During her time at the Kennedy School at Harvard, where former PM Ardern is spending her life in exile waiting for the extreme divides she created in NZ to heal before venturing back to her homeland, she's been giving interviews. She has been painting a picture of herself as a leader of outstanding qualities; who healed division; who led with empathy (her brand), particularly toward children. When asked about the effects of her Covid policies on Kiwi youngsters, she dismissively laughed off the question. Since Ardern defined her leadership as being one guided by "experts", she cunningly answered as follows: at 43 mins 40 secs into the Kennedy School session, Ardern says she did a video that was put up on Facebook during the pandemic, where "I interviewed a really well-known clinical psychologist, or maybe counsellor at least, who specialized in kids, where he said to the parents of New Zealand, 'If you're kids are watching a lot of TV, then its fine .. they're going to be OK'", as she laughed, and her host laughed, and the Harvard audience laughed. "That is empathetic policy-making", Ardern concluded. Her Kennedy school professor host replied, "It's a beautiful example". The audience whooped in delight.
Yesterday, I received the latest articles from the Centre of Economic Performance at London School of Economics, where I once worked. One, "A generation scarred by the Covid-19 pandemic", is by Steve Machin, an LSE "big name" in education & labour economics. The study says, "By deploying the latest econometric methods to understand how children develop skills over time, using data from UK cohort studies, we estimate the educational & lifetime impact of mass school closures & deepening social divides on a generation of children. In previous work, we highlighted the likely devastating impact that school closures would have on young people’s life prospects. The disruption of the pandemic on pupils in England will mean lower GCSE grades well into the 2030s. We estimate that a quarter of pupils received no schooling during the first lockdown in early 2020. Pupils eligible for free school meals, those educated at state schools, & those from less affluent backgrounds, suffered learning losses at a much greater rate than their more affluent peers. Even our previous gloomy predictions did not foresee the perfect storm of factors that would exacerbate inequalities inside & outside education in the wake of the pandemic .. .".
NZ's lockdowns were far more severe than the United Kingdom's. So it turns out Ardern is talking uniformed, empty, marketing-your-own-brand, fake soundbites. As for the Profs at the Kennedy School singing along with her, pretending to be common people, they also should be ashamed. There's now exceptionally strong evidence that the effect on children of pandemic policies has been devastating. NZ's Labour Party hit the poor hardest, which will exacerbate inequality in NZ for the foreseeable future. Beware of Ardern, Hipkins and the Otago medical "experts" trying to rewrite history about the effect of their actions.
Sources: https://nz.video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=AwrOrEWMIXZm0DcOBhcfaQx.;_ylu=Y29sbwNncTEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Nj?p=kennedy+school+jacinda+ardern+you+tube&type=type80260-555696122¶m1=412725389&hsimp=yhs-002&hspart=sz&ei=UTF-8&fr=yhs-sz-002#id=5&vid=1fa8e2d7dc75a44a12447fffe65bc1e3&action=view
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/abstract.asp?index=10952&mc_cid=8e6d4242e9&mc_eid=91b437965d
Yesterday, I received the latest articles from the Centre of Economic Performance at London School of Economics, where I once worked. One, "A generation scarred by the Covid-19 pandemic", is by Steve Machin, an LSE "big name" in education & labour economics. The study says, "By deploying the latest econometric methods to understand how children develop skills over time, using data from UK cohort studies, we estimate the educational & lifetime impact of mass school closures & deepening social divides on a generation of children. In previous work, we highlighted the likely devastating impact that school closures would have on young people’s life prospects. The disruption of the pandemic on pupils in England will mean lower GCSE grades well into the 2030s. We estimate that a quarter of pupils received no schooling during the first lockdown in early 2020. Pupils eligible for free school meals, those educated at state schools, & those from less affluent backgrounds, suffered learning losses at a much greater rate than their more affluent peers. Even our previous gloomy predictions did not foresee the perfect storm of factors that would exacerbate inequalities inside & outside education in the wake of the pandemic .. .".
