‘Not enough in the tank’ as popular PM says 7 Feb will be her last day in office
Jacinda Ardern has dramatically announced her resignation as New Zealand PM.
In a press conference, the popular Labour premier said that she did not have ‘enough in the tank’ to continue and that those who would look for further reasons would be disappointed.
She went on to address her daughter to say she was looking forward to being there when she got home from school – and to her partner Clark to propose ‘let’s finally get married’.
Ms Ardern, whose humane and competent response to the Covid pandemic kept New Zealand’s death toll in two figures while Boris Johnson’s saw hundreds of thousands of UK deaths including thousands of people in care homes wilfully infected and UK Labour leader Keir Starmer pushed for schools to be kept open and without masks in classrooms, will step down with effect from 7 February.
She has faced criticism for not addressing child poverty to the extent she said she would on first taking office, and for not rescinding New Zealand’s discriminatory laws on immigration for disabled people, but is still light-years ahead of anything remotely on offer in the UK.
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She will be missed.
Try telling that to her countrymen/women.
Tim from, have some respect. First person on earth to have false gum replacements therapy.
In general terms, this is sad news. The world can’t afford to lose a leader of her calibre and compassion – not to mention her clarity of thought.
It’s not just the pandemic that comes to mind, but her handling of The Christchurch Murders, and their aftermath. She was an example to us all.
On a personal note, I wish her nothing but health and happiness, for herself and her family. If anyone has earned it, she has.
No tyrant quits voluntarily. Wonder what’s stinking behind her? Maybe Klaus told her to quit? Maybe she can see the writing on the wall and is trying to run (where?!)?
Her highly suspicious entrance into NZ politics should have been enough to tell you this woman is not to be trusted.
Reading the link below it appears she’d fallen out with Five Eyes and the US over their approach to China.
Quote from the article:
“Asserting her country’s sovereignty has potentially deep implications for the “Five Eyes” alliance….Indeed some say New Zealand has confirmed itself as the weak link in the intelligence chain that it joined with the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia.”
Establishment lapdog Wintour seems to be openly implying once you surrender your country’s sovereignty to the US and the Neocons, there is no return without major consequences. A bit like working for the mafia – you’re never allowed to quit.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/23/new-zealands-stance-on-china-has-deep-implications-for-the-five-eyes-alliance
I don’t know much about New Zealand politics, but we know how going against US subservience worked out for Corbyn. Hopefully New Zealand voters use their PR system to avoid being poodles of masters in Washington, that is unlike the UK, Australia and Canada’s craven bunch of leaders.
Your logic is faulty NVLA for you start with the premise that she is a tyrant ..
Maybe her speedy acceptance into NZ politics means she was recognised as
honest with good-for-NZ policies and she was LIKED ..
just as Corbyn was liked before the right wing combined to smear
and denigrate him ..
She deserves respect for standing up to the US over their plans to isolate China. The US not only see China as an economic rival, they have an ideological problem with China being communist, albeit more notionally communist.
New Zealand turning China into an enemy, just because the US sees them as a future geostrategic military rival, is subservient nonsense. The British govt may go along with that approach (as will establishment’s Sir Keir Starmer no doubt) , Australia and Canada have accepted that recasting of China as an enemy too. It took guts from Jacinda to say no. And she has probably paid the price in hostile ‘corporate’ press coverage.
Big, big clue for you.
Corbyn didn’t make it, Ardern did.
Corbyn didn’t make it, Starmer did.
Noticing a pattern yet?
NVLA – Apparently the electorate didn’t think that Corbyn was up to the job.
https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/inlineimage/2019-12-23/Why%20did%20people%20not%20vote%20labour.jpg
It’s odd that she took her p45 while her globalist pals were at the Swiss orgy.
What about politicians who START with nothing in the tank?
Good riddance to Authoritarian rubbish!
Don’t celebrate too much.
Wait until you see if a neoliberal, ‘liberal interventionist’ puppet comes in her place. As Nvla corectly observed, these things tend to happen for a reason beyond that which is stated. Nothing about English speaking democracies is real. Our democracies are hollowed-out shams due to the hegemonic US’s pernicious influence over them.
Hope NZ Labour choose wisely and pick someone who isn’t controlled by the self-appointed world masters in Washington.
Shes had a better offer…! ….wait for it folks
May someone made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.
A message delivered by?
Mike’ we lie, we cheat, we steal’ Pompeo.
Or John ‘we know where your kids live’ Bolton?
Dunno why she’s copping for it from a few of yous. I don’t know too much about her politics (domestic and foreign) but I get she was a blair advisor in her youth…But who didn’t make mistakes when they were younger?
