The Personality
Never second-guess that Jacinda Ardern best defined her premiership as an excellent communicator. Even before she took over the leadership, she was a media darling, and she instantly won strong media attention to Labour when she took over. She parlayed that into effectively making the case for the importance of kindness in politics and other causes, like maintaining a glowing stature on the international stage. That cut-through dissipated in the past few years, but the fatigue of the COVID years suggests that is only partly her fault.
Insofar as I would criticise her here, it is for how the bland politician-speak of deflections and dismissal quickly lose people: in 2017 she claimed in the debates that a successful politician doesn’t need to lie, and that was the first of many half-truths that gradually eroded credibility. Her government did have many valid excuses for the difficulties they faced, but by never loudly and proudly taking responsibility, admitting fault, and levelling with people when it was tough to do so, the extent to which she was totally believed on all matters fell in the long run.
Above all, what she demonstrated is that empathy is important. Wayne Brown. Wayne Brown Wayne Brown Wayne Brown. I don’t need to elaborate any further on what an empathy deficit looks like. Instead, I want to add to the chorus of voices who have spoken positively about her leadership. People in times of crisis need physical resources and assistance, and there is often a pressing demand for legislation and other government action, but people are people. Whoever we are and whatever conditions we are put within, we tend to long for comfort, reassurance, and direction. She provided this inarguably better than any other Prime Minister in our history, moving effortlessly into 21st century communications. That obvious aroha is priceless.
Having gone back and forth over the years, I think I have now settled on the verdict that Jacinda, on the balance, was an earnest, honest person after all. She told her fair share of lies in the name of political expediency, but she was not devoured by hunger for power, presenting a false face to the world et cetera - all the worst things we suspect the powerful of. John Key was relatively indifferent, making popularity the end goal. Helen Clark went well offside on issues like the foreshore and seabed. PMs from further back turned the country upside down. Ardern has no such existential marks against her. She never laid the groundwork to attempt to take the leadership, and interviews from the time suggest she would likely have taken a step back and focused on starting a family if not for the hot potato Andrew Little dropped in her lap.
She took on the responsibility when needed to, and still pursued her own family she desired to support, prioritising them in the end over the country as much as she could. She clearly poured herself into the work she did, as the “vibes” screamed in recent years from her haggard face to persistent rumours about her resignation. And the simple fact that she was so willing to open her heart to those suffering and go to them in their time of need, not for the gain of herself or their government, but because they needed it. I think how unlikely most politicians would be to really give that their all is often overlooked.
From the start, Ardern honestly tried, in her conduct and in the principles she espoused, to create norm shifts in this country for the better: hard, intangible work for anybody, let alone polarising politicians. She had a good influence on many fronts outside her own backyard, such as relatively peacefully inaugurating a soft “woke” era in New Zealand (e.g companies openly embracing diversity, especially Tiriti commitments; massive normalisation for rainbow people, under a gay deputy PM no less). She stayed true to her pledge to avoid negative politics, and the rest of Labour did not compensate by transforming into vicious attack dogs. In polarising times, she was not a driver - she was a hand extended, and often slapped away.
On those matters very pertinent to her - the distinct and worse treatment of women in politics - the results were ultimately discouraging. She tried her best, and the country gave her far from her best in return. You can absolutely hate her and think that she is driving your business or your farm into ruin or running hard-working people out of jobs, and you can judge her for those policy matters. Not with rancid insinuations and statements so tied to her existence as a woman: her looks, her motherhood, tropes handed down through generations of the silly little girl or the plotting Lady Macbeth of the UN 2030 Agenda. Needless to say, her treatment often did not clear this bar.
That is discouraging for the future generations of female difference-makers she had hoped to inspire, even though, on the balance, she probably has had the net positive effect she set out to create. Ardern is an excellent role model to women - at once kind and goodhearted, and totally in control of the life she has led. As she retreats into private life, still surrounded by security and hounded by conspiracy theorists, I pray at least her and her daughter can live optimistically. Nobody else has had to spend so much time in their farewell speech, their one chance to forsake duty and focus on themselves, talking about security services and crackpot peddlers, and I hope no one else does again. It was not a fair go and it reverberated across many more people than the one at the top a lot of the haters meant to to hit.
The Policy
Ardern’s best was responding to crises, and this was usually driven far more by her personal responses than the accompanying policy. It is worth saying, however, that claims her initial COVID response deferred to the experts are largely ungenerous to her. Health bodies around the world, including here, were mostly sluggish at first in their assessment of COVID, and not really set up to properly process the situation. She appears chiefly responsible for the captain’s call that ensured hundreds of New Zealanders are still alive today, who would have died under just about any other Prime Minister. Hundreds of people who wake up every morning for a new day. Add on the myriad benefits for millions of us from weathering the COVID storm so well, and she deserves enormous and lasting historical credit for this.
