OPINION
In February 2018, the new prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, went to Waitangi. She was pregnant and warmly welcomed, and she talked about “what we value”.
Manaakitanga, the spirit of generosity and caring. Kaitiakitanga, or guardianship. The importance of speaking kanohi ki te kanohi, or face to face.
She talked about “the gap between us”, in unemployment, mental health, housing, incarceration. “We don’t seek perfection,” she said. “Frank and open disagreement is a sign of health.”
She declared: “I believe in the power to change”. And, she said: “You must hold us to account. I want to [come back and] stand here with my child and only you can say when we have done enough”.
There was a powerful sense of a new beginning and we reported it on our front page. We gave it the headline: “Something has changed”. As it turned out, in the innocence of 2018 we had almost no idea what real change was.
A little over a year later, on March 15, a gunman killed 51 people in and near two mosques in Christchurch. Ardern’s responded with a new kind of leadership in the face of terror.
She embraced the victimised community and made it possible for the country to do the same. She moved swiftly and decisively on gun control and forged an international network to combat social media hatred, in both public and private sectors.
The only notable opposition to her approach came from Act, which promptly adopted the gun lobby as its own.
Just one year later, Covid arrived.
There was panic: We’d already seen the horrifying scenes from New York of corpses piled into containers outside hospitals.
Ardern announced a lockdown and urged kindness on us all, and did it in such a way that we rose to the challenge. We became the team of five million and that allowed us to become one of just a handful of countries to prevent an awful death toll.
Kindness also meant we affirmed the value of essential workers, not just health workers but those in supermarkets. And it underlay the rollout of wage subsidies and a range of other supports for businesses and their employees.
We realised our choice wasn’t health or economy, but both or neither. Kindness worked. It was an astonishing achievement.
Remember the countries that lurched in other directions? In Britain and the United States, Covid deaths per million population have been well over 3000.
In New Zealand, they’re under 500.
When it came time for an election in late 2020, voters here knew how well we’d done and they could see where National’s erratic, uncertain and often panicky responses might have led us. They voted accordingly.
But in politics, they say, what makes you strong will also, one day, bring you down. People get sick of it.
Now she has resigned. But is this too superficial a way to read the end of Jacinda Ardern?
Kindness became the target of attack. Loved ones were not able to be together in their moments of greatest crisis. The Managed Isolation and Quarantine (MIQ) regime created frustration and despair for those who couldn’t get a place. The system was changed to provide more certainty, but that seemed only to make matters worse.
The policies were saving lives, but the bigger story was that, for everyone trapped by the rules, it wasn’t kindness, it was cruelty.
And while the economy did well and a great many companies did very well, the headlines focused on the despair in hospitality and tourism, where customers had disappeared.
IT STARTED to be said we had saved the lives of old people by sacrificing the prospects of the young. Not kindness, merely favouritism.
Is this one of the most appalling ideas to come out of the whole Covid saga?
“Old people” are us. If not literally “us”, they are our parents and grandparents and they are who we will all become. You could say it’s an essential definition of a humane society, that we do not abandon our old people.
Ardern understood this more clearly than many.
Besides, we know Covid, especially long Covid, is not a disease only of the old.
Ardern also understood that if lockdowns were not used effectively, vulnerable communities would be devastated. South Auckland was top of that list and poor rural communities were probably second.
The big Auckland lockdown was, in large part, designed to ensure those things did not happen.
But a growing number of people saw it differently. For them, lockdown meant telling the healthy they had to suffer because of risks to others. It was divisive and unfair, they said, particularly when some of those others, like communities in Northland, had stubbornly low vax rates.
For some, the question then became: Was the Government just favouring Māori?
Simultaneously, within vulnerable communities the Government was criticised for doing the opposite. In some towns, frustrated local Māori set up their own checkpoints. The police let it happen. That rang the talkback lines off the hook.
