Madison Wells will produce a documentary focusing on the public and private life of Jacinda Ardern, the trailblazing Prime Minister of New Zealand who helped introduce strict gun laws following the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings. She also led her country through the Covid pandemic and grappled with issues such as child poverty and climate change.
The hallmark of good leadership is not the issues grappled with, but those that are at least improved and better still solved. By those measures Ardern was a failure.
The feature-length film is currently untitled. It follows Ardern from the moment she receives the Labour Party nomination to the birth of her child to her resignation in 2023, when she was at the height of her power and popularity. . .
Commented Madison Wells CEO and the film’s producer Gigi Pritzker, “We are so proud that our first doc chronicles the life of the extraordinary Jacinda Ardern. Her uniquely empathetic and inclusive leadership style has been and continues to be an inspiration to people everywhere, including me. This is exactly the kind of empowering, moving and boundary-pushing story we tell here at Madison Wells.” . .
An inspiration to people everywhere? No, especially in New Zealand where the current government is having to deal with the mess she, and her government, left behind.
That’s an exaggeration and as David Farrar points out, she wasn’t at the height of her popularity when she resigned.
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Hard for their statement to be more wrong. Ardern’s popularity peak was +72%. When she resigned from office it had plummeted to -1%.
For the first three years of her leadership, her popularity increased but that didn’t transfer to her party. Until Covid struck and National MPs started behaving badly, National was more popular, or only a little less popular than Labour.
That undermines the promotion of Ardern as a leader to be admired – her popularity was built on fairy dust and feel-good word salads, not delivering on promises and not making a positive difference to any of the issues that really matter.
It will be very interesting to see if research for the documentary changes the producer’s rose coloured view of our former Prime Minister, but given he subject is co-operating that is unlikely.
There is potential for a documentary that does an unbiased examination of Ardern’s short, and ultimately unsuccessful leadership, but this hagiography won’t be it.
Ele Ludemann is a North Otago farmer and journalist, who blogs HERE - where this article was sourced.
6 comments:
Counter- film:
JA: The Destruction of a Nation.
Maddison Wells can choose to make whatever movie they want - but why on earth our current government supports it financially?
Is hagiography the new word to describe vomit inducing?
Bad enough living under the most clueless, useless and hypocritical PM New Zealand ever had, who in their right mind wants to relive the nightmare by viewing the movie????
'Hagiography' = biography of a hag. Sounds right....... or did I look up the wrong dictionary?
Hagiography = a nauseating puff piece extolling the Jab-Hag.
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