Having given her so much praise, I’m promptly moving on to hit on this communication bugbear again. However good she was at communicating values or feelings, Labour have lost practically every policy argument over the past half-dozen years, so even as they have won votes and entered power, their public support and their space to move has barely changed from Opposition. In many cases, they chose not to even try to make the argument, forgoing action on issues like capital gains tax.
The argument for this that you never hear from the politicians, but from campaign managers and other supporters, is that ambitious, left-wing agendas are unelectable since the 80s. This cynical view argues that, because campaigns like Corbyn, Sanders and Cunliffe never win, then the best Labour can do is nix their most left-wing positions, get into power on centrism, try to lock in incremental benefits like raising benefits over time, and hang on as long as they can to deny right-wing parties power for as much time as possible.
I am sympathetic to this line of argument, and may discuss it more elsewhere, but I see two problems. One is cost disease socialism - parking that for now, but if you want an explanation, pop over to my fav articles of 2023 and find Danyl Maclauchlan’s essays. The other is more pertinent here in this Ardern-specific retrospective, and that it’s not clear to me that there’s a clear line between doing less stuff and winning versus losing elections.
The first reason for this is the nature of electoral margins. You can drop some centre voters and still get over the line in essentially similar conditions in many cases. Capital gains tax, for how essential a step it seems in New Zealand - an economy strapped to a housing market - was probably not a binary election winner/loser. If Labour supported a capital gains tax in 2020, they would probably need to govern in coalition with the Greens, but that government would be 95% the same.
The other, however, is that centre voters don’t want nothing to happen. Yes, in many ways their views often amount to this (i.e caring about issues without accepting any big changes to their living conditions), but they are not automatically opposed to any initiative to better conditions. Cynical restraint on policy is therefore an erosive approach in the long run because not just with the left, but with the centrists, it becomes unclear what they stand for.
To the average voter, who isn’t constantly calculating where every party sits on a left-right scale, Labour don’t look like a nicer National - they just look clueless and dead in the water. That is what they look like coming up to this election, and I’ll share sometime why I think Hipkins going so far down this path has been a major detriment to the party.
So, Ardern let big decisions languish and sidestepped them for no real gain, most egregiously with the cannabis referendum result coming down to an edge that might well have been decided by her strong personal advocacy. What big policy there has been under the Ardern premiership is a bizarre focus on centralisation. I’ve discussed that in Labour’s Spent, but I think it’s just worth adding that it’s never, ever been clear in the slightest how this aligns with Ardern’s political brand. This is not what kindness looks like; it’s not inherently opposed to it, but they have nothing whatsoever in common.
What could the politics of kindness look like? Left-wing commentators usually use this as an opportunity to unfurl a policy wishlist, but I’m more interested here in exploring what aligns with Ardern’s value set than what might be most desirable. Kindness looks like decentralising away from a Wellington bureaucracy, towards local bodies in touch with the everyday struggles with people. Kindness looks like redressing injustice, be it what the government has done well with apologies and investigations from the Dawn Raids to abuse in state care, to better land and settlements policy, to a clear commitment to equality of opportunity rather than just topping up poor paychecks and payments (a worthwhile cause of its own, to be sure).
Kindness looks like centering human value over economic value. I’m not simply saying this to deride capitalism, but in the sense that Ardern could have directed her government to abandon a focus on the economic costs of poverty and welfare, and instead prioritise trying to humanise low-income people to middle-income people, and bridge the everyday concerns of the one to the other to close the perception gap on how similar we are. However effective or hopeless, however condescending or patronising, this would make more sense based on what she has told us than what she has given us.
Ironically, if you assess the big policy initiatives of the government by these rubrics, then the most kind result probably comes out as…co-governance?! (Whatever that means - here’s an excellent read on the matter.) Ironic because, outside of transitory conditions like the cost of living crisis, the most prolific Opposition attack lines have been on co-governance. A National government may well continue these policies in some form, but the amount of vitriol that has risen in recent years, and the unacceptability dawning now of publicly embracing co-governance in government, demonstrates how poor Ardern has been at connecting the narratives she so effectively espoused on a personal level to her policy initiatives. That has crippled the ability of Labour’s policies to either win votes, or to last long enough to make a big impact. No alternative in her shoes could have done any better of a job, but she hasn’t set the party in good stead to bring forward the next generation who can.
