A TALE OF TWO COMMENTATORS

While Bernard Hickey of Newsroom writes that Covid-19 has seen the Labour-led Government deliver 'the biggest shot of cash and monetary support to the wealthy in the history of New Zealand', blogger Chris Trotter thinks Jacinda Ardern's government 'opted to put people first'. One of these two commentators is a Jacinda Ardern loyalist. Can you work out who it is?

BERNARD HICKEY IS proving to be a far superior commentator to those who never miss an opportunity to parade their 'progressive' credentials but think that getting Labour re-elected and supporting the working class are one in the same thing.

While much of the New Zealand left treats Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern as something akin to a comforting security blanket, Hickey has never put his critical faculties into neutral when it comes to assessing the track record of the Labour-led Government. In an article for Newsroom this week he observes:

'The already rich are on the line heading upwards - getting richer because of a range of Government policies aimed at responding to Covid-19. Meanwhile, renters, beneficiaries and the working poor are getting poorer because their rents are rising, their incomes are falling and they have received barely any more direct help than they got before the pandemic.'

Hyperbole about Ardern's 'kindness' and her 'almost supernatural emotional IQ' is mercifully absent from a column that dispassionately assesses the Government's economic performance and finds it to be wanting. Hickey observes:

'Almost by accident, and without debate, the Labour-led Government has delivered the biggest shot of cash and monetary support to the wealthy in the history of New Zealand, while giving nothing to the renters, the jobless, students, migrants and the working poor who mostly voted it in.'

Hickey points out that while the Labour-led Government has spent some $13 billion on wage subsidies to large and small businesses, it has given next to nothing to the already jobless, those on a benefit and the working poor. Against the advice of its own welfare working group, it ruled out increasing benefits.

It's socialism for the rich, capitalism for the rest of us.

Compare Hickey's assessment with that of Chris Trotter. Trotter, an ardent Ardern loyalist, thinks we ordinary folk have struck it lucky:

'Here in New Zealand, by a miracle of historical alchemy, we were blessed with a prime minister and a government who, against all expectations, reversed the neoliberal formula. In “going hard and going early”, Jacinda Ardern’s government had opted to put people first.'

Trotter insists that Jacinda Ardern and her government ‘reversed the neoliberal formula’ and ‘New Zealanders cheered on a government prepared to borrow tens-of-bilions of dollars to keep them and their loved ones safe’.

The increasing number of folk who are lining up at the food banks must be counting their lucky stars that Jacinda Ardern 'opted to put people first'....