Seems to me she handled covid spot-on. Everyone’s complained on here about the amount of needless deaths caused by fatbollox and the rest of the avaricious, incompetent vermin.
She kept NZ’s death toll extremely low. and put her public’s health first. And that makes her sound in my book.
Virtually everyone thought Blair was great pre-1997… there was some worries on the left, especially after scrapping Clause IV of Labour’s constitutional rulebook. The 1997 manifesto had enough goodies in it to keep the left onside though.
Plus, Blair wasn’t scared of having the left in his 1997-2001 cabinets, though he didn’t have much choice. Blair was prepared to strike a fair left-right cabinet balance ; Robin Cook, Mo Mowlam, John Prescott; Clare Short, Michael Meacher, Donald Dewar
Starmer is just out and out trying to destroy the left, as if he’s a robot controlled by Mandelson.
It was only around 2001 onwards Blair started to become a RW power-crazed monster.
I agree Toffee. Like you I don’t know why some posters are so against her – she handled Covid well ,her reaction to the Christchurch killings set a standard other countries would do well to follow and she stood up to the USA and refused to follow their line on China.
Yet she is being called a “tyrant” and ” authoritarian rubbish” and is being accused of lying about the reasons for her resignation -these posters allege she is moving on to better things. I can’t think of many better things for a New Zealander, living in New Zealand than being PM of New Zealand.
Looks to me like there is more than a bit of misogyny in play here.
Even Kim Dotcom wished her well, and he shares the worldviews typically expressed here and across the international left. He lives in New Zealand.
By that logic, you must be a big fan of China’s response. Zero COVID is an ideological fool’s paradise, as China is now discovering.
NZ provided themselves a buffer.
The UK did the exact opposite.
Both are island nations, although the UK has a much higher pop. density.
NZ deaths = 215,000 to date
Them’s the facts, tim. There’s no argument about it – Ardern’s policies saved lives. Fatbollox’s killed almost as many in a day than have died in total in NZ.
Also, I’ll bet NZ’s post-covid economy is in far better shape relative to ours, too.
Ooops!! WAS meant to read:
NZ = 215,000 deaths to date.
(Dunno what happened there 🙄)
WOW! It done it AGAIN!! Are the toerags censoring this site?
UK deaths – >215000
NZ deaths <2700
Meaningless, arbitrary, selective claptrap. Overall mortality rate unaffected.
timfrom – What a silly statement.
Not at all. Hardly anyone died of flu while COVID reigned supreme. In ballpark terms, the numbers that usually died of flu, died of COVID instead.
You might not like all that Jacinda Ardern has done, but she makes the politicians we have here look like minnows.
Bridget Phillipson – who? Shadow Secretary of State for Education apparently, though you’d never have guessed it.
A friend has shown me a report from The Yorkshire Post. It says, inter alia :-
Bridget Phillipson told the YP that “The current system we have now around higher education funding, is not sustainable in the long term. The government knows this. It’s obvious to everyone and what they’ve brought in is a system that is even more regressive than the system that preceded it. So it’s clear to me that we do need to see a change in that area, because it can’t be right that young people who are low and middle earners face a very high marginal tax rate as a result of the more regressive system that the government has introduced. There are big questions that need to be answered around a better system for the future.” ………….. but (she) would not provide a plan of how Labour would change it. (end).
Unfortunately for her, or maybe I should say for students, she fails to understand that leadership requires the identification of solutions to problems rather than just a load of sympathetic guff.
Let’s pause a bit here. The Solomon Islanders deserve a say. Pro-China, hmmm!
The unfairness of life and human flaw: the good ones eventually want to move on, pass on the torch while the parasites and incompetent just cling and cling and cling more, to then plot come backs and so on.
Indeed, Ben.
Tapeworms would be a good metaphor.
Not at all. Hardly anyone died of flu while COVID reigned supreme. In ballpark terms, the numbers that usually died of flu, died of COVID instead.
And vaccines were invented because Edward Jenner sussed out that nobody caught smallpox if they had cowpox.
Not saying the reasons are exactly the same and that you can’t have both ‘flu & covid at the same time, but the restrictions definitely helped quell the transmission of ‘flu as well as covid.
Simple science. Limit contact = restrict transmission.
You’re highly unlikely to be in a car crash if you walk. That’s not to say you won’t get knocked down…
“Simple science” is what we always USED to follow with every virus before COVID (quarantine the sick, let everyone else get on with their lives). Then, for reasons yet to be properly explained – it wasn’t some new scientific breakthrough, we tossed all that out the window and opted for blind ideology imposed from above (quarantine EVERYBODY) instead.
When Science is hijacked by ideology, fascism awaits. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Do you mean like China? 🤔
Whatever. The stats speak for themselves.
