Centrist Publishing arranged for television advertising for the book Jacinda: The Untold Stories; an unauthorised biography by David Cohen which was screened during the Graham Norton show on TVNZ 2, Friday 12th December.
The advertising has galvanised Jacinda’s supporters and got them outraged and calling for complaints to be made to the Broadcasting Standards board such as the example that follows: “for airing a book known for spreading misinformation and creating further division in the country.”
The advertisements which claimed the book had bestseller status under the tagline “The Real Story” aired multiple times during Ardern’s interview with Graham Norton. One commentator even claimed that; “They should be sued for claiming it’s a bestseller.”
Centrist Publishing stated that the advertising was booked through standard commercial processes.
“All television advertising must be approved by the Commercial Approvals Bureau, and the script for this campaign was based on radio advertisements that have been running nationwide since 7 November and cleared prior to airing.
Given the outrage and hostility shown towards this book Jacinda: The Untold Stories I thought it was appropriate to look back at some of the main points of Jacinda’s record as Prime Minister of the Labour Government from her election in 2017 through to her resignation just prior to the 2023 election, to allow us to decide whether the reaction was justified or just another case of blind faith commitment.
Jacinda Ardern, cited child poverty as her reason for entering politics. When she first ran for Prime Minister (2017), she declared climate change was her ‘generation’s nuclear free moment’.
On both of those issues, she failed comprehensively. At the time of her resignation in 2023, all the child poverty statistics were the same or worse and her governments climate change commitments were a sad joke.
I cannot think of a major policy from her election manifesto that was not a failure.
Her Labour government had basically shut down the coal mining industry in New Zealand (supposedly to eliminate the use of fossil fuelled energy) and then sat and watched as we imported millions of tonnes of dirty coal from Indonesia, so that we were able to keep the lights on without saying a word.
New Zealand is sitting on huge coal reserves yet we were importing dirty coal and her government said nothing because it may have shown how stupid the decision was to try to claim the high ground in the name of reaction to the effects of climate change.
She claimed they would make houses more affordable; yet housing costs rose so high that first home owners couldn’t even “hope” to buy let alone actually be able to “afford” to buy, during her tenure.
She promised us 100,000 Kiwi-build homes, but actually only succeeded in sacking the Minister after he failing spectacularly.
She spent over $1 billion on emergency housing, and yet the waiting list for a State house escalated from 5,000 in 2017 to over 27,000 in 2023.
She promised Auckland would get a light rail system from the city centre to the airport and failed to lay even a single centimetre of track during her tenure.
These examples and many others go to show that her Labour government made a bad habit of failure after bold promises, over its terms in office.
In early 2019, Ardern said that she would promote a new ‘economics of kindness’ which was demonstrated shortly afterwards in her first ‘well-being budget’. We all saw the results of that budget (for example it earmarked funds to fix mental health, but her government could not find any projects in the first twelve months, on which to spend the money).
Ardern promised the people of New Zealand that her Labour government would provide the most open and transparent government ever and at one time even stated they were the one source of truth and we should only believe the government.
Overall the truth is not quite so rosy though because when you look at the government’s statistics, on practically every single metric the Labour administration failed.
Child poverty levels rose as did carbon emissions. The gun buy-back scheme implemented after the Christchurch mosque attack was nothing short of an expensive PR disaster that actually achieved very little in real results.
Her Labour government introduced a separate Health system for Maori managed by Maori and with the power of veto over all health board funding throughout New Zealand.
As New Zealanders we have always prided ourselves on being an inclusive multi-racial society. Yet under her Labour Government we started heading down a path of separatism with our society divided by race based on a factually incorrect interpretation of Treaty of Waitangi documentation.
Her government, many times, stated that we have a partnership requirement with Iwi under the Treaty of Waitangi but in actual fact this was just another lie from her government.
The claims of a partnership between Maori and the Crown are not supported by any of the documentation of the Treaty although this latter-day reinterpretation of the Treaty was simply stated as a fact, without any acknowledgement that the assertion was hotly contested, and is flatly contradicted by many of the speeches recorded by Colenso in writing at the time (on 5 February 1840) and flatly contradicted also by speeches made by numerous chiefs at Kohimarama in 1860.
A starting point to consider in relation to the question of a partnership would be to consider and understand the wise words of a prominent leader respected by Pakeha & Maori alike.
‘The Hon Sir Apirana Ngata -M.A. LLB. LIT.D’
(THE TREATY OF WAITANGI - an explanation published in 1922)
The acclaimed Maori Leader Sir Apirana Ngata explains the intent in the pages of this book, the "Treaty of Waitangi". He concludes with the words: "The Treaty made the one law for the Maori and Pakeha. If you think these things are wrong and bad then blame our ancestors who gave away their rights in the days when they were powerful".
In 2021 we celebrated the 40th anniversary of the 1981 South African Springbok tour of New Zealand, an event that deeply divided our nation.
More than 150,000 people took to the streets to protest against sporting contact with South Africa, a country that defined and divided its people by race/colour through a formal system of Apartheid established in 1948.
There were many protests over the years demanding that New Zealand stop all sporting contact with South Africa (particularly Rugby) until apartheid was abandoned.
In 1981 the then Prime Minister Rob Muldoon, invited the Springboks back and for two months New Zealand became a nation at war with itself.
