For 18 months Jacinda enjoyed a wonderful honeymoon from our political journalists and could do no wrong. Largely that was because she’s a genuinely nice person, impossible to dislike.
But for two months now she and her government have been subject to unrelenting media criticism. Partly that’s a reflection of the media’s long‑established pack‑hunting mentality, but mainly it’s because the criticism is valid and consistent. That is the government’s seeming inability to govern, substituting endless enquiries and investigations for actual action.
With Jacinda this manifests itself with her weird obsession of calling for a bloody “conversation” on every issue arising, in lieu of actual action.
It’s getting worse. Reporting on her meeting with Trump in which incidentally, God massively failed me, ignoring my heartfelt prayer for, in his own words when he meets a new woman, Trump to “grab her by the pussy”, Jacinda was quoted thus; “The idea of continuing a conversation around New Zealand trade relations with the United States was greeted warmly.
It was a conversation around our buyback (guns) … so we had a conversation around what happened in New Zealand.”
Do any of these much vaunted conversations ever get a meaningful result?