NZ's lockdowns were far more severe than the United Kingdom's. So it turns out Ardern is talking uniformed, empty, marketing-your-own-brand, fake soundbites. As for the Profs at the Kennedy School singing along with her, pretending to be common people, they also should be ashamed. There's now exceptionally strong evidence that the effect on children of pandemic policies has been devastating. NZ's Labour Party hit the poor hardest, which will exacerbate inequality in NZ for the foreseeable future. Beware of Ardern, Hipkins and the Otago medical "experts" trying to rewrite history about the effect of their actions.
Sources: https://nz.video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=AwrOrEWMIXZm0DcOBhcfaQx.;_ylu=Y29sbwNncTEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Nj?p=kennedy+school+jacinda+ardern+you+tube&type=type80260-555696122¶m1=412725389&hsimp=yhs-002&hspart=sz&ei=UTF-8&fr=yhs-sz-002#id=5&vid=1fa8e2d7dc75a44a12447fffe65bc1e3&action=view
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/abstract.asp?index=10952&mc_cid=8e6d4242e9&mc_eid=91b437965d
Professor Robert MacCulloch holds the Matthew S. Abel Chair of Macroeconomics at Auckland University. He has previously worked at the Reserve Bank, Oxford University, and the London School of Economics. He runs the blog Down to Earth Kiwi from where this article was sourced.
7 comments:
The thick skinned audacity of this woman is beyond belief. “Spending her life in exile….”was cleverly crafted making it appropriately punchy and a true description of her real status. This aspect would have been lost on the adoring progressive liberals drawn to her hubris.
That is their job, to keep the masses the masses. For who would be there constituents?
if I were her I would stay in exile also. She is probably feaful that NZ may harbour some or a right wing nutter as extreme as the innumerable pro maori nutters.
But she is speaking her truth. Facts are irrelevant.
I am still curious as to how, upon announcing her " resignation from the Labour Party & as PM", we were then advised, by the ever compliant NZMSM, that Jacinda Ardern had been made a Dame (of the Realm).
Stunning.
Why, well those who have, in the past, receive notification from the PM prior to a Public announcement. But you say that is normal. Hang on I say - JA was still the PM at the time!
So who in the backroom of the functionaries of NZ Civil Service, Labour Party Hierarchy or even the Gov Gen, even Chippy & Gay Boy -
1/- knew what was to happen in advance so arranged a 'farewell gift' OR
2/- because of declining 'trust in the Labour Party & the JA backlash' she was enticed to leave on the promise - " You will get a King's Honour"?
Which in itself, is odd that an ardent Socialist, like JA, would say thank you, how nice.
Please note that Helen Clark has never been Honoured in the same way!
So "she" is in America, I wonder if Daughter & "Husband" are with "her"??
"Since Ardern defined her leadership as being one guided by "experts"..."
That's not really leadership then, isn't it. If that's the case, why not just let the "experts" be in charge then?
Like all the other "leaders" around most of the world, Ardern just stood up there and read the script provided to her and implemented the policies, and severely damaged the country in the process.
The only good thing to come out of the Covid debacle is that it provided a clear opportunity for the public to disabuse themselves of the comforting myths that constituted the way they saw the society they live in and how it is run.
@Madame Blavatsky
I would rather a leader that listens to experts than a leader that listens to no one and thinks they know everything. No one knows everything.
The problem with the Covid pandemic is the 'experts' had no information to go on. Nothing like it had ever happened in the modern, digital word, and nothing like the lockdowns had ever been attempted at that scale. So they weren't experts at all. They couldn't have been. They took a stance early on and held firm on to it refusing to listen to other voices.
But then again thats nothing particularly new. What Jacinda should do now however is acknowledge the wrong moves she made in hindsight. But she won't do that because that requires her humility to be real, not feigned.
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