But the Government was not favouring Māori. When the vaccine rollout began in 2021, it did not target Māori and Pasifika and did not allow their community groups to take a leadership role.
Why was that? Because they didn’t want to lose control? Or didn’t want to feed accusations of separatism? Or simply because they didn’t understand how to talk to Māori and Pasifika in a crisis?
Eventually, the problem was sorted and all the while the economy continued to perform more strongly than in almost all other comparable countries.
But the complaints got louder. Protesters with a disparate range of causes occupied the parliamentary lawn in early 2022 but their demands were quickly unified.
“No vaccine mandates” became the rallying cry.
It resonated more widely. Vaccine mandates had been strongly advocated by business groups and others, but once they were adopted, a surprising number of schools, volunteer fire brigades and even healthcare centres lost staff. There was sympathy for them in the wider community.
The parliamentary protest was not, on the whole, anti-Māori “separatist” - the United Tribes flag from 1835 was commonly flown. But white supremacists took part and the campaign against the Government’s Three Waters plans had a strong presence too. Its most common complaint was about co-governance.
And integrally woven into all complaints about co-governance was the idea that the PM is divisive. Not kind. A wrecker of social unity, for giving in to Māori.
Few people appeared to support the extremists among the protesters, but when the police broke up their camp, we were shocked at what we saw.
Police battling New Zealanders while the grounds of Parliament are on fire? You didn’t need to support the protesters at all to know something had gone terribly wrong. And Ardern was the PM, it had happened on her watch; by definition, for many people, that made her divisive.
BY THEN, we were into the long decline of Omicron. Where Delta had been a short, sharp shock, this variant brought the upsetting realisation that Covid was going to be with us for a very long time.
We weren’t ready for that. Nor was the Government. The brilliant messaging of 2020 has never found its equivalent in the age of Omicron. They knew we weren’t going to tolerate any more lockdowns, but they didn’t seem to know what to do about it.
Many people have even persuaded themselves the pandemic is over, and they’re quick now to say it’s “divisive” to say any different.
But it isn’t over. The Ministry of Health reports there were 333 people in hospital with Covid at the start of this week. In the previous week six people a day died with Covid as a contributing cause, making a total of 2437 in total so far.
All those statistics would have been horrifying in 2020. But they cause so little general concern now that few people even bother with masks.
Over 90 per cent of New Zealanders over 12 have had at least two vaccine shots. But while 2,750,000 have also had at least one booster, only a quarter of that number have received a second booster.
With vaccines, as with masks, a lot of us have just given up.
If we’d had six deaths a day since the start of the pandemic, our total deaths by now would be nearly three times higher. That’s just one of the ways to measure Jacinda Ardern’s contribution.
But if you’re the prime minister who beat Covid so decisively in 2020 and 2021, how demoralising must the current spread of the disease be?
It’s not just deaths. The health system is on its knees. Businesses, schools and other organisations continue to struggle every day with staff shortages, supply chain problems and all the other hardships caused by the ongoing pandemic.
MEANWHILE, ACT and a newly rejuvenated National have happily fed the idea that Ardern is “the most divisive” leader we’ve had. It’s a bit rich, considering the record of some of their own former leaders.
National’s Robert Muldoon gave us the 1981 Springbok Tour and one of his predecessors, Sid Holland, was responsible for the 1951 Waterfront Lockout.
Act Party founder Roger Douglas tore up the social, economic and political fabric of the entire country with his monetarist reforms, for Labour, in the 1980s.
Are Ardern and her Government really divisive in the way they’re painted?
Three Waters has been divisive, to be sure. But the main aim has been to remove a looming rates burden from councils. The divisiveness is mostly around race.
It points to a terrible truism in this country: Nothing inflames the passions like the sense that Māori are getting something they don’t deserve.
The new housing density rules are also divisive. But they’re the product of cross-party consensus, achieved so councils wouldn’t be harried into the ground by Nimbys.
Both policies, therefore, are attempts to manage division, not deepen it.
