Jacinda Ardern and the infantilization of New Zealand
Morrinsville (population 7,700) is a rural town in New Zealand devoted to the dairy cow.
If you’re driving to Tauranga or Rotorua and the children are getting bored, turn off the by-pass road into the main street of Morrinsville and show them Mabel the Mega Cow who stands 6.5m (21ft) tall in the middle of town. Then, kill some more time by driving around spotting the other 44 brightly painted, but life-sized, fibreglass cows that adorn other street corners.
If you want to leave a mark on Morrinsville, they say, you can commission a cow of your own; there are still some street corners left unadorned. But its Mabel who has put Morrinsville on the map, according to locals. She’s the biggest cow in the world.
“ … according to locals. She’s the biggest cow in the world”
Back in the 1990s a buck-toothed teenage girl, named Jacinda Ardern, attended Morrinsville College and served in the local fish and chip shop. It is no exaggeration to say that she became even more famous than Mabel. Her father was a policeman, and her mother was an assistant school caterer. The family were Mormons, members of the local Church of Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
You may have had Mormon ‘missionaries’ knocking on your front door at some time, and recognised them by their clean white shirts and wide smiles. Theirs is a religion established in 1830 by an American chap called Jo Smith, who claimed that two heavenly personages appeared before him when he was 14 years-old with instructions from God the Father and Jesus Christ. Christopher Hitchens (a notorious debunker of religion) described it as a racket, and a ridiculous cult. But that was Christopher all over.
When Jacinda was 17, her Aunt Marie, a Labour Party stalwart, recruited her to join the party and help with political campaigning. It was here that her teeth revealed themselves as a political asset, for she always appeared to be smiling, even when she was deeply frowning. Made for politics, you might say.
The following year she went to the nearby Waikato University to study Public Relations as part of a Communications degree. If you’re unclear exactly what public relations involves (and it goes by a bewildering number of names and euphemisms) it’s best to read the university’s description of it.
‘... they are effective networkers who work closely to manage publicity ... (and) are also involved in crisis and issues management, government relations, lobbying ... you’ll take part in mock media conferences, build a website, use social media ... and write press releases ...’
Does that sound like something a political party could use? Sure does! Bet Aunt Marie wished she could have done a course like that herself.
Next thing Jacinda was off to Wellington to work in ‘Auntie’ Helen’s office as a research assistant. ‘Auntie’ Helen Clark was the Labour Prime Minister whose stern voice and micro-management of people’s lives made ‘Auntie’ an appropriate title for those who loved her, and equally for those who hated her. For young Jacinda, however, she was to become a guide and a mentor, shooing her off to work in Tony ‘Weapons-of-Mass-Destruction’ Blair’s office in the UK (Remember him?), and into the International Union of Socialist Youth (IUSY), where she was elected President.
Who can forget her presidential speech to the IUSY in which she addressed the audience using that well-known term from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, ‘Comrade’, 15 times in 7 minutes. By the time she returned to New Zealand in 2008 she was a well-schooled socialist ready for a list place on the opposition Labour front bench, where Phil Goff immediately made her spokesperson for Youth Affairs.
A few things had changed during this time. Auntie Helen had lost an election and ceased being Prime Minister, heading off to work at the United Nations, and Jacinda had turned her back on the Mormon Church, whose condemnation of homosexuality and same-sex marriage made Labour Party members, in particular, Devils Incarnate. (Not to mention its prohibition on marijuana and opioids.)
Well, anyone who reads Vogue or The Guardian knows the story, and how our buck-toothed heroine became the youngest ever Prime Minister of New Zealand for a dazzling, sometimes baffling, six years, before suddenly exiting Stage Left as if it had all been imagined, like a mirage, and not real at all.
How to explain it? Was she a Manchurian Candidate planted by the World Economic Forum’s evil schemers for world domination: Larry Fink, George Soros and Klaus Schwab? After all, she remains a WEF Young Global Leader, and was spotted running from a secret one-on-one meeting with Larry in New York (when she was meant to be elsewhere on government business at the United Nations, and looking after her baby, for heaven’s sake).
You can take on that conspiracy theory if you wish, but I’ve got a different slant, and it has its origin in the deepest and most reliable source of my higher thinking. I have a gut feeling that the key to Jacinda Ardern is her emotional and intellectual immaturity. The clue is in the way she infantilized New Zealand.
Bear with me. What does ‘infantilize’ mean? Dictionaries agree that it refers to treating someone as if that person were a child. It is a common response by those with simple, unsophisticated minds to resort to infantilization when confronted with deeply complex and subtle problems that can appear unsolvable. Those who do it, are not aware that they are doing it, for they’re not only reducing the complexity for those they are addressing, they are reducing it also for themselves. Policies are presented in the form of feelings and metaphors rather than intellectual arguments.
