In their second term, Labour had unbridled power. They could have done what they liked in terms of reducing child poverty or looking after the homeless. Instead, they put the homeless in motels, which was totally unsatisfactory, and did nothing to reduce child poverty.
The problem, though, with giving them such power, was that they borrowed so heavily—$60 billion. They brought a country that was doing pretty well in terms of debt-GDP ratio when English left office to one that was almost out of control. It more than doubled New Zealand’s indebtedness and, now, we’re paying in the region of $10 billion a year just to service that debt.
I feel like a bloody preacher when talking about it. I don’t want to be unkind to Ardern. She probably still feels she did the right thing but part of me looks at what her government did with the economy and they could have avoided doing a lot of it. They’ve sunk this country into a fiscal hole that will take quite a lot of climbing out of—that’s tragic.
I don’t think she had the intellectual capacity to understand exactly what she was doing. She so often said that she never wanted the job and, on balance, despite some strengths in terms of X-factor, I don’t think she was suited to or capable of being Prime Minister.
She also had, and this is a point worth emphasising, a low-talent Cabinet. When you think about people like Phil Twyford, Michael Wood, David Clark (the guy who kept cycling around Dunedin during Covid), she was let down by all and sundry around her.
The writing was on the wall, really. If you take the job of prime minister, which is a pretty important task, you’ve got to have the intellect to handle it. If you haven’t, it’s going to show in fairly short order unless you have extraordinary people around you, and she didn’t.
A classic example of how the Ardern Government was out of touch with the people is its response to the 23-day occupation of Parliament’s well-manicured grounds in early 2022.
The occupation was co-ordinated by citizens unhappy about the government-issued lockdowns and mandates and, at its peak, the group made up some 1000 people. Her friend, the Speaker, Trevor Mallard was given free rein to handle the protesters in any way he saw fit and what he did was a disgrace. He lorded it over the protesters from his first-floor balcony, along with the press gallery, who were invited to watch it from his vantage point.
If he had bothered to go down and see these people—doctors, nurses, military personnel, people from all walks of life—he would have seen a fair grievance they had against mandated vaccinations. Rather, Mallard turned on the grounds’ watering system, turning the lawn into slush, and boomed Barry Manilow from the loudspeakers as a form of torture on those below.
The only one willing to listen to their concerns was Winston Peters, who walked among them on a number of occasions. He was trespassed by Mallard for two years, no great penalty for him because he wasn’t a sitting MP at the time, although the trespass order was overturned. Because I had done the same as Peters, there was a suggestion that I’d also be trespassed but it came to nothing.
The fiery end to the protest was inevitable, after the crowd had been infiltrated by gangs and the like, who were there purely to cause trouble rather than raise concerns about mandates. Ardern would watch the protest from the safety of her ninth-floor office in the Beehive. She ventured on to the ruined grounds only after the protesters had left.
Mallard was a constant embarrassment for the Labour Government. In 2019, after a review of Parliament, he claimed there was a rapist in the building. It had everyone on edge, until I tracked down the alleged rapist and discovered he was nothing of the sort.
During the tracking process, Mallard called me and summoned me to his office, accusing me of upsetting spooked staff by making my enquiries, and told me to stop. I told him the only one upset would be him when the real story was published. In fact, I had made just one call to track down the accused staff member. I went to his home, after he had been expelled from Parliament, to interview him and discovered the allegation against him was minor and he had been cleared by an internal inquiry, which I read.
In the end, Mallard apologised but the gaff cost the taxpayer more than $300,000.
A few years later, at a Bob Jones party, the property magnate asked me to have a word with Mallard, as he was upset about our relationship being destroyed. I had spoken at Mallard’s wedding several years earlier.
I pulled Mallard aside and said that I was sorry our relationship had been damaged to the extent it had been but added that he had destroyed a man’s life. I also told him he should understand how a journalist operates as he had married one.
The last two words he ever spoke to me were, “Fuck off.”
He certainly did, thanks to his buddy Ardern. He was knighted, along with her, and sent to be our ambassador to Ireland. He was withdrawn from that job early by the Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters.
What goes around comes around.
Taken with kind permission from the bestseller One Last Question, Prime Minister by Barry Soper (HarperCollins, $39.99), available in bookstores nationwide. His memoir consists of portraits of 12 Prime Ministers during his long service as a parliamentary reporter.
