Jacinda Ardern’s exit looms. By Graham Adams.
[Few] will be surprised if Jacinda Ardern resigns before next year’s election. Since the 2020 election, support for the Labour government has fallen from 50 per cent to the mid-to-low 30s. Ardern’s personal popularity has dipped as that of National’s new leader, Christopher Luxon, has risen. The slide for Ardern and her party seems inexorable.
Wherever you look — whether it’s a failing health system, fuel and food price rises, increasing gun violence, crimped building supplies, or opposition to co-governance with Maori in water management — the government is taking a battering on nearly every front. …
All that time to prepare, backed by “the science”, yet NZ’s hospitals are overrun:
The crisis in health care is the most immediately damaging issue for the government — not least because Ardern’s strict elimination policy for Covid was sold to the public during 2020-2021 as the best way to avoid hospitals being overrun. And now they are. …
Day by day, news media are highlighting just how much pressure the nation’s hospitals are under, with harrowing reports of patients being neglected as a result of understaffing and an influx of patients with flu or Covid.
One woman died from a brain bleed after leaving a stretched emergency department and another had to wait two days to deliver her dead baby. …
As [Ian Powell, a former executive director of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists] noted: “New Zealand has one of the highest dependencies on overseas recruitment [for medical specialists] in the OECD. We are in fierce competition with Australia. But, whereas the overall salary gap between Australia and New Zealand favours the former by around 20-30 per cent, for specialists the gap is more than 60 per cent.”
The new health system, which has created a powerful stand-alone Māori Health Authority, began operating on July 1 …
So what’s a woke government do?
The government seems to have decided its best defence is to attack the National Party as being hostile to women.
The tactic has been viewed as one born of desperation. Radio host Sean Plunket described it as Labour “desperately trying to get back all the female voters” Ardern won in 2020 who have drifted away.
Lefty regimes never last long before things fall to bits. Reality eventually overwhelms the fine sounding rhetoric. The special leftists appointed to turn the place prove incompetent and overpaid.
“Powerful stand-alone Māori Health Authority”? What a lovely racist touch. Why not have a health authority for everyone? Are we not all people? Same law and same health system for all, I say.
