TEFLON JACINDA

The global capitalist elite at Davos regarded Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern as a natural political ally.

PRIME MINISTER Jacinda Ardern has been receiving the kind of favourable media coverage previously reserved for one of her immediate predecessors, John Key. But don’t expect the liberal chattering class to start describing her as ‘Teflon Jacinda’ anytime soon.

It’s not rocket science to work out why Ardern enjoys the patronage of the mainstream media – they have concluded that she represents no threat to the economic and political status quo. While the alarm bells might have started to go off during her election campaign when Ardern started talking about ‘transformational change’ and the ‘failure of capitalism’, she has proven to be still the cautiously centrist politician that she has always been.

Ardern quickly dispelled any establishment fears that she was about to storm the citadels of capitalist power. For Ardern, ‘transformation’ merely means tinkering with the policy settings of neoliberalism, not overturning it. While this might still upset hard right wingers like Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking, it has caused few ripples elsewhere.

The media warmly reported that Ardern had been embraced by the Davos capitalist elite. TV3’s Lloyd Burr even went as far as to describe her as ‘the darling of Davos’. This sounds like a really bad episode of Dr Who to me.

While Jacinda Ardern engaged in some mutual appreciation with the likes of Prince William, another female politician was the subject of less favourable comment – and she wasn’t even there. In the United States the hugely popular socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticised Davos, attacking a system that allows billionaires to exist alongside widespread poverty.

One business commentator, referring to Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed 70 percent marginal tax, wrote that she made the Davos elite ‘nervous’. Certainly she is in no danger of being described as ‘the darling of Davos’. But she would regard this as a huge insult rather than a compliment.

When asked by Stephen Colbert on The Late Show this week whether she was concerned she was upsetting the political establishment she replied that she gave 'zero f**ks' about people telling her not to make waves.

"People called Martin Luther King divisive in his time," Ocasio-Cortez reminded Colbert. "We forget he was wildly unpopular when advocating for the Civil Rights Act. I think that what we need to realize is that social movements should be the moral compass of our politics."