This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from a mix of countries I follow personally and countries I think the forum might be interested in. Feel free to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
It's more that the ends to which Ardern was turning the civil service were neatly aligned with the zeitgeist, and she was an international megastar. Ardern had something of a reputation for sitting on a vast hoard of political capital and had enough personal popularity that practical delivery was essentially superfluous. Take Labour's 'Kiwibuild' policy to build state houses, one of the highest priorities of their 2017 platform. The goal was to build 16,000 homes over 4 years. They managed to build... 1000.
Obviously, these failures didn't affect Ardern's popularity (she won the first outright majority government under MMP in 2020), and she continued to enjoy the abbasiyah of a civil service who were being well paid to decolonise Aotearoa, etc. Once she resigned however, straight-white-man Hipkins was left holding the bag. His motivations were always more practical and union-focused rather than ideological. In any case, he obviously could not rely on personal popularity to win the next election. Hence: the eruption of tensions between ministers desperately trying to deliver meaningful results for the electorate and a civil service that had higher loyalties to their cause.
Of course, I'm speaking in generalities. Plenty of good people in Wellington, and pockets of high competence. However, since National has deliberately avoided getting involved in the culture war while out of office, they're therefore, I believe, largely ignorant of how far things have shifted in this regard.
New Zealand has a unicameral house, so I don't expect National will have any difficulty implementing its fiscal agenda - or rather, whatever fiscal agenda emerges after coalition talks with ACT and NZF are concluded. However, as Labour found with Kiwibuild: changing budgets is easy for the party in power, fixing problems is far more difficult.
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