Let’s look at some Jacinda examples.
· When a lone wolf gunman shot up two Mosques in Christchurch, killing 51 Moslems, Ardern donned a hijab and admonished her country, and the world, to put anger aside and be kind to each other. Drawing her top lip down over her teeth resulted in a visage of such pained seriousness that the world’s media was awestruck.
· Julie Burchill in The Spectator wrote: “Her hijab-cosplay in the wake of an attack on a mosque was yet another grim example of a privileged western woman showing off by wearing what is for millions of non-western women a living shroud worn under threat of death, as we see most recently in Iran.” Spoilsport!
· Then, taking inspiration from J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, where the populace refused to speak the name of the evil wizard, Lord Voldemort, believing that their silence would protect them, she instructed the media and the populace that the gunman’s name must never be spoken, nor his words ever printed. For it might break the magic spell.
· Oh, and we’re going to take away everyone’s guns, she said. That should stop it from ever happening again.
· “... and bring together countries and tech companies ... to bring to an end the ability to use social media to organise and promote terrorism and violent extremism.” We’ll call it The Christchurch Call, she said, and she’d head up the summit with her friend, Justin Trudeau, and that nice President Macron. (That one’s worked well. Stopped Hamas in its tracks.)
· In June 2018 she gave birth to a daughter and promised to halve child poverty within a decade. No money would be spared in order to make this medicine go down, as Mary Poppins might have put it. Unfortunately, measurable child poverty increased, which then left mental illness to be addressed. Many millions would be spent on it, she promised, and, keeping her word, many more bureaucrats were hired for that purpose. Mental illness took off.
· The child was the front and centre star when she addressed the United Nations and called for ‘climate change urgency, equality for women and the placing of kindness at the forefront of actions for social change’. It was the sort of speech a Year 13 teenager might have written, but her Photoshopped images in Vogue and Harpers made her look at least 29. It was like Instagram on steroids, and what girl wouldn’t be jealous?
· When Covid-19 arrived before she could be put to the test of another election, her country was uniquely protected by its isolation and broad moat of surrounding water. Taking her cue from Sleeping Beauty, she pulled up the drawbridge, closed the castle gates and laid the country down to sleep until a handsome prince in the form of a vaccine could arrive to wake everyone up and save them.
· But not before they’d all put teddy bears in their front windows so that evil spirits would be frightened away.
· Ah, Covid! At last, all those years of turning up to lectures at Waikato Uni were about to pay off ... the ‘crisis and issues management ... mock media conferences, use of social media ... and writing press releases ...’ And, best of all, no need for following rules. It was like an endless school camp with no teachers.
· Instead of hiring doctors, she hired 50% more spin doctors in the form of ‘Communications Staff’. It was just like being back at Uni.
· And the ‘Pulpit of Truth’ was, like, straight out of the Mormon First Vision. No wonder the people loved it, and loved being kept so safe, even if they couldn’t go see their dying grandmother, or keep their job, or ask questions, or show their faces in public. Hey, it was for their own good.
· But some people need help more than others, because they’re unable to help themselves. They need special care, and none more so than Maoris. As Dame Tariana Turia famously said, “Democracy only works for the Majority”. And that’s not fair. So Jacinda came up with the idea of Enhanced Democracy. In keeping with Orwell’s newspeak guidelines, this phrase could be used to justify the elevation of Maori people to bodies to which they had not subjected themselves to a democratic vote. And to give them lots of money that they needn’t share with others.
“We are the single source of truth. Anything else you hear, dismiss it …”
Okay, I could go on and on, but plenty of people have already pounded their keyboards about Jacinda.
Let’s now return to the concept of infantilization. Merriam-Webster makes the point that treating people as helpless can prolong or encourage their dependency on others. It is a sign that you actually disrespect them. We can’t be sure how many Maoris have come to realize this, just as we can’t be sure how many New Zealanders realize how infantilized they were by their treatment during Ardern’s Covid years. It might explain why the electorate turned against her so vehemently at the end, or it may just have been the accumulation of non-deliveries by Year 13s playing at being politicians.
When, as a self-declared progressive socialist, and anti-monarchy Republican, she accepted the title of Dame Grand Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, she said ‘it was for the people’. So much for principles. She also had a flightless beetle, a lichen, and an ant named after her.
As Zoe Strimpel wrote in the UK’s Telegraph in January 2022: “Ardern has blinded the world with her virtue, and robbed New Zealand of all that makes life worth living”. How fitting that she’s now been taken to the bosom of Claudine Gay’s Harvard University coterie where truth dies under the weight of infantile fantasies, and online calls for murder, rape and genocide are judged according to their ‘context’.
A.I. Fabler
February 10, 2024
A.I. Fabler’s bio and published work can be viewed HERE