National Day of Celebration in NZ

Yep good riddance indeed.
Hopefully the nail in the coffin of any chance of electoral success for the left….. although should never speak too soon.
She hates losing and has a reputation for being a poor loser….. so hopefully she has bailed because writing on the wall.
Anyone want to wager she will be working for the WEF or UN inside 12 months?

I'll be honest. I'm sad to see her go. OH NO, SOMEONE THAT THINKS SHE'S AN OK HUMAN BEING?! HATE!!! RAGE!!!

Edit - Cut myself off.

I'm sad to see her go because women have been happy just to get a seat at the table. Just like Julia Gillard, she gave young women hope that maybe one day the tables will allow not only for a few more female seats. We're still proving on the daily that there's a lot of people who aren't ready for that. Probably take a few more hundred years.

Bit sad is all.


Edit Edit - I didn't say I think she was a good politician or a good Prime Minister, although she $h!ts all over Scomo's run so I think objectively it's safe to say at least she cleared that extraordinarily low bar. Just that I think as a human being she's ok compared to other politicians.
Probably wouldn't sling rocks at other countries PMs when we put people like the happy clapping gremlin on the seat for a decade 😒.

I don't hate her Stealth; she is genuinely caring and empathic. But she is also a die-in-a-ditch socialist, and that isn't my cup of tea. I don't like where collectively her party has taken NZ.
I don't think it will take 100 years for another woman PM in NZ - a number of parties have senior high-performing women in their ranks!! Although I know you were being factitious!
My well-placed mole tells me the reasons she is going is because 1. she is exhausted, 2. she hates losing and can see the writing on the wall and 3. she has lost control of a portion of her caucus.

I actually had to question that myself, bce. I don't know a HUGE amount about her but I did notice that just like most politicians out there, she's very clever. I had to wonder if a part of her knows that the road only gets rougher for anyone in a position of power for most western countries in the next few years.
I think you're right about her not losing. This is a pretty comfortable way for her to not lose. Get out 'by your own hand' and no one's forcing you out because you didn't have the stamina to fight off the agro that most PMs would deal with on the daily anymore.

And as MWT points out, she's able to retire on a pretty penny with a young family to raise and she can relax on the goodwill and comforts of a PM's pension for the rest of her days.

I didn't particularly like Julia Gillard either. But I was listening to her give a speech a while back and she said "I could have been the perfect PM with everyone loving everything I ever did. There would still be a vocal group who wanted me gone because I'm a woman and for no other reason". She was right. It must take a lot to fight that level of disdain day in and day out. I think Ardern was pretty adept at it but largely because Kiwis are just a decent bunch of folks by and large!

If her gender is the reason she is missed, then she deserved to go.

Gillard tried to use gender to justify her existence. It backfired.

Fact is that gender has nothing to do with it. NZ was a beacon of human rights and democracy. It was also an affordable place to live. Under her watch that took a severe beating. She's cut from the same cloth as Daniel Andrews.

Yeah, so imagine how galling it is if you spent so much of your time justifying your existence in a professional space simply because of your gender, that the loss of those particular women is actually something to be disappointed about. It's not the fact that I thought they were brilliant at it. Or not. It's that once you get in that door you have to constantly fight for the seat at the table. 

That's how rough under-representation can be. And we do it to half our country by dint of the fact that they have an innie instead of an outie. So arbitrary and ridiculous. And yet here we are. Whether you think it's sensible or not, it's possible to be disappointed by a lack of representation where it rarely exists. And I suppose difficult to comprehend if you've never experienced it. That's not a judgement. That's me realising that for some folk it might be difficult to understand that even an example that's perceived by some as not a great one is still some kind of representation. For some of us (a whole bleeding lot of us, actually) it's a lifelong experience. For others it's a myth because they've never had it happen to them. 

Like I said, I don't have any particular understanding of her policies because I was too busy watching our own hobgoblin right wing fundy destroy our own country. So it's fair to say that I'm under-qualified to discuss her policies and how they impacted on NZ's political space. I'll happily admit that. But like I said, that's not what's disappointing to me.
It's possible to wish for better examples of representation while still being grateful for the provision of any representation.

After spending a LOT of time dealing with people who're in the inner circles of industry I can tell you one thing that I know for fact rather than just media reporting. Women ARE trying to join parties. More often than not they're being systematically blocked by not only the 'boys club' that exists in middle to upper echelons but by the culture itself.

"If you let us take you off the ticket this year, we'll put you up for this speccy position next year" and then "Oh sorry, that role isn't available anymore" is just as blocking as "No girls allowed". It's just not reported on. And until it's happened to you (or someone that you know) it's unlikely that you'd ever hear about it. Obviously that can happen to anyone. Man or woman. But I do know that the proportion of women that it happens to is far larger than fair-minded people would like to think.

Anyway, back on topic haha. I reckon any pollie whether male or female would be nuts to knock back the chance to draw a shiny pension without having to do any work for it. If you were a NORMAL person you'd probably do otherwise. For sanity if nothing else. But yeah... I can't see anyone kicking a stink about it if they didn't have anything left in the tank to give.

We don't know how long she's been feeling the pinch. I know a lot of folks that I worked with were shocked when I binned it to start a new job. They all assumed I was fat dumb and happy because I didn't say anything to them about planning to get out. She might have been done with it for months or more and finally just decided it was time. Or perhaps she saw the writing on the political wall. Or perhaps she was just a poor loser and wanted to get out before the people of NZ made it not her choice. Who knows. It'll be interesting to see how things change in the coming months over there. Or even IF they change.

From a NZ Prep site;

"If you voted for Ardern to prove you weren't sexist, you have to vote for somebody else next time to prove you aren't an idiot."