Ardern’s pro-fascist experimental lockdown measures in NZ, designed for no other purpose than to control the populace in order to gain a yardstick of how far you can go in future…Deaths from COVID = @2700
de piffle’s ultra-liberal UK deaths = >215,000.
Dont remember ardern suggesting NZ should takeitonthechin (one word, said quickly)
Or: “Let the bodies pile high”.
On a personal level, I think allowing the populace – especially the poorer – to die of a disease – and profiteering from it – is a far more extreme example of fascism than keeping the populace safer by restricting freedoms temporarily.
Don’t you?
You’ve announced a win at half time. You seem to think the measures we took are a categorical success. That’s only by one, short-term deaths measurement. Apart from the aforementioned missing flu deaths, it takes no account of the cancer deaths to come due to lack of screening these past few years, nor the evolving story of skyrocketing heart disease figures, particularly in young people & athletes and other harms from the rush-“tested” vaccines.
People, especially the poorer, have always died from disease and we can’t prevent that totally, no matter how advanced our medicine. That’s just life. You might as well advocate a war against death. You ain’t ever gonna win it.
And when it comes to profiteering from COVID, whatever Boris’s mates creamed off was chickenfeed, compared with the profits made by Big Pharma who, let us not forget, had such rock-solid faith in their product that they demanded and were granted 1) immunity from prosecution for any ill-effects inflicted on the public and 2) long-term confidentiality regarding details of the manufacture and testing on humans of the C-19 vaccine.
And you are correct that notes will have been taken regarding “gaining a yardstick of how far you can go in future”. It’s odds-on they’ll try it on again…
It’s odds-on they’ll try it on again…
Didn’t take a pandemic for “them “ to try it previously; it was just another means/opportunity of doing so. Point is, (most) people abided by it out of concern of the possibility of it being an extinction event – not a localised, conventional threat.
And it won’t take a pandemic in future, but it’ll be a convenience if there happens to be another (God forbid)
Oh, and big pharma DID cash in. No two ways about it….But at least you got something of use for the money. Remind us what the PPE contracts spivvery gave us?
And as you’re comparing risks…Why complain about the (potential but as yet unconfirmed) risks from the vaccine(s)?
There’s a risk in taking an aspirin. There’s a risk in going for a pint. There’s a risk in crossing the road.
That risk is increased manifestly, if it so happens the road you’re crossing is the M25 at rush hour. That’s why people don’t do it. That’s why there’s a permanent law against it.
But if you were threatened with social ostracisation if you excercised personal choice and DIDN’T take the asperin/cross the road, whatever, you’d think Hang on, just what are you trying to pull here?! You’d say Fuck you. My body, my choice, right? That holds if you’re pro-abortion, doesn’t it?
It’s the coercion that was the big give-away. And you say “it’ll be a convenience if there happens to be another (God forbid)”. If??!!! Are you aware that, if the WHO get their way, this coming May a world-wide Pandemic Preparedness Treaty will be passed, giving them the power over the heads of nation states, to declare a Pandemic and take such measures as they see fit, anywhere in the world. No arguments. They’re lobbying people like Biden, Trudeau and our very own Sunak to get on board as we speak. And for “Sunak” also read “Starmer” (heir apparent to No.10).
If that doesn’t scare the crap out of you, nothing will!
Have I entered what is known as the met averse. People in NZ we’re about to dump her. Her covid measures were extreme. She actually said that the invaded should be treated as second class and gumfawed. What’s going on with the left. Do you feel that she would supports our strikers? We can’t post about the Mexican presidents statements about international attacks on himself which also attacked JC. We are applauding attacks by a state on people with a different opinion about the flu yet attack China for taking measures against attacks on its citizens.
Blimey, some of the comments on this thread are reminiscent of a Labour ‘right’ pile-on of Jeremy Corbyn.
Well done, lads and lasses! You make me cringe.
In another note – I see wishy’s been given the option of a FPN for not wearing a seatbelt…
It’s fookin outrageous!! A witch hunt, and no mistake. Seatbelts, schmeatbelts 😕
One more offence, and that’s life isn’t it? 🤞
Do they still have that rule, or was that only on TV cop shows?
One more offence, and that’s life isn’t it?
Yep! Three strikes and you’re out!! Unless of course you’re a toerag…then it’s three-billion-and-three.
Unfortunately, it’s only a £100(?) fine. Not even loose change to the skinny roland rat-alike.
And it’s an offence (to me at least) that the bastards are allowed to draw breath.
And as for the kecks he wears…A crime against haute couture. Have they all had an argument with his shoes or summit? You’d think with all the dough he’s got that he’d be able to afford an extra three inches of material ffs.