FROM TRAGEDY TO FARCE

Back in the day : Martyn Bradbury with Jacinda Ardern on Citizen A.

Even though he admits that Jacinda Ardern has failed to deliver during her first term in office, Martyn Bradbury still wants us to vote Labour. But, as someone once observed, the first time is tragedy, the second is farce.

EVEN THOUGH HE ADMITS that Jacinda Ardern  ' has done sweet bugger all in genuinely changing the lives of New Zealanders ', Martyn Bradbury continues to defend Ardern and her Government. The editor of The Daily Blog has  got very little to point to that would compel anyone but the determinedly centrist to vote for Labour, so he would like us all to believe that a second term Labour-led Government will seize the opportunity to implement the policies of real change it hasn't implemented during its first term in office.

You will have to take Bradbury's word for it because this argument isn't based on anything other than Bradbury's misplaced loyalty to Ardern. He once reminded readers of The Daily Blog that she used to baby sit his child. He blithely ignores the reality that Jacinda Ardern, throughout her political career, has done nothing to suggest that she is anything but a routinely centrist politician. Although she campaigned on a election platform promising 'transformation', she reverted to type once safely installed in her Beehive office. Her natural instinct has always been to lean into the status quo.

While he will often parade as a progressive whose sympathies lie with the left, Bradbury has not cut his ties with the centrist politics of the Labour Party and has major difficulties imagining any form of progressive politics that doesn't involve Labour. It remains the politics he feels the most at ease with and he will take the big stick to anything that threatens the political position of the Labour Party.

In April 2017, for example, he was attacking 'righteous left wing condemnation that NZ Labour aren’t enough like (Jeremy) Corbyn'. He advised, at that time, that it was important to get Labour elected because activists could then pressure the Government to 'implement progressive policy'. After some two years of this Labour-led Government the abject failure of this strategy is all too apparent.

That Bradbury wants to, yet again, misdirect people into voting for Labour in 2020, is sadly predictable. The fact that the some 750,000 folk who no longer vote will more than likely decline Bradbury's invitation to join him on the path to nowhere - just as they did in 2017 - appears to have escaped his notice.