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Here Comes the Politics of Kindness

by Will Jones
28 April 2025 11:21 AM

Covid tyrant queen Jacinda Ardern is set to tour the UK and US to promote her new memoir, subtitled A Different Kind of Power. In the Spectator, Michael Jackson says Kiwis remember all too well Ardern’s use of power and are still suffering the effects. Here’s an excerpt.

Just over two years on from stepping down as Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern is awaiting the imminent release of her memoir titled Jacinda Ardern, A Different Kind of Power. The launch will be supported by a nine-night US and UK book tour. The marketing around both employs the ‘kind and empathic’ messaging now firmly cemented as her international brand. Eventbrite, for example, asks us to imagine “what if kindness came first?” Today, if you ask Meta AI or ChatGPT “what one word best describes Jacinda Ardern’s leadership style” they will both respond with “empathetic”.

These words do not, however, encapsulate her brand in New Zealand – despite still being pushed by the country’s media, academics and those inside the Wellington bubble. No, ordinary Kiwis have a different take on the former prime minister.

At the time of her resignation in January 2023, Ardern’s leadership was viewed as toxic. Her party was in free fall in the polls, having plunged from 60% in October 2020 to just 27% by late 2022. Even the publication Stuff, an unabashed cheerleader of the Ardern government, admitted earlier this month that job losses, skyrocketing inflation and interest rates, increases in the cost of living, a host of unpopular policies, her leadership style and Covid mandates that “fractured social cohesion” had all driven a collapse in Ardern’s popularity. 

Interestingly, this was not the first time that Ardern had struggled in the polls. In late 2019, just two years after becoming prime minister, Ardern’s party was polling 7 per cent lower than their main rival, the National party. Enter Covid: Ardern’s saving grace. By mid-2020, Labour was soaring in the polls and went on to win the October 2020 general election – an electoral phenomenon replicated worldwide as people, subjected to intense Covid fearmongering, rewarded political incumbents.

In hindsight, however, Covid – and more specifically, Ardern’s response to it – would play a significant role in her downfall. Over the proceeding years, Kiwis would come to learn that there was nothing kind or empathetic about her leadership and policies.

Kiwis saw firsthand, for example, how Graeme Hattie, who flew to New Zealand in July 2020 to visit his dying father, was treated. Hattie’s application for release from New Zealand’s mandatory 14-day quarantine on compassionate grounds was rejected twice. His father died while Hattie himself remained stuck inside a guarded quarantine hotel.

Then there were the hundreds of thousands of Kiwi citizens denied the right to return to New Zealand between April 2020 and February 2022 because of the country’s closed border policy and a quarantine lottery system, condemned by High Court Justice Jillian Mallon as “not demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society”. These Kiwis missed important life events (e.g. births, marriages, jobs), and many, like Hattie, were stopped from comforting and farewelling dying loved ones.

Thousands of Kiwis were subjected to mandatory vaccination, despite explicit assurances by Ardern to the contrary in September 2020. Frontline border and quarantine workers were the first to be made to have vaccinations in late 2021, followed by the health and disability, and education sectors. Those who refused were threatened with losing their jobs – many did.

Worth reading in full.

Tags: COVID-19DemocracyJacinda ArdernLockdownNew ZealandPolitics of kindness

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24 Comments
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Art Simtotic
Art Simtotic
27 days ago

To Stop the Spread of the respiratory virus with an age-fatality profile that paralleled general mortality, Queen Canute created North and South Prison Islands.

For the politics of kindness, read the politics of cruelty, claptrap and coercion.

Behold a politician and conclude the exact opposite.

Last edited 27 days ago by Art Simtotic
23
0
RW
RW
27 days ago

Arden got confronted with the grave problem that people resisting her COVID policies were being extremely unkind, seeking to kill grannies by breathing freely despite the grave dangers for grannies associated with that and not getting repeat-injected with experimental biopweapons safe and effcient vaccines despite this was absolutey necessary to stop other vaccinated people, especially grannies, from succumbing to a disease they had supposedly been vaccinated against unvaccinated people irresponsibly proved to be rather immune to. Hence, generous application of pepper spray and batons to teach them the error of their unempathic and unkind ways was unavoidable.

18
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Solentviews
Solentviews
27 days ago

They have no shame, do they? Ardern, Trudeau, Macron, and our lot: (Johnson, Gove, Hancock and Sunak). They leave piles of incompetence and misery in their wake, only to continue with the non-stop bs that they have ‘helped’ their countries. They seem bemused that people don’t agree.

The truth is that if they had all done ‘nothing’, each country would have been much better off.

21
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transmissionofflame
transmissionofflame
27 days ago

Kindness sounds like a good idea, though the motives are often suspect and the results mixed. But my fundamental objection to her kind of politics is that she is happy to force everyone else to be “kind” in exactly the way she determines kindness ought to be done. I will never be like that or agree that her approach is not immoral.

