’s leadership, as have carbon emissions. The gun buy-back scheme implemented after the Christchurch mosque attack was nothing short of an expensive PR disaster that actually achieved very little in real results.
Since again taking power after the last election, with an absolute majority, she has assumed unprecedented additional powers most under the pretext of protecting our health. Her government has introduced a separate Health system for Maori managed by Maori and with the power of veto over all health board funding throughout New Zealand.
As New Zealanders we have always prided ourselves on being an inclusive multi-racial society. Yet under the present Labour Government we are heading down a path of separatism with our society divided by race based on a factually incorrect interpretation of Treaty of Waitangi documentation.
They have many times stated that we have a partnership requirement with Iwi, under the Treaty of Waitangi but in actual fact this is just another lie from this government.
This claim of a partnership between Maori and the Crown is not supported by any of the documentation of the Treaty although this latter-day reinterpretation of the Treaty is simply stated as a fact, without any acknowledgement that the assertion is hotly contested, is flatly contradicted by many of the speeches recorded by Colenso in writing at the time (on 5 February 1840) and flatly contradicted also by speeches made by numerous chiefs at Kohimarama in 1860.
So if Morgan Godfery wants to know why the Labour government has fallen so far behind in the polls he just needs to take off those rose tinted glasses and look at the history of their decision making since taking an absolute majority at the 2020 election. He will then see what the rest of us see, a government and a Prime Minister that has failed on nearly every election promise they have made and a government that is rushing headlong into destroying what is the oldest democracy in the world.
This Labour Government under Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is elevating Maori (12.6% of the total population in the 2018 census) to the status of a ruling class through their interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi giving Maori a partnership/co-governance role.
As New Zealand continues down this separatist path set out by Jacinda Ardern and her current government, New Zealand will increasingly become an apartheid nation, where those claiming Maori heritage are given superior rights over everyone else.
On the basis of false assumptions and fabrications, democracy is being sacrificed, and New Zealand returned to tribal rule.
Another claimed justification for making these race based decisions to elevate Maori to a ruling class is NZ’s obligations after the signing of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Jacinda Ardern’s government commissioned a report which she claimed was about developing a strategy to fulfil our obligations under that declaration. Jacinda Ardern stated that the report titled “He Puapua” was an advisory document but this was at best a disingenuous statement as parts of that document have already been enacted and as such it is the beginning of division of our country based on race (Apartheid any way you look at it).
Part of the He Puapua report defines the pathway to achieve Maori sovereignty by 2040 and the implementation of parts of that report which has been done in secret without any public referendum or mandate other than their victory in the last election will not stand up to public scrutiny.
This report was kept secret even from her coalition partner (New Zealand First) before the last election and was eventually only released after a full copy was leaked to news media outlets and published. This being another example of our most open and transparent government at work!
This being the same Open and Transparent Government that set up the $55 million “Public Interest Journalism Fund”. We were told was to help the media deal with the effects of Covid, but like lots of other decisions, the devil was in the detail.
When it was analysed we could see that this was another prop under Prime Minister Ardern’s government attempts to divide New Zealand on the basis of race, given the requirements for recipients to promote the government’s position in regard to their current interpretation of the Treaty documents.
One of the reasons I say this is that under condition three, all fund recipients are required to “Actively promote the principles of Partnership, Participation and Active Protection under Te Tiriti o Waitangi acknowledging Māori as a Te Tiriti partner”.
The Austrian Chancellor, Sebastian Kurz recently resigned over allegations that he had used public money to buy favourable media coverage for his party’s policies.
In regard to the “Public Interest Journalism Fund” here in New Zealand the same principles seem to apply as there is a direct link between the funding and the promotion of Government policy. Does this not equate to corruption of the media by government? At the very least it effectively means that the media have been silenced by this current Labour government.
Another example of the openness and transparency of this government, being when a number of current government ministers stated that they were proud to be quoted as being socialists but this was something they had never mentioned prior to the election, but then again maybe we should expect that type of conduct as they were trying to win an election and at that time honesty, openness or transparency in election manifestos is not really required by politicians; IS IT?
Ardern’s government has assumed a large range of powers and made a lot of decisions that are being claimed to have been required in response to the coronavirus pandemic but in fact this claim is very hard to justify, especially when you look at the government’s actions since the 2020 election, in regard to the pandemic and our responses to it.
With those powers they instituted the lockdowns on the basis of stopping the spread of Covid 19 and protecting our health. We were told that they had gone early and gone fast and that it was all going to prevent the overloading of our hospitals and their ICU capacities.
We were told that the health system did not have the capacity to handle a large increase in the numbers that would be presenting to ICU if we did not have the lockdowns in place and while this in itself may have been quite true, the government failed to take action to ensure that the health system was upgraded to cope with the expected demand.
No in fact they carried on making ridiculous decisions that can only be seen as evidence that collectively the government was totally out of its depth in dealing with the pandemic and its outcomes.
A classic example of their stupidity was the decision to build a cycle bridge over the Auckland harbour; a $685 million bridge, and then when they finally conceded how stupid the decision had been and cancelled it, they carried on paying to complete plans for the bridge to tune of approximately another $50 million.
Here we had a promise from the government to fund a bridge across the harbour that was going to cost at least $685million, and if history is to be replicated a total cost well in excess of this figure as is often the case with infrastructure projects, when extras and inflation are taken into account.
If our health system was in such a poor state why were they not prioritising spending around more capacity for dealing with the effects from Covid, such as adding ICU beds and hiring more nurses and doctors, instead of concentrating on stupid grandstanding decisions such as the Skypath Cycle Bridge across Auckland Harbour?
Unbelievably misguided foolish decision making that is totally removed from any sense of reality!!!
Jacinda Ardern has made many statements since taking over office as Prime Minister and has very rarely been challenged on them but it is time she explained what she actually meant when she made these claims.
It seems that the public are now asking those questions and in the light of not getting satisfactory answers they have shown they will no longer support her and her government.
It is definitely time for a change!!!!!