Go Home Jacinda Ardern
While left in Australia were enraged yet again that Donald Trump was President of United States, they got some relief when their world leader poster girl New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern visited Melbourne last week.
Ardern has been praised by the left for her leadership post the Christchurch mosque shooting; for showing compassion and acceptance of the local Muslim community, the image of her hugging a Muslim in a hijab has been painted on a mural in Melbourne.
They also admire her policies in response in gun control and cracking down on ‘hate speech’ both in the community and online. Authorities in New Zealand visited the homes of citizens who had expressed support for politicians such as Donald Trump to check they weren’t extremists.
Ardern has just implemented the second stage of her gun control reform which will see all guns in New Zealand registered by the government.
She has spearheaded the ‘Christchurch Call’ which is a global campaign from governments to put pressure on social media giants to eliminate ‘violent extremist content from their platforms.
A New Zealand man who shared the Christchurch mosque shooting video was sentenced to 21 months in prison. Websites that hosted the video were blocked by ISPs in New Zealand and Australia.
The centerpiece of Ardern’s visit to Australia was an invitation from Melbourne Lord Mayor Sally Capp to give a speech in Melbourne’s Town Hall about Good Governance.
Melbourne in the state of Victoria is a perfect place for a far-left progressive leader like Ardern to give a speech to a receptive audience. The Town Hall was packed with 2,000 eager attendees who the MC accurately described as being “fanboy and fangirling”.
Ardern’s speech was full of the typical leftist motherhood statements about choosing hope over fear “In a political environment you can either choose to capitalise on that fear, stoke it and politically benefit from it. Or you can run a counter-narrative, you can talk about hope, you can talk about solutions to the problems that we have to admit many of us political beings have been a part of.”
Ardern clearly positions herself as the antithesis to Donald Trump. Although she didn’t name Trump in her speech in Melbourne, back home in New Zealand earlier in the week she commended Trump’s attack on the Squad of progressive Democrat Congresswomen:
“Usually I don’t get into other people’s politics, but it will be clear to most people that I completely and utterly disagree with him. I’m quite proud that in New Zealand we take the opposite view, that we take the view that our Parliament should be a representative place, it should look and feel like New Zealand, it should have a range of different cultures and ethnicities and never should a judgement be made about the origin of anyone”.
While in Melbourne Ardern met with Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, Australia’s most proudly progressive leader. He said he was eager to learn more about her just passed ‘wellness budget’.
This type of budget instead of being about fiscal responsibility and economic management, it instead focuses on social justice issues such as homelessness, family violence and mental heath. Surpluses and deficits are also secondary considerations.
Australia’s left have long wished that Jacinda Ardern could be Prime Minster of Australia as well. In May this year the 2019 Believability Index, found that Jacinda Ardern was Australia’s most trusted politician with a score of 77%, beating all of Australia’s current politicians.
Nicholas Reece a former Gillard Government Advisor wrote in the Guaradian this week ‘Jacinda Ardern prime minister of Australasia? If only it was that simple‘ suggesting she ‘could be the prime minister of southern Australasia, leading the peoples of Victoria, NSW and New Zealand. Meanwhile, Scott Morrison could be the PM of Queensland and beyond. Reece also admired that ‘New Zealand has long been the social laboratory for progressive policy reform’.
But ordinary Australia’s were not impressed by her visit. While here she lambasted Australia’s policy of deporting New Zealand born criminals. Changes to Australia’s Migration Act in 2014 have seen 1500 New Zealand citizens deported.
Ardern said of the deportations “I consider that to be a corrosive part of that policy. And it’s having a corrosive effect on our relationship.” adding “I just think we can’t take our friendship for granted, we can’t take our closeness for granted. And if there is something that is causing concern for one side of a friendship, it should be raised”.
Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton was unapologetic for putting the protection of Australians first “We need to stand up for Australians,” he told Channel Nine’s Today Show “we’ve got Australian citizens who are falling victim in certain circumstances where people are sexually offending against children, for example, we’ve had a big push to try to deport those pedophiles.”
Labor Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese who was with Dutton on the Today Show agreed with the deportation policy “We haven’t argued for change in this area. We think that the balance is essentially right”.
The reality of the policy is if a nation has the chance to deport a criminal to another country, they will do that. If they are not a citizen and have been convicted of serious crime, then deportation is the best method to protect your nation from that person even again.
As Scott Morrison said about the policy back in February it is a policy that is applied non-citizens of all nation, New Zealand is not singled out “in any way, shape or form”. While we are close with New Zealand both culturally and economically, our leaders are rightfully putting Australians first. By the end of her Australian trip Ardern had got the bi-partisan message that Australia would not stop deporting non-citizen criminals.
When she was asked by Sunday Project Host Lisa Wilkinson Ardern about describing the deportation policy as ‘corrosive’ she played down the tension “Oh look I think we should be fair the, the deportation policy has existed for a while” and that her objections had just been “friends as we are, you can speak frankly with each other you know.”
Despite Wilkinson being a friendly interviewer, she did ask Ardern the tough and awkward questions. But it was Wilkinson’s husband Fairfax columnist Peter Fitzsimons who acted as the biggest sycophant when he called his wife during the interview and he got to speak to Ardern for a whole ten minutes.
Gloating about it in his Saturday wrap column Fitzsimons wrote “Goodness! It is a weird thing to call your Missus and suddenly find yourself chatting for 10 minutes to the most popular political leader in the world, but so it proved on Friday” going on to say “even though the politics of the world is drifting to feral right, she is the beacon for how politics can be done – progressive, inclusive, considered – and still romp home at elections”.
Joe Aston from the Financial Review was scathing of the high profile couple’s self indulgent cross promotion. Aston also highlighted that Ardern had not romped it home at the last New Zealand election with her party coming second in the overall vote and only becoming Prime Minister due to a unique Coalition of the nationalist New Zealand First Party and the local Green Party
So after arriving in Melbourne to a flaunting local crowd and saying some pretty words, Ardern left Australia achieving nothing politically. Our leaders told she has no sway over Australian domestic policy. Fittingly her New Zealand Defence Force plane broke down as she was on her way home from Australia, and had to catch a commercial flight.
While the globalist class and media have puffed her up to believe she is the most important and inspiring leader in the world right now, her Australian visit has shown that doesn’t count for much in diplomatic reality. Go home Jacinda Ardern and leave Australia to look after Australians.
