By David Seymour

You can’t deliver for New Zealanders if you don’t show humility, and this Government’s arrogance is getting in the way of solving problems and helping people. Jacinda Ardern’s decision to cancel her weekly discussion with Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking joins a long list of increasingly hubristic moves from the Prime Minister and her Government. Together they make up a rap sheet of high-handed, elitist behaviour from a group of Ministers who are showing themselves to be out of touch with the people that put them in the Beehive. Jacinda Ardern let the mask slip and attacked members of the South Auckland COVID-19 cluster, and then ran for cover in the days following to avoid scrutiny from the media. Stuff political columnist Andrea Vance was spot on at the weekend when she summed up the Government’s vaccine rollout as ‘a secretive, sluggish spin-fest,’ with the flow of information ‘tightly controlled and heavily politicised. Meanwhile, the Government used urgency to pass Māori wards legislation it didn’t campaign on. These are laws that are foundational to how we conduct our democracy, but they were sprung on Parliament at short notice and rushed through without proper evaluation.You can’t paint yourself as a paragon of democratic virtue and then not walk the talk – not if you want to stay in favour with New Zealanders. Eventually that behaviour will catch up with you.