But obviously that meant nothing to her government as they looked to implement this same odious race based system of apartheid into New Zealand.
The Labour Government under Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern effectively elevated Maori (12.6% of the total population in the 2018 census) to the status of a ruling class through their interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi giving Maori a partnership/co-governance role.
Under this separatist path set out by Jacinda Ardern and her Labour government New Zealand increasingly became an apartheid nation, where those claiming Maori heritage were given superior rights over everyone else.
On the basis of false assumptions and fabrications around the Treaty of Waitangi, democracy was being sacrificed, and New Zealand returned to tribal rule.
Another claimed justification for making these race based decisions to elevate Maori to a ruling class is NZ’s obligations after the signing of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
The Labour government commissioned a report which Ardern claimed was about developing a strategy to fulfil our obligations under that declaration. She stated that the report titled “He Puapua” was an advisory document but this was at best a disingenuous statement as parts of that document had already been enacted and as such it was the beginning of division of our country based on race (Apartheid any way you look at it).
Part of the He Puapua report defined the pathway to achieve Maori sovereignty by 2040 and the implementation of parts of that report which was been in secret without any public referendum or mandate other than victory in an election would not stand up to public scrutiny.
The He Puapua report was kept secret even from her coalition partner (New Zealand First) before the 2020 election and was eventually only released after a full copy was leaked to news media outlets and published. This being another example of Ardern’s most open and transparent government at work!
The same Open and Transparent Government that set up the $55 million “Public Interest Journalism Fund”. We were told was to help the media deal with the effects of Covid, but like lots of other decisions, the devil was in the detail.
When it was analysed it could plainly be seen that this was another prop under her government’s attempts to divide New Zealand on the basis of race, given the requirements for recipients to promote the government’s position in regard to their interpretation of the Treaty documents.
One of the reasons for this claim is that under condition three, all fund recipients were required to “Actively promote the principles of Partnership, Participation and Active Protection under Te Tiriti o Waitangi acknowledging Māori as a Te Tiriti partner”.
The Labour government assumed a large range of powers and made a lot of decisions that were being claimed to have been required in response to the coronavirus pandemic but in fact this claim is very hard to justify, especially when you look at the government’s actions since the 2020 election, in regard to the pandemic and our responses to it.
With those powers they instituted the lockdowns on the basis of stopping the spread of Covid 19 and protecting our health. We were told that they had gone early and gone fast and that it was all going to prevent the overloading of our hospitals and their ICU capacities.
We were told that the health system did not have the capacity to handle a large increase in the numbers that would be presenting to ICU if we did not have the lockdowns in place and while this in itself may have been quite true, the government failed to take action to ensure that the health system was upgraded to cope with the expected demand.
No in fact they carried on making ridiculous decisions that can only be seen as evidence that collectively the government was totally out of its depth in dealing with the pandemic and its outcomes.
Jacinda Ardern made many statements since taking over office as Prime Minister and was very rarely challenged on them or asked to explain what she actually meant when she made these claims.
Some examples of her government’s openness, transparency and “one source of truth”:
The Prime Minister told us that Kiwis would not be penalised if they chose not to vaccinate, yet that is exactly what she did. And these are only a few of the U-turns that her government made.
Thanks to co-governance in education, we saw a change in the history curriculum, with our children are being indoctrinated with a Maori worldview that denied much of our European history - and ignored many of the pioneers who helped build this nation.
In education school truancy was at record levels and New Zealand was leading the world in declining standards with more than 40 percent of school leavers unable to read and write properly. Yet it was a priority for her government to produce a sanitised view of New Zealand history that was acceptable to Maori.
Even graduating students at our tertiary institutions were forced to submit to compulsory Maori cultural propaganda in order to receive their qualifications.
The democratic rights of local communities to challenge the establishment of Maori wards in local government, was abolished retrospectively.
The greatest act of shame that Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Government must be held accountable for was the way in which they divided our nation by race.
But when we consider the Labour government as a whole taken from their 2017 election win, there have been so many Ministers gone from government for failing to uphold the rules of the parliament for various reasons that it is hard to remember all of them.
It seemed to have started just before the 2017 election when Andrew Little lost the leaders role to Jacinda Ardern and carried on since then with regularity. We have seen the following go:
Phil Twyford; Clare Curran; Meka Whaitiri; David Clark; Louisa Wall; Poto Williams; Stuart Nash; Guarav Sharma; Michael Wood; Kiri Allan.
And of course there was Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern herself (replaced by Chris Hipkins in January 2023), who resigned stating that she did not have enough in the tank to go another round.
All together these statistics make for sorry reading that seems to show a government in which the wheels fell off. A government that was light on talent and ability and also light on the need to follow parliamentary rules.
The book Jacinda: The Untold Stories; an unauthorised biography was written by David Cohen and when you compare this to Jacinda’s book: A Different Kind of Power you see many differences.
Taking all of the above into account it is no surprise that the timing of this advertising coming during Jacinda Ardern’s appearance on the Graham Norton show should generate a large response from her sycophants and dedicated labour party followers.
Overall; the objections appear to relate to the contextual placement and timing of the advertising, rather than their accuracy or regulatory approval and the publishers have said that they will respond appropriately to any formal complaints.
In my opinion the outrageous and hostile reactions to this advertising were over the top and certainly not justified in light of the above.
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By Andy Loader, Poke the Bear