ROBERT MacCULLOCH: What's Eating Ardern? Linking NZ's First Female Finance Minister Ruth Richardson's budget to her neighbor's suicide 30 years ago is just awful

Jacinda Ardern's international PR strategy is being unleashed. She's working on becoming a Great Ambassador for Herself and a Terrible Ambassador for NZ. The more she puts her good self up, the more she pulls NZ down and makes her fellow Kiwis look bad. Have you heard Helen Clark or John Key - our former Prime Ministers - upon retirement, get stuck into other Kiwis on the world stage? Not so Ardern.

Her recent address in Bologna targeted NZ's first female Finance Minister, Ruth Richardson. Ardern said Richardson's "Mother of All Budgets came out", when she was 11 years old, cutting public spending. "I even recall seeing a cartoon as a child depicting the then-Minister of Finance [Richardson] standing over a large cauldron of soup with a child begging for more". Of the "impact on people", Ardern recalls "the spread of illnesses associated with poverty .. I remember a neighbor's son taking his own life" (at 1 hour 43 mins into the video below). Ardern said Kiwis back then - of which I was one - called those on benefits "dole bludgers" and spoke of an "Asian invasion".

In this dark story of our mean past, it wasn't just Ruth who made us beggars, life not worth living & who spread plague. She had accomplices - Orks from Middle Earth with names like Richard Prebble & Roger Douglas. Apparently they deployed "fear" to do their dirty work. Stoking fear is not a thing Ardern would dream of doing herself, of course. She'd never tell 1.6 million Aucklanders that thousands & thousands of us would die, die, die - even though most of us were already vaccinated including all of the vulnerable ones - unless we did an almost 4 month lock-down in late 2021, the cause of today's cost-of-living crisis. Pity she put us last in the queue for the vaccine.

Why would an Italian audience even want to hear how someone called Ruth did a budget 30 years ago which somehow was linked to Jacinda's neighbor's son taking their life in Morrinsville? Ardern claimed high unemployment & debt in NZ in the 1980s to early 1990s arose from reforms that made us more "open" & less regulated. She conveniently forgot to mention the oil price shocks - and Foreign Exchange crisis caused by then PM Rob Muldoon - which came before.

What was Ruth's legacy? When she started as Finance Minister in the early 1990s public debt was 40-50% of GDP. It subsequently fell over the next decade to less than 10%, until Ardern ramped debt back up to pre-Ruth 1990 levels, paying for everything during the pandemic on borrowed money (see below). She could only do so because of Prebble-Douglas-Richardson's championing of fiscal responsibility in prior years.

The Italians I know who sat through Ardern's speech were quietly wishing those types would come to Italy to fix their crippled economy, which is afflicted by overwhelming debt & red-tape.

At least Ardern can now start writing more shallow, dinky self-serving PR stories from Harvard, building a narrative that Nicola Willis is the new Ruth Richardson. It really is that pathetic.

Sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnnCdGyvvNE

Robert MacCulloch holds the Matthew S. Abel Chair of Macroeconomics at Auckland University. Rob blogs at Down To Earth Kiwi