Mike Hosking: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's pay cut frustration is nonsense

COMMENT:

Spare a thought for Jacinda Ardern this morning. She's frustrated. She's frustrated she is still earning half a million dollars, and that her pay cut hasn't come through.

And the virtue-signalling nonsense she instigated two months ago is yet another example of words having led to exactly nothing.

The real frustration, of course, is that she has been caught out.

She seems to me to get caught out a lot. She got caught out on Monday when we asked her about Rob Fyfe.

She'd cold-shouldered Fyfe by not even acknowledging his letter of his return to his home having volunteered to work for her for the past two months.

There is no need for her to be frustrated over her non pay cut. She could have got the Remuneration Authority to move more quickly (sort of like hundreds of employers did to hundreds of thousands of workers all over the country).

Or she could have front-footed it and said, "look, I had no idea this was so hard". At which point someone like me would have asked, why not? And if you didn't, why didn't you check it before you got yourself another headline with yet another vacuous promise?

Anyway, she could have said, "I had no idea it was so hard, so in the meantime I'm donating the money to charity or putting it aside to deposit it as a lump sum."

Or, "I've told the authority to back date it." Or "I'm reviewing the authority to find out why it's so useless." Or anything other than, yet again, what's happened, which is the NZ Herald once again busting her for spouting a lot of frippery that goes nowhere.

What makes this particularly egregious is I said at the time it was a bunch of virtue-signalling nonsense given, unless you were directly affected by Covid, or unless your job was in jeopardy, there was no point in taking a pay cut because it solved nothing.

It saved nothing, it did nothing, it changed nothing. So all that was left was it made you look like you cared.

She's into that stuff. She wants you to like her, and she wants you to think she's cool and on your side. In that is the deception. In intent she may well be genuine, in delivery she is nothing of the sort.

And this embarrassment is her to a "T". She made her announcement, got her headline, and she moved on. The details were inconsequential, until, of course, they came and bit her.

At which point we have to roll out the old "I'm frustrated" line. "Not my fault, nothing to see here. All I want to do is the right thing by everyone."

Saying stuff that leads nowhere is superficial, and in this case supercilious as well.

You can only play this trick so often before the Empress would appear to have no clothes.