11
0
RW
RW
27 days ago
Reply to  transmissionofflame

Kindness sounds like a good idea

In contrast to this, it sounds like an extremely terrible idea. Arden was supposedly the leader of her country and not its mother, foster carer or pastor. Most people will never interact personally with leading politicians and hence, if they’re kind(-hearted) really doesn’t matter the least. They should rather be intelligent, honest, possess personal integrity and have a talent for and a desire to get the job done well. If they’re also kind to others, this may be a nice bonus but without the other qualities, kindness is completely useless.

Additionally, kindness in politicians is a very dubious claim. People don’t usually feel much affection for strangers and those who claim otherwise are either somehow deranged or simply lying. It also takes a generous does of ambition and a certain ruthlessness to rise through the ranks of other politicians seeking to accomplish the same to the top. And ambition, ruthlessness and effective use of political tactis don’t mix with kindness.

9
0
transmissionofflame
transmissionofflame
27 days ago
Reply to  RW

Indeed. If only more had your clarity of vision.

8
0
transmissionofflame
transmissionofflame
27 days ago
Reply to  transmissionofflame

Put another way. I am coming round to thinking that people fall into one of two categories. On the one hand you have most people, who believe that “collectivism” is fine as long it is directed to their liking. On the other, people who see collectivism as a necessary very evil – forcing people to go along with and pay for things they don’t agree with, for the “common good”, and that the bar that makes this violent threat morally acceptable should be set very high- the bare minimum necessary to allow for “ordered liberty”. If you start to see collectivism as a positive tool to help you fix the world you end up where we are now, with many major political parties supposedly on the “right” just being vaguely watered down versions of the leftists.
The only contemporary UK mainstream politician I have seen speak about this to my satisfaction is Rupert Lowe.

9
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huxleypiggles
huxleypiggles
27 days ago
Reply to  transmissionofflame

Overthinking it tof. Ardern was and is a firkin evil cow. End of.

7
0
transmissionofflame
transmissionofflame
27 days ago
Reply to  huxleypiggles

Oh she is indeed but her message takes people in

5
0
Hound of Heaven
Hound of Heaven
27 days ago
Reply to  huxleypiggles

I personally know New Zealanders who actually feel more loathing than that. But it’s a fair appraisal nonetheless. Has she ever had a proper job?

5
0
Jeff Chambers
Jeff Chambers
27 days ago

I love “kindness” of the globalist marxo-fascists. Their “kindness” is so much more wonderful than other forms of kindness. And it isn’t at all fake and nauseating. And it isn’t the “kindness” of preening and pathological self-regard. Honest.

8
0
huxleypiggles
huxleypiggles
27 days ago

All that Ardern is doing is continuing with the original storyline. Everything she did throughout the Scamdemic was done at great cost to herself, what was it “nothing left in the tank” and all “for the greater good.” She has now written a history of her martyrdom such that in a few years hence another globalist Pope will see fit to raise her status to that of sainthood.

History is written by the victors.

6
0
ComradeSvelte
ComradeSvelte
27 days ago

Evil horse faced traitor

12
0
Hester
Hester
27 days ago

A terrible, terrible person, truly wicked, if she had been around in the middle ages she would have been senior in the Inquisition, a Witch burner/Witch finder.
A Monster incarnate.

15
0
huxleypiggles
huxleypiggles
27 days ago
Reply to  Hester

👍👍👍

3
0
Lockdown Sceptic
Lockdown Sceptic
27 days ago

Covid Tyrants Destroyed the West

4
0
Monro
Monro
27 days ago

The Good Intentions Paving Tour…….

Run for the hills…….

3
0
JeremyP99
JeremyP99
27 days ago

https://open.substack.com/pub/schwabianobserver/p/what-the-f-is-going-on?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=x2r5q

Substacker Lily Bit on the walking dead of the WEF YGLs. Ardern is evil, in the biblical sense.

6
0
Heretic
Heretic
27 days ago

Jacinda Ardern: “The Empathy Tour”.

Will that be like Harry & Maleficent: “The World Privacy Tour”?

5
0
Jack the dog
Jack the dog
27 days ago

Loathsome woman.

5
0
lulu-b45
lulu-b45
26 days ago

Ardern and Dan Andrews in Victoria were the worst of the worst.during covid. Wouldn’t use her book as toilet paper

4
0
Gezza England
Gezza England
26 days ago

When I asked AI I got back ‘horse faced bitch’.

2
0
Kornea112
Kornea112
26 days ago

She was well rewarded for her world class authoritarian zeal by Prince William and elite member of the global WEF cult. Ardern knew which side of her bread was buttered.

0
0
porgycorgy
porgycorgy
26 days ago

It would be useful to have a list of the venues so that some of us could let her know how much we loathe her.

Last edited 26 days ago by porgycorgy
0
0

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