TO GET an idea of what Keir Starmer’s government will be like, have a look at New Zealand’s Ardern government. What Starmer is doing is exactly what Jacinda Ardern did. It is almost as if Ardern was a rehearsal.

Oil, gas and coal bans led to the closing down of the Marsden Oil Refinery, the only one in New Zealand. This resulted in the importation of refined fuels, at greater cost and with a drop in the quality of that fuel. This caused problems with aviation gas and bitumen, leading to road building issues. While New Zealand has geothermal and hydroelectric power it also relied on fossil fuels to for its largest power station at Huntley. As a result of the bans, Ardern’s government imported dirty coal from Indonesia, resulting in more pollution than home-mined coal, and the coal was delivered by rail at night so the public wouldn’t notice. As the Green Party were working with Labour, they were quiet on the subject.

Overpaying the teachers and nurses but not paying the police wage claim. The Police Commissioner exhibited a greater propensity to politics than policing!

Ardern’s government was soft on crime and so criminal activity spiralled out of control. The courts were encouraged not to incarcerate dangerous and violent criminals and allowances were made for a criminal’s background, particularly if they were Maori. A Maori committing a crime automatically had a 15 per cent reduction in his or her sentence than someone else committing the same crime, as was a presentencing cultural background report which usually found mitigating reasons to reduce sentencing further. It became a huge lawyer industry that the current government has stopped.

All sectors of education suffered under the Ardern regime, with changes to the curriculum reflecting her ideology rather than the traditional teaching. Gender teaching in primary and intermediate school years, a totally revised history curriculum and other areas have suffered. Truancy and bad behaviour expanded dramatically. The adulteration of conventional science teaching with Maori myths, which rightly belong in anthropology subjects, has made a nonsense of those subjects.

Another area was diversity and inclusion. Under Arden’s government there was a push to advance people into senior positions based on ethnicity and sex rather than on ability and merit. We are now paying the price of incompetently run governmental organisations where there has been huge expenditure and very little to show for it. There has also been a massive increase in the numbers of (diverse) civil servants with the same outcomes.

Ardern’s government exaggerated claims about house building but they bought houses off the open market at inflated prices and pushed house prices up beyond the reach of most people. Ardern promised to build 100,000 houses in ten years – the actual figure was 2,300!

They caused racial tensions by pushing indigenous rights above everyone else’s, to the point at which Maori would have 50 per cent of the ruling power for 17 per cent of the population. Most Maori aren’t interested but there is a small cohort of the Maori elite who were supported by Ardern to make undemocratic claims. This was all the more ridiculous because there are no full-blood Maori any more and many of those elite who claim to be Maori are significantly European! As it is, those with Māori ancestry make up about 27 per cent of our MPs. Since the 1860s Maori have had seats reserved for them in parliament. Even when we changed from first past the post voting to MMP (a form of proportional representation) and it was recommended that Maori seats be scrapped, they still have six Maori electorates. So, claims of discrimination against Maori are nonsense. However, Ardern used Maori to disrupt what was essentially a unified society. My comments about Maori are not to be taken as a criticism of Maori but locally they have been atrociously used by Ardern.

She bribed the media by introducing a Journalist Fund (initially to the tune of $55million, or £23million) on condition that they toed the government line, which they did. The fund is set to continue to 2026 so even though we have a change of government we have no change in the line the media pushes because the rules have stayed the same! Ardern has been lauded as a great communicator; she has a degree in communications, and her projected international persona is very different from her domestic one.

The parallels between Starmer and Ardern (a former Blair assistant) are staggeringly similar, although I have mentioned some things that are yet to happen in the UK, but surely will. We now have a right-wing coalition government where two of the party leaders have Maori blood and both are strongly against Maori separatism! The leader of the coalition, Christopher Luxon, would have fitted into the UK Sunak Government with ease.

I sound almost like a conspiracy theorist . . .