OPINION
By Frankie Rufolo
The leftie darling down under may have been sanctified throughout 2020, but now New Zealand’s Labour Prime Minister is losing the respect she once had.
We’ve all seen it: that creepy clip of Jacinda Ardern in a press conference on vaccination. In case you haven’t watched the viral video, the leader of our commonwealth sister was asked about vaccine passports by a journalist who asked if the idea meant creating new classes of people. The British lefitsts who hated Priti Patel’s alleged smirking strangely had nothing to say as the Labour politician smiled and said “yeah, that’s exactly what we’re doing,” arguing it was important for vaccinated people to be confident they were around other vaccinated people.
Well, I’m double vaccinated and she does not speak for me. I’m confident in the British public, in the science and in my own health. Vaccine passports are a terrible idea for all sorts of practical reasons: many businesses have been hurt by lockdowns and cannot afford to be discriminating against their own customers or worrying about the liability if they make a mistake. If a vaccine passport system is all done using a mobile phone app, then it’s effectively discriminating against older people and poor people, whether they’re vaccinated or not and after the track and trace disaster, it raises the question what happens if the app goes wrong? If paper passports are brought in, then governments risk creating a black market in fake ones. Kiwis are being told to call the police on unvaccinated people breaking the rules when surely even in New Zealand there must be real crime to deal with?
In the UK, vaccine hesitancy has been a disproportionate problem with ethnic minorities – although more British Asians started taking the jab after seeing horrific scenes in India – so a passport system would effectively mean discriminating against black people all the time and no one wants that. In New Zealand, it’s the indigenous Maori people who are disproportionately unvaccinated and they do not want a white woman like Ardern to make them second class citizens in their own country. How progressive.
But I digress: back to New Zealand’s leading lady, a politician I once respected (which doesn’t mean agreed with all the time.) I’ll admit, I was a bit jealous of the Kiwis last year. The government had been sensible enough to lock down the borders. Although they were strict with their own people, hardly anyone had suffered or died with coronavirus, whereas in the UK, Johnson oversaw scandals in care homes, making the sacrifices we all made redundant as the very vulnerable people who we were supposed to protect were killed by the Conservatives. When “Black Lives Matter” protests started in New Zealand, Ardern was more consistent than other leftists and lockdown fanatics and criticised the participants.
Before the last election, New Zealand’s Labour Party were in coalition not only with the Greens but also the anti-immigration New Zealand First Party (who probably made her close the borders to keep out COVID.) After delaying the 2020 election (something President Donald Trump suggested in America and was demonised as a fascist as a result) Labour gained a landslide majority, but rather than govern alone, Ardern invited the New Zealand Greens into coalition talks anyway, citing their “expertise” on climate. Proponents of Proportional Representation – something The For Britain Movement supports and the UK desperately needs – argued this showed fairer elections mean better leadership. Whilst Ardern co-operates with different parties in her own country, the same cannot always be said for her and her next door neighbours. It seems the Labour Prime Minister will side with almost anyone to attack Scott Morrison’s Conservative government in Australia. When international tensions arose between the Aussies and the Chinese, Jacinda Ardern’s trade minister told the Australian government to “show China more respect.”
Well the Communist regime in China is increasingly spying on its own people, crushing democracy in Hong Kong, infringing on the religious freedom of Chinese Christians, persecuting the country’s tiny Jewish minority, pushing discriminatory anti-gay policies, forcing the Uyghur Muslim population into concentration camps where they’re being tortured, sterilised and killed, using North Korean slave labour, threatening to invade Taiwan, supporting the brutal military coup in Burma, jumping at the chance to recognise the Taliban as the government in Afghanistan, and executing more people than the rest of the world combined. What part of that are the Australians supposed to respect? If Jacinda Ardern had been Prime Minister in the 1930s, perhaps she’d have told Britain to respect Nazi Germany?
Like the British public have had huge debate about dealing with the current fascist foe: Islamic terrorism – specifically ISIS Jihadis wanting to return like Shamima Begum, other Western countries with large Muslim populations have had the same problem. Earlier this year, a dual national of both Australia and New Zealand was facing deportation from Turkey for getting involved with Islamic State in Syria. Australia did what the UK did and revoked the ISIS bride’s citizenship. Jacinda Ardern lashed out at Scott Morrison’s government, arguing that the Jihadi had grown up in Australia, accusing the country of “shirking its responsibilities.” New Zealand took the terrorist in. What about Jacinda Ardern’s responsibility to protect her people?
This of course takes us back to the terrible Christchurch Attack and the more recent supermarket attack in Auckland. In March 2019, Brenton Tarrant, a self-described fascist and white nationalist, used multiple machine guns to massacre innocent Muslims in two mosques. The youngest victim was a boy of just three years old, the oldest seventy seven. Whilst Jacinda Ardern was praised for her response to the terrorist attack – with a recent documentary criticised for over-looking the victims in sanctifying the Prime Minister – it’s important to remember a government has a responsibility to stop attacks happening in the first place. Tarrant wasn’t a New Zealander, he was Australian and had come to police attention years previously. Likewise, in September this year, eight people were injured when ISIS supporter Ahamed Samsudeen went on a knife rampage in an Auckland supermarket. The perpetrator was identified as a Sri Lankan immigrant who had already been to prison in New Zealand for owning ISIS videos and distributing their propaganda. Ardern’s response was typical, worrying about a “backlash” against Muslims, hardly the main concern.
Innocent Kiwis were killed and injured by two opposite types of terrorist who should never have been in the country. True, Ardern kept out a virus more than she kept out violence, but after a year, it just got ridiculous. I understand why people were against different lockdown rules dividing up the UK, but it’s absolutely insane that New Zealanders living on separate islands were put into a full lockdown after just one COVID case in Auckland this year. The success of New Zealand Labour’s lockdowns in 2020 soon came back to bite them – so few Kiwis had died from COVID-19, the population became complacent about the virus and uptake of the vaccine was slow. New Zealanders just couldn’t be bothered to get the jab. Sadly, it seems Ardern will take her country down the same dark path as Australia to change that.