In a Wednesday morning announcement, Leftist New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern stated that she is officially resigning from her position because she does not have desire or stamina to attempt to secure her re-election.
“I’m leaving, because with such a privileged role comes responsibility,” she stated. “The responsibility to know when you are the right person to lead and also when you are not. I know what this job takes. And I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice. It’s that simple.”
Her current term is slated to end on the 7th of February and a new election should take place on the 14th of October.
Ardern was known for attempting to suppress the freedoms of people throughout her country while in office, including insanely draconian pandemic lockdowns, advocating for regulating speech online, and gun bans.
Ardern stood in such fringe positions on the pandemic that she signed off on a nationwide lockdown due to a single case that had been officially reported in the country. “Don’t talk to your neighbors,” she stated at that time. “Please keep to your bubble.”
At 42 years old, Ardern also quickly tried to seize the moment of political opportunity in the wake of a shooting that took place in Australia a number of years ago when she officially announced that the country would ban all semi-automatic long guns and would make everyone in the country hand the guns over to the government. The buyback program for New Zealand was an abject failure.
Ardern was issued some fairly strong condemnation after she compared online speech to an actual weapon of war throughout a speech given at the United Nations back in September.
“As leaders, we are rightly concerned that even those most light-touch approaches to disinformation could be misinterpreted as being hostile to the values of free speech we value so highly,” she stated. “But while I cannot tell you today what the answer is to this challenge, I can say with complete certainty that we cannot ignore it. To do so poses an equal threat to the norms we all value.”
“After all, how do you successfully end a war if people are led to believe the reason for its existence is not only legal but noble?” she went on. “How do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists?”
“The weapons may be different but the goals of those who perpetuate them is often the same: To cause chaos and reduce the ability of others to defend themselves, to disband communities, to collapse the collective strength of countries who work together,” she concluded. “But we have an opportunity here to ensure that these particular weapons of war do not become an established part of warfare.”