The Power
Ardern’s Labour government has been good, in a vacuum, at building “power” - whether you want to call it political capital, dominance of Parliament, ability to exercise the state in times of crisis, whatever. However, this is largely an irrelevant goal in light of the ebb and flow of events. Governments will suddenly be called on to deal with things they could not possibly anticipate, and that will change the status quo in unpredictable ways; there’s no waiting for the perfect moment to move forward. Labour’s power has largely ebbed away by now, with little to show for it.
In keeping with my wish above that Ardern had done more in line with her philosophy, I think that political power is like a muscle. You can’t get stronger or fitter by sitting on the couch, waiting for just the right time to hit Simon Bridges in the face. (Sorry, Sime.) You have to get out in the real world and regularly exercise it in order to maintain that power. For instance, that could look like ensuring that incremental, small-scale policies are highlighted, targeted, and force ministers to connect with the everyday functions of their ministries and the outside world.
Now, as a result of their patience waiting for the perfect moment that would never come, Labour are on track to lose power within just six years, underperforming the last two governments. For Ardern, personally, I am annoyed that for all of the analysis of her communication skills, we never got much assessment of her own actual competency at running Cabinet or the other, internal responsibilities of government. Of course, the Prime Minister doesn’t manage much in the way of portfolios directly, but leadership style (be it about consensus or top-down) can be very informative and important.
Perhaps Ardern, as a “beltway baby” emblematic of a trend of huge concern to me - political leaders coming from within an exclusively political employment bubble - was largely responsible for the inability of the government to execute. I’m disinclined to this view because of how well she performed when crises pushed her front and centre, and because with the cards she was dealt in her caucus, it’s unclear what more she could have done. You certainly cannot fault her intelligence and it was ridiculous for anybody to ever try: she was always across her briefs in rapidly changing situations once she got to the Prime Minister’s office, working the long hours necessary for it.
She never seemed to stumble around how the political world functioned, and it remains an irritant that she was peppered with questions about "inexperience" after nine years in Parliament, while Chris Luxon - who, yes, ran an airline - is constantly setting his feet wrong after just three years in Parliament, and you barely hear a whisper about experience despite the obvious links between the two, as a latter-day David Shearer.
What we can say is that Ardern appears to have kept enormously tight discipline since she took over, maintaining Andrew Little’s good work in getting the party back together. The government has avoided much leaking, there has been next to zero factional warfare over policy priorities, and there have been no signs whatsoever of personal ambition or undermining others outside perhaps David Clark and, more recently, Nanaia Mahuta. Both got swiftly demoted for their troubles.
These are encouraging signs, reinforced by a clean and quick handover of power, that Labour will hold together under new leadership. There should be no doubt, however, that Labour is poorer to have lost her. With her effective leadership and refreshing clarity, she was the best of them, and she has left without enough done towards Labour’s core goals. If she cannot manage them, nobody can.
The End
What has she left us with? She has left us with warnings and concerns about hatred and polarisation in New Zealand that require prompt and direct address, not just, as I fear, being ignored and smoothed over when the tension dies down after this election. She has left all of us, especially those directly and hugely affected by crisis, with full hearts where we might be hurting more. We may feel disappointed or failed in some way, but many of us are relieved that at least she was there for it. Good luck for the rest of her life.
I have always been defensive of Jacinda Ardern, which is not really surprising; I latch onto the hills I'm dying on easily, regardless of how much sense they make, and tend to be most easily mobilised by ugly rhetoric against someone, especially when it seems so at odds with their mild-mannered demeanour or out of touch with the realities of the political context. New Zealand absolutely can stand to be critical - she chose to be our Prime Minister and we can lambast her in hindsight if we so wish; the hokey “she’ll be right”ness I love about our country doesn’t prevent that. Whatever conclusion we reach on the huge problems with her government, New Zealand best benefits by being proud of her. We ought to live up to the ideals she tried to live by, even if the government fell short - the era that she promised would have been a good one, if we saw it delivered.
In the end, the last real episode of Ardern’s Prime Ministership, before that shocking press conference and that splendid farewell speech, was the “arrogant prick” episode. It was funny and real, handled with class by both parties, and led to amusing jokes about how this was what brought her down. My own conspiracy theory about Ardern is that that may not actually be so far from the truth. Of course this meant nothing in the grand scheme of things, but for somebody who had put so much effort into governing with kindness, whatever that meant, being caught on the hot mic changing from that might well have been a bit of cold water in the face - if she was starting to slip, then best to wrap up now at the end of a very consistent run before things changed.
I think that a very respectable call; almost no politicians make it, the profession being so consumed with pursing power and clinging on tight with both hands once it's within reach. She let go, and I don't think she's regretted it for a second since. Whatever decisions she got wrong over her premiership, she nailed her time to move on and she did not phone in her effort before that point. A poor government and a good person atop it - that’s the story of the Ardern years, I think.
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