The question was simple and direct:
“Rate Jacinda Ardern’s leadership during the Covid pandemic.”
The options were:
Great in parts
Excellent
Awful
Lacking in areas
Average
The options were:
Great in parts
Excellent
Awful
Lacking in areas
Average
Click to view
Over 49,000 people responded, and the results speak for themselves. A clear majority of 43 percent rated her leadership as awful. That isn’t a fringe opinion, it’s a roar from a public that still feels bruised and betrayed. This wasn't a close result or a statistical fluke. This was a damning indictment of a Prime Minister whose pandemic policies were dressed up as compassion while they inflicted real, lasting damage. Her decisions are the reasons why people are dead.
What’s disturbing is that 32 percent still rated her leadership as excellent. That number says more about the power of media spin and celebrity-style politics than it does about actual governance. Under Ardern’s rule, people were locked out of their own country and left begging for a spot in the MIQ lottery. Families couldn’t bury their loved ones. People lost their jobs over vaccine mandates. Mental health collapsed. Small businesses were suffocated while big corporations were padded with government cheques.
Ardern didn’t lead with grace. She ruled with a clenched fist, wrapped in the velvet glove of paid PR fluff and fake kindness. “Be kind” became a mantra used to silence dissent. Anyone who dared question her was branded a conspiracy theorist or worse. It was not leadership. It was control, and it came with a horse-tooth smile so it fooled the international press.
Now, she's reportedly back in New Zealand. You’d think after being away and collecting awards for her “service,” she might front up and listen to those she hurt. Instead, social media has lit up with people calling for accountability. They haven’t forgotten being told they couldn't visit dying family members, or the emotional toll of being isolated for months on end while the government patted itself on the back.
Last month I ran my own poll on X. The question was blunt:
“Who would you rather have over for dinner, Jacinda Ardern or Adolf Hitler?”
The result was shocking to some, but not to those who lived through her decisions. A majority of respondents said they would rather dine with Hitler. It was a disturbing outcome, but one that reflects how intensely people resent her legacy. To many, Ardern didn’t just make hard calls. She made cold ones. And she showed no real remorse for the suffering that followed.
She is in my opinion, the most hated New Zealander of all time.
Matua Kahurangi is just a bloke sharing thoughts on New Zealand and the world beyond. No fluff, just honest takes. He blogs on https://matuakahurangi.com/ where this article was sourced.
18 comments:
She's a walking advertisement for hypocrisy!
Yep, confirming what most of NZ knew.
I listened to about 2 minutes of Ian Taylors letter being analysed on "The Platform" then switched off. I just never agreed that Ardern was expected to, or ever intended to, end "child poverdy." I never voted for her or saw anything extraordinary in her. She didn't have a legacy and it was New Zealand she left in ruins. A legacy denotes something positive. She used to flap her arms about in parliament and used any learned communication techniques she could muster. However, she said nothing of value. It's such a shame that politicians have this great platform to use but hardly any use it wisely.
Last paragraph is 100% correct
Hmm, in that survey, whether we agree with them or not, it seems 45% rated her above the central "awful" rating. We have to be careful with statistics and the questions that we pose to get them. That aside, is this proof positive that brainwashing has worked? As for dining with JA or AH, well the latter would probably be far more interesting than the Marxist shill - just don't get on his wrong side ....
“What’s disturbing is that 32 percent still rated her leadership as excellent”.
Is this the lucky percentage that got the exemption and/or the heads up about the safe and effective”?
Ah, the loyal 32% — the kind who’d applaud a house fire because it was lit with scented candles and came with a platitude on kindness & empathy.
While the rest of the country counts the cost in suicides, bankruptcies, and kids locked out of classrooms for years, this crowd is still swooning over how “well-spoken” she was while wrecking the place.
It’s deadly impressive — watching a third of the population confuse catastrophic leadership with compassion just because it came wrapped in a warm PR filter.