There’s more. The Resource Management Act reforms are the product of an exhaustive process to reach consensus. The same is true for He Waka Eke Noa, which sought a consensus over farm emissions.
Ardern has a famously cautious political instinct, which has led her to repeatedly rule out policy options she believed would upset people too much. A capital gains tax, a wealth tax, faster action on climate change, a light rail line down Dominion Rd, deeper reform in the management of broken families. There’s a long list.
If you support any of those things, you can say it causes hardship that they’re not happening. Like me, you might have been deeply disappointed she did not have a more crusading zeal for change.
But her cautious instinct is part of the kindness. Time and again, Ardern has sought the less disruptive path. Despite what Groundswell or angry Nimbys might say, her record – and the slow progress it has produced – speaks to unity and consensus.
THE PRIME Minister has faced an unprecedented barrage of cruel, sexist and sometimes dangerous threats and attacks. This has long been the reality for women in politics, especially women leaders: Judith Collins, Jenny Shipley and Helen Clark all had to put up with it.
Ardern, like the others, rarely complains, presumably because she doesn’t want to encourage it. But the vileness has been worse for her.
People scream obscenities and death threats at close range, in front of children, when she turns up to public events. They post their grossly misogynist messages and pornographic pictures, over and over on social media. They threaten her all the time.
It’s not just that social media is more influential now. Her haters seem especially enraged that a younger woman got to be the boss of them.
Most – not all but most – of her political opponents, whether MPs in parliament, radio presenters on the airwaves or others, do very little to call this out. Some explicitly encourage it and take part in it. Those who are silent implicitly encourage it by their silence.
On RNZ’s Morning Report this morning, Christopher Luxon declined to acknowledge that women in politics face an extra level of hatred. Massey University sociologist Suze Wilson wondered if he had forgotten his duty of care to his own women MPs.
And yet we’re told Ardern is the one being divisive.
KINDNESS ISN’T an end in itself. It’s a way to make the social relations among us all more functional, as we go about building a better society and confronting the threats it faces.
As Ardern frequently proclaimed, kindness was the tool she wanted to use to make a difference.
Did she do it? By several indicators, poverty has reduced – and the creation of those indicators, previously thought impossible, is itself a step forward. We have record numbers of new homes being built, many of them affordable homes. This is no small thing: Warm dry homes are the essential foundation for all other social and economic policies.
We have Fair Pay agreements and a world-leading Zero Carbon Act. The legacy of the Christchurch Call lives on.
We have learned the health system is unfit for purpose. A serious attempt is now underway to evolve a model of governance and delivery for health that will work well for all of us, not just those more accustomed to getting most of the benefits.
It’s fine to dispute the method and it’s important to deal with existing hardships faced by nurses and others in the health system. Our democracy not only allows these debates to happen, it insists that we have them.
And we do. We argue furiously about everything political in this country. But the challenge Ardern leaves us with is this: Can we do it without the hatred?
Change is divisive. Jacinda Ardern tried to find the way to make it less so.
At Waitangi in 2018, she visited Paihia School, where the children welcomed her with a pōwhiri and singing.
“There is joy in what they do,” I wrote at the time, “and pride, and love. It’s for what they are doing, and for each other, and for their guests. The beauty of the culture, the thrill of doing it together, the rewards of sharing.”
It’s tempting to think Ardern engendered so much hatred because her opponents know what’s at stake.
Every year more New Zealanders are valuing the beauty of that culture and welcoming it into their lives. Over time, too much kindness might also mean pay equity becomes normal, bullying is no longer the principal instrument of power and tax cuts stop being the holy grail of political policy.
It might mean women, even women with young children, become common as leaders. We surely do not want Ardern to be the last.
Most people probably already think these are worthwhile goals.
But somehow, to our shame, we’ve allowed a divisive and noisy group of others to persuade us out of it.
The 19-year-old disappeared without her wallet or mobile phone.