Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Today it's Jacinda Ardern

Every day of late I am having to write posts correcting misinformation put about by journalists. For a change, today it's a politician. Jacinda Ardern  has sprung to life with a very weak criticism of Bill English containing this emotive assertion (she must have been reading the NZ Herald):

"In the meantime the number of young Kiwis not in education, work or training continues to soar."

Here are the NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) rates for 18-24 year-olds for the last 9 quarters ending with September 2012:

 
12.9
13.2
14.3
12.8
12.4
13.1
13.5
13.1
13.4


Any line that plotted those percentages couldn't possibly be honestly described as "continuing to soar".

I don't rate Ardern. This isn't the first time I've pointed out her incompetence. Labour needs to get a better spokesperson into that job for what could be National's most vulnerable portfolio this year. Then again, have they got anyone more capable?

4 comments:

Johnny said...

This isn't "incompetence". It is straight out lying, something that she, her breed, and her age group have no compunction against.

Calling it "incompetence" is unlike you Lindsay, in that it is a sop to political correctness.

Lindsay Mitchell said...

I rarely accuse anyone of lying because I'm not inside their head. She is incompetent because she made a claim that wasn't true. But she may have made it believing it to be.

Anonymous said...

Re: her age group -they often have a poor command of english, largely due to an inferior education -no lessons in how to use a dictionary, a lack of grammar, comprehension, advanced reading etc, combined with a zero correction policy by teachers and the "anything goes" policy of modern public schools have produced this permanently stunted generation. Jacinda probably thinks that "soars" means "maybe increasing" but nowadays you are not obliged to use the right word when expressing yourself as it is the reader's responsibility to "understand" what the person is trying to say.

Anonymous said...

I agree with anonymous.

Ardern is a poster-child for our PC-infested "never-correct-the-children" education system.