Politics & Power Quote by Jim Bolger

Bolger’s sentence has the polite upholstery of a veteran statesman, but it’s doing a lot of work. “Heightened” and “somewhat unusual” are softeners that let him name instability without sounding alarmist. It’s the diplomatic equivalent of saying the kitchen smells like smoke while keeping your voice calm so nobody panics. The phrasing signals a caretaker’s instinct: acknowledge the temperature, refuse the melodrama, keep the public inside the bounds of “normal.”

The real tell is how he locates the problem: not New Zealand’s politics, but “politics and polling around the countries that New Zealanders take close interest in.” That’s a small nation’s geopolitical self-awareness compressed into one clause. New Zealand watches bigger democracies as weather systems; if the U.S., the U.K., or Australia are turbulent, the pressure changes travel. By foregrounding “polling,” Bolger also hints at a modern pathology: politics reduced to perpetual measurement, governments and oppositions alike trapped in the nervous feedback loop of approval ratings, swing voters, and algorithmic attention.

The intent, then, is both reassurance and warning. He’s telling New Zealanders: the instability you’re sensing isn’t imagined, and it isn’t isolated; it’s part of a wider pattern in the places you benchmark against. The subtext is strategic humility. New Zealand can’t control those external currents, but it can control its response - resist importing the panic, the polarization, the poll-driven short-termism. Coming from Bolger, a leader associated with an earlier, more institution-trusting era, the line reads like a quiet plea for steadiness amid other countries’ political storms.