Who's dismayed at New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern's resignation?

Ardern shot to international fame in the first months of the pandemic. She appeared to have contained the first wave more effectively than most other countries. Being white was an immense advantage. Several African countries like Senegal, Rwanda and Ghana did it better than New Zealand, in much tougher conditions. But the world was agog about Ardern. Two years later, all the chickens have come to roost.

I was astounded by the Indian acclaim for what Ardern was doing to fight the epidemic. She was running a country with a population of five million, one-fourth that of Mumbai. Population density is obviously a factor when it comes to contagious diseases. New Zealand has 18 people per square kilometre, while even Mysore has 441. It is an island deep in the
southern hemisphere that is isolatable from the rest of the world. If anything, Ardern had an easier Covid challenge than nearly all her counterparts across the world.

Yet Ardern messed it all up. As Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine and health policy at Stanford University, puts it, her policies were “immoral, incoherent and a grand failure”.

Ardern followed a zero-Covid strategy, which has not succeeded anywhere on earth. There was a two-month lockdown, perhaps only second to China’s in its severity, at the beginning of the pandemic. This worked well, but then, Ardern kept ordering more lockdowns and shutting down of borders whenever a single case of Covid was detected in the country. This had grave fallouts. New Zealand has a poor hospital system, and the lockdowns forced people to delay essential health services. The effects linger till date. Even today, the weekly mortality number in the country is higher than what it was before the pandemic.

Yet, by the end of 2020, Ardern seemed to have become complacent, perhaps due to all the international accolades coming her way. New Zealand was very late in getting vaccine supplies and was completely unprepared when the second wave—the Delta variant—hit.

When Delta arrived, only a small fraction of New Zealand’s population was vaccinated, so the lockdown restrictions continued. It was only in late 2021 that the government began vaccination drives on mission mode. But
here again, Ardern turned dictatorial, making vaccination a condition for employment in some professions like the police, health care and education.

These mandates triggered a protest movement, with the agitators occupying the lawns in front of the parliament, something unheard of in this peaceful country’s history. The government refused to engage and the weeks-long standoff ended in violence. All of this has affected society at large.

According to a recent poll, 64 percent of New Zealanders believe that their country is more divided than ever. At the end of it all, New Zealand has 1.5 times higher cumulative Covid cases per million than the United States and eight times higher than India. And our intelligentsia was hankering for Ardern. In the meantime, the economy has tanked, with inflation soaring. Of course, the pandemic has impacted the economies of all countries around the world, but in this case, it has much to do with the government failing to deliver on its grand promises.

When Ardern became prime minister in 2017, over one in five children in New Zealand lived in poverty. The country had the worst homelessness rate in the developed world, with 1 percent of the population living on the streets or in shelters. Six years later, child poverty rates remain unchanged. Ardern, in addition to being prime minister, held the portfolio of child poverty reduction. She had even said that child poverty is the reason she was in
politics. Yet there was nothing done to solve the problem.

Homelessness has increased considerably, with the average stay length in emergency housing rising sevenfold in the last five years. More than 26,000 people are waiting for government housing, up from 5,000 five years ago. When Ardern came to power, she promised to build 100,000 homes for the poor. In six years, she has managed to build only about 1,500.

According to a study by the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research, business confidence is at its lowest level since 1974 due to higher interest rates, cost pressures and soft demand. As many as 70 percent of the firms surveyed expected general business conditions to deteriorate, compared with 42 percent pessimism just three months ago.

But Ardern was focused on goals higher than repairing the economy or helping the poor. Her woke priority was a plan to tax farmers for sheep and cattle burps to combat global warming (I am not joking) and earn international applause for being the first country to do so. She preferred spending hundreds of millions of dollars to incentivize businesses to
decarbonise than on extending the public healthcare system.

Like several other “liberal” leaders around the world, when faced with criticism, Ardern peddled censorship. Speaking at the United Nations last September, she compared free speech online to “weapons of war” and called for international regulations to disallow content. She said that she was worried about dis- or misinformation, but it was clear that what she wanted was a stifling of views contrary to her own. The righteousness with which she proposed the curbing of dissent was quite astonishing.

But unfortunately, that is what defines left-liberalism today—a sense of moral superiority that brooks no argument and quickly moves to cancel anyone who disagrees. That other woke prime ministerial icon, Canada’s Justin Trudeau had expressed sympathy, from 7,000 miles away, for farmers agitating in India, but when Canadian truckers protested against his vaccine mandate, he invoked a war emergency law, cracked down with armed force and even froze their bank accounts.

To her credit, Ardern has been intelligent enough to quit before being officially voted out. Perhaps her party, Labour, saw the writing on the wall of an unhappy nation and pressured her to leave. But this is hardly the end of her story. She will certainly reappear in some time as a highly paid and globally visible member of some multilateral organization, maybe even a fat cat investment bank or a Big Tech firm that wants to trumpet its woke credentials. The show will go on.