Good riddance to bad Jacinda

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Jacindamania debunked by someone other than MB at last:

Jacinda Ardern has been regarded as a global icon of progressive politics for so long now that it is almost jarring to be reminded how she managed to bring the New Zealand Labour party back to power in 2017 after nine years in opposition.

…Ardern was promising if she were elected Labour would cut immigration by 30,000 people from over 70,000 a year.

Her other policy offerings to New Zealanders were not extensive but the most important was a promise to tackle New Zealand’s housing crisis because as she said as opposition leader, “Too many families are missing out on buying homes”.

…Despite pledging to cut the number of migrants, Labour actually increased them.

In the year to October 2017 – the month Ardern took office – net migration was 55,000.

In December 2019, the last month before the COVID pandemic struck it was 72,000.

…Between 2019 and the end of 2021 property prices rose by 50 per cent.

By 2021, following Ardern’s successful re-election, the situation was described by Arthur Grimes, professor of public policy at Victoria University of Wellington, as probably “the biggest widening of wealth distribution that we have ever seen in New Zealand between people who own houses and those who don’t”.

We celebrated mightily with the rise of such policy commitments and watched in horror as Ardern rolled over on all of them.

Worse, all she really achieved was putting a pretty face on the same old trickle-down policies of the right, turning much of her adoring left into the useful idiots of their alleged enemies. This was particularly the case for the youth that she purported represent.

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There was nothing inevitable about this. The policies to change it are well understood. Jacinda simply lied to gain power or had no gumption when she got there.

Good riddance to another failure.

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.