It has been the week the former Prime Ministers dominated the news
First, there was Jim Bolger’s 90th birthday celebrations and widespread media coverage, which looked back mostly in admiration at one of our most under-rated Prime Ministers.
Then came Jacinda Ardern and her book.
New Zealand prime Ministers tend not to take writing their memoirs very seriously.
There is yet to be a Kiwi version of the memoirs of Australian Prime Ministers like Bob Hawke (618 pages) or John Howard (711 pages).
Instead, ours have been slight, if they have been written at all.
About the nearest we get is Sir Geoffrey Palmer’s 800-page effort, “Reform”.
So, a serious memoir by the former Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, is made unique by its very existence.
POLITIK has not yet read it, but this is not a book review.
However, what is clear from the avalanche of reviews, published excerpts and interviews that have accompanied the book’s launch is that it is not a matcher for Palmer’s detailed bill-by-bill account of two terms in Government.
Instead, it seems it is a book as much about Ardern herself and her highly personal approach to Prime Ministership.
She entered Parliament in the 2008 election, and by 2014, then-leader Andrew Little had her on the front bench, where she would form what would be valuable alliances with MPs like Annette King, Trevor Mallard and Grant Robertson.
But it wasn’t until she stood for the Mt Albert by-election in early 2017 that it became thought possible she might be a future leader.
POLITIK spent a day watching her campaign then, and on reflection, perhaps some of the traits we would see later were already on display.
Her supporters were pleasant, polite well, well-dressed young people who looked very much at home in the leafy avenues of restored Victorian villas in Grey Lynn, part of the Mt Albert electorate.
At one point, the supporters were stationed at the end of a walkway leading to a rail station and were waving signs at commuters as they left the train and headed home.
The goal was to stop the commuters, and then Jacinda would come and talk to them.
Asked how they selected their targets, one female sign-waver said simply, “We go for the hot guys.”
A not-so-hot guy, however, emerged in a double-cab ute at the intersection of Mt Albert and New North Roads. He was a tradie and probably a westie heading home, but he was stuck at the lights while Jacinda boomed into a megaphone about the evils of child poverty.
He wound down his window and yelled: “Just fix the f..king traffic.”
And that was always the paradox about Ardern; about how much she could identify with old, male, working-class Labour and how much she was a product of younger, female, professional inner city Auckland.
Those young women were her electorate.
And it wasn’t just in New Zealand. In 2019, she went to Melbourne to make a prestigious annual address to public servants at the Melbourne Town Hall.
As the media bus rounded into Lonsdale Street from Collins Street, it ran straight into chaos. The road was virtually blocked with live TV reporters broadcasting into the 6.00 p.m. news and long queues of mostly women trying to get into the town hall.
The speech to the Australian and New Zealand School of Government at the Melbourne Town Hall even included an organist warming the audience up with a booming version of “Royals”.
The MC, ABC presenter Virginia Trioli, told the audience that the Prime Minister had been told there were “two thousand people waiting madly to fan-girl and fan-boy her; she didn’t quite believe it, but she believes it now.”
Aboriginal elder Joy Murphy Wandin was even more effusive in her “welcome to country.”
“You have put the fire in our belly and the warmth back in our souls for our right to self-determination,’ she said.
“All politicians should speak the truth like you do.
“Elders like myself feel empowered by you.”
Yet just what that truth was remained as elusive then as it seems it still does today.
“As well as being an idealist, which I am, I’m also a pragmatist,” she said.
“So, whilst I have these great hopes and ambitions for what I’d like to do while l have the privilege of having this role, I also come from a small town of Morrinsville, and that’s probably where I think my pragmatism comes from.
“So I’m okay with the idea that transformation takes a bit of time.
As her clash with former Labour leader David Cunliffe over the past few days has shown, Ardern was not a supporter of the kind of far-left class warfare that he engaged in during the 2014 election campaign.
But when her close friend, the former finance minister, Grant Robertson, tried to action the social insurance scheme for workers that he had spent literally years working on, she kyboshed it.
It would have had workers and employers pay into a scheme which would cover them if they were made redundant and thus enable them to retrain.
It got support from the right from people like the University of Auckland Economics Professor Robert MacCulloch and had basic approval from both the unions and employers, but it never happened.
Yet for all that, she will most probably be remembered for Covid.
On March 26, 2020, the first day of the Alert Level Four lockdown, on Facebook, the Prime Minister, in an oversized jersey, sitting up in bed, metaphorically tucked the nation in for the night.
“Evening, everyone,” she said.
“I thought I would jump online and just quickly check in with everyone.”
She asked her audience to excuse her casual attire, but “it can be a messy business putting toddlers to bed, so I am not in my work clothes.”
Big sister, Jacinda.
No Prime Minister in recent years had the level of support and adulation even that Ardern did at the end of 2020.
And then the hate started.
By 2023, it seemed there had been just too much “big sister”.
She had always said she wanted Labour’s reforms in Government to be sustainable and outlast a change of Government.
That was a reason she gave for not adopting radical ideas and why she said she was okay with transformation taking time.
Nehal Davison is a British public servant and consultant who worked with the Public Service Commission and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet in Wellington during the Key and Ardern governments and is currently a programme director for the Institute for Government in London.
She has been critical of the Ardern Government’s apparent inability to make policy stick.
“Ardern is widely celebrated for her effective handling of crises from the Christchurch mosque shooting, the White Island-Whakaari eruption and, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic,” she said in a presentation for the Institute.
“However, the challenges her Government faced in delivering domestic results are less well-known, epitomised by the failure of the flagship KiwiBuild policy amid a housing crisis.
“Even significant reforms in health, education and employment relations were short-lived.
“In late 2023, Labour lost its majority and was replaced by a National-led coalition government, which swiftly repealed or shelved many of Labour’s key reforms, leaving only minor policies to survive.”
Davison said Ardern’s Government relied heavily on the model of ‘working groups’ to build consensus and find pragmatic solutions that would endure changes in administration.
In its first year alone, the Government convened around 38 working groups, ministerial advisory groups and inquiries in high-profile areas such as tax, welfare, law and order, health and employment.
“While the Institute has long argued for bringing in external expertise to tackle complex issues, the simultaneous demands for engagement in multiple working groups and reviews proved challenging for those outside of government,” she said.
“Clarity around the purpose of these groups and how their recommendations would be acted upon was also sometimes lacking.
“In other areas, there was a lack of political will to make the difficult decisions necessary to implement the groups’ recommendations, particularly in areas such as tax and welfare, leading to disillusionment and disengagement among some groups regarding the purpose and value of reviews.”
And for all her skill at messaging, it sometimes didn’t work.
It was only when Kieran McNulty took over promoting the Three Waters proposals that the emphasis went on how they could help keep rates down; Ardern had focussed on how they would make water safer to drink.
And there was the spending.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon had a point when, during the election campaign, he attacked Labour’s spending during the Covid crisis.
In its second term, overall spending went up 18 per cent. There were big increases in core government services, housing, health and law and order.
And so it was a government of two halves: one that failed to deliver sustainable reform at the same time as it amped up spending, yet one that for most of its term was led by one of the most charismatic and popular New Zealand Prime Ministers.
Jacinda Ardern thus remains a political paradox just as perplexing as she was back in the Mt Albert by-election.
