Hooton says it time’s up for the most inept Government ever

Matthew Hooton writes:

The Ardern administration has finally confirmed — were confirmation required — that it is the most incompetent New Zealand Government in living memory, and perhaps ever. …

National’s Muldoonist era might rival Jacinda Ardern’s circus. But, however controversial, the Clyde Dam, the Waitara and Motunui methanol plants and the Marsden Point expansion were built — in contrast to Ardern’s 100,000 KiwiBuild houses, the $30 billion Auckland tram, and the $6.4b Let’s Get Wellington Moving programme, for which the Government has allocated a further $120 million for yet another business plan.

Perhaps we’re better off those projects are doomed. But the Ardern Government’s inability to deliver anything it says it values is surely unique.

Not only can’t I recall a NZ Government that has been so incompetent at delivery as this one, but even globally it is hard to think of examples. Most project failures mean they happen a few years late, but this Government’s failures means they are literally centuries behind with their projected completion.

From mid-2020, real wages began falling and have done so for eight quarters. Since the Labour Cost Index (LCI) began in 1992, that has never happened before.

By mid-2021, real wages fell below where they were under National. A year later, they have fallen a further 3.7 per cent, so that New Zealand wage and salary earners have experienced a 3.3 per cent cut in their real wages since Ardern has been Prime Minister — the worst five-year change since the series began 30 years ago.

Another fine achievement.

Prolonged border controls destroyed the international education industry, putting the viability of universities at risk. Trades training faces collapse following the bizarre project to set up a Wellington-based super-polytechnic, at a cost so far of $200m, with nothing to show for it.

No one knows what the billions for two new health bureaucracies in Wellington will deliver. We don’t know where the $1.9b for mental health went. There is wild talk of writing off student loan debt as an election sweetener.

It won’t work. The defeat of the Ardern Government is increasingly likely, and more than deserved.

Labour governments can do many things and survive. Enriching property owners while slashing workers’ real wages isn’t one.

Hopefully just one year to go.