Reality collapsed, but hey, at least the PM looked caring while she torched the village.
the media whore, who bought the media!!!!
Aargh, I have actually survived meeting Ardern; I guess I may have survived meeting Matua K, but I wouldn't know.... As for the poll, well, readers of the article would be coming to it as pro- or anti-Ardern: otherwise they'd not be likely to be reading it. (I didn't, but was interested in the poll once I'd heard about that.). A representative sampling would get more people in the more neutral categories. I think the percentages of the general population who think Ardern's performance in the pandemic either excellent or awful are a minority.
She's yesterday''s news and I wouldn't waste my time or money on her book; cross the street to see her, nor certainly do that basic bodily relief function if she was on fire.. She wrecked our communidy with her neo-Marxist ideologies, and did nothing for her self-acclaimed goal, to reduce child poverdy.
That said, our current PM is not much better. He is entirely forgettable and a repugnant invertebrate for other reasons. Completely blind, deaf, and dumb to what's going on here at home but, like Jacinda, on a mission for personal aggrandisement in the form of a gong - all the while, Rome burns.
Not a big Ardern fan, but this is way over the top. Just lighten up with the rhetoric and calm down a little.
A right royal presstitute
I think the poll results reflect how divisive the Labour party policies were during that period. There isn’t a lot of middle ground as a result. Even with 89k respondents now the results are the same with few in the middle.
A honest poll on stuff, the wonders will never cease 🤔
I do not condemn her for the Covid handlin;. it was unknown territory. We avoided a repeat of 1919 and the convoys of coffin trucks, packed crematoium as in USA, Italy etc. It was by no means all doddery elderly who died. We have family connections with senior medicos in USA. They told of multiple dying patients begging for the (too late) vaccine. What I cannot forgive her for is the financial mismanagement and the blatant support for maorification and political takeover by maori. And irresponsible immigration policy. The reverence applied to her overseas is absurd. Although she has become a good advert for what the female appearance grooming industry can acheive.i do not envy her life back in NZ, althogh she is probably safe from maori nutters, a serious worry for any who dare question the maori takeover.
True to its biased background, Stuff’s so-called poll demonstrates its bias.
There is only one negative option - Awful. All the others are positive to at least some degree.
There should be a continuum from wholly positive through to wholly negative. That’s how a professional researcher would develop a questionnaire.
Not so Stuff. They were doubtless hoping the number of kind-of-positive options would outweigh the negative.
An observation about Jacindamania and its consequences: It occurs to me that the best way for an elector to regard any government should be a mixture of cynicism, scepticism, disbelief and distrust. That way you won’t be disappointed.
One positive in this is that we at least seem to be returning to that with the current government.
I think it's more that people reading the piece would have a strong view either way on Ardern. It's a self-selected sample of the population.
"A clear majority of 43 percent rated her leadership as awful. That isn’t a fringe opinion..."
What a misinformed comment. All it proves is that 43% of 49,000 people out of a population of 5 million have a chip on their shoulder about Adern. It's a bit Trumpian to say that represents "a damning indictment". Stuff set up a completely unscientific poll with a highly emotive question which cannot possibly be used to impute anything about the views of the New Zealand population at large. It's unscientific because it breaks the first rule of statistical sampling, namely that the sample must be randomly selected. Self-selection by people who read Stuff and just happen to be attracted to an piece by Taylor is light years away from being random. Which means no credibility can be given to the result at the national level. There were plenty of proper polls conducted at the time that overwhelmingly approved of the Government's managing of the pandemic.
Oh and by the way, perhaps Kahurangi can explain the basis for his statement "Her decisions are the reasons why people are dead". Which people would that be? Seems odd given that a paper published in October 2023 in the New Zealand Medical Journal wrote that if New Zealand had the same mortality rate as the United States, around 20,000 more people would have died. So somebody must have been doing something right considering how lightly we got off.
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