Her rise to power came suddenly, matched by its unending rota of challenges and, three days ago, news of its imminent end. Will time gift a softer lens from which to judge our 40th Prime Minister’s place in history? Cherie Howie reports.
Modern marketing has hoodwinked us to believe the horror of London’s Blitz was lived by those who cheerily kept calm and carried on.
But the World War II slogan - commandeered decades later to sell endless tat from tea towels to tote bags - never crossed paths with its intended recipients, with almost all posters pulped in weeks after their predecessors in the same Government morale-boosting campaign stirred more scorn than cheer.
When it comes to nostalgia for times past, where wistful remembrance can snare even history’s deadliest conflict, it helps if you didn’t live through it.
One day there’ll be people, as yet unborn or barely so, judging the five-and-a-half years New Zealand was led by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
They’ll consider her tradition-flipping start in forming a coalition Government despite a second-place polling, the rolling maul of terror, health, natural disaster and economic crises she faced, and her Government’s mixed success with its progressive policy - including on climate change, housing affordability and child poverty - all while trying to keep the country’s ample mob of middle voters within arm’s reach.
And then there’s those of us who were there.
Us, who watched another glass ceiling shatter as a 37-year-old new mum showed parenthood and premiership was possible, and who piggybacked on the international rise of New Zealand’s star after our leader’s compassionate and swift law-changing response to the terror attacks on Christchurch mosques.
And, the majority of us who accepted the immense social and economic hardships imposed in the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic.
But in decades to come, will we also still cast a cynical eye on the Prime Minister’s now oft-derided kindness mantra, question how her Government championed co-governance, or hold on to bitterness over the eventual two-and-a-half years of sacrifices - from freedom of movement, to mandated health measures, to disruption of business - that landed on us thanks to the worst pandemic in a century?
Our first Gen X Prime Minister’s already tumbled from the heights of 2017′s “Jacindamania”, and her party’s subsequent first parliamentary majority election result under MMP three years later.
Last month, security fears forced her to can her planned Waitangi Day barbecue brekkie for the public, an event where the biggest risk should have been a bacon butty overdose, not someone getting the bash.
Is her legacy, too, bound for the bin? Or the stars?
Fifty years ago, it was illegal for men to have sex with each other, there was no Waitangi Day public holiday, and while the Equal Pay Act had just been enacted to squash pay disparities, the legal bar didn’t lift to general discrimination against women at work.
“The past”, British author L.P. Hartley wrote at the start of his 1953 novel The Go-Between, “is a foreign country”.
“They do things differently there.”
Fifty years from now, Ardern’s legacy will not only be influenced by the yet-to-be known sensibilities of the times, but also the realities in which Kiwis of the future live, historian Jim McAloon says.
“[Her legacy] depends on what the world is like in 50 years.
“If we manage to mitigate the climate crisis, she’ll be seen as someone who contributed greatly to that,” the Victoria University of Wellington history professor says, in a nod to the Ardern Government’s ban on future oil and gas exploration and the passing, with cross-party support, of the Zero Carbon Bill in 2019.
Reforms to the Emissions Trading Scheme followed under 2020′s Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading Reform) Amendment Act, although last year’s separate agreement over greenhouse gas emission reductions with the agriculture sector - which produces 91 per cent of New Zealand’s biogenic methane emissions - has been criticised by some, including Greenpeace.
Some have also questioned what difference the Government has made toward emission reductions, which have been rising, and feel many climate-related achievements - which also include a new commission and the Clean Car Discount - have been led by the Greens’ co-leader and Climate Change Minister James Shaw.
But if the outgoing Prime Minister’s efforts don’t have the necessary impact on a crisis she has described as a matter of “life or death”, she may be remembered as someone who tried but failed, the historian says.
“Through no fault of her own. Again, the nature of politics.”
Likely more secure, McAloon says, will be Ardern’s place at the vanguard of a different model of female leadership when compared to former party leaders Helen Clark, Jenny Shipley and Judith Collins.
“It’s easy to dismiss it as rhetoric, but I think her language of kindness and wellbeing will be remembered.”
And the “relatively brief” length of her tenure is far from fatal to her legacy, he says.
“She had a year longer than [former Prime Minister] Michael Joseph Savage did, and he of course is the great saint, rightly or wrongly. He had plenty to deal with as well.”
He’s most interested to see if Ardern’s incremental approach to change, while “bringing people with you”, is copied by future politicians, and successfully so.
“She clearly thinks it works. It has a lot to recommend it, but it also becomes easy to criticise as a lack of vision, and that criticism was often levelled at [former National Prime Minister Sir] Keith Holyoake, which I think was quite unfair.
“Holyoake was quite successful in reading the signs of the times and adjusting to them. So, historical judgments can perhaps be as fickle and unfair as contemporary ones.”
No time spent at the top is easy, and Sir Keith - our third-longest serving Prime Minister after a two-month stint in 1957 and then almost four consecutive terms to 1972 - met his share of challenges.
Export prices for wool fell almost a third in 1967, raising unemployment and inflation at the same time exports to Britain were falling as the UK looked to Europe, protests raged over the Vietnam War and plans to raise Lake Manapōuri levels for hydro-electricity. There was much hand-wringing over teen gang rivalries and misbehaving youth, and the sinking of inter-island ferry TEV Wahine claimed 52 lives.
The former tobacco farmer’s 1963 “Steady as she goes” election slogan promised a measured approach to governance - something McAloon believed Ardern also showed, thanks in part to her “very enviable ability to master a brief very quickly” and “remarkable skills in relationship building”.
“That’s important. You’ve got to be a good negotiator […] and at Question Time, she was on top of things and a very, very quick study.
“That’s what she initially brought to the role. But from 2019, […] there was really one crisis after another.”
No Prime Minister since World War II has faced so much in so short a time, McAloon says.
“Other Prime Ministers have been as capable […] and demonstrated great leadership in difficult periods, but I think she’d be forgiven for thinking it was one damned thing after another.”
As well as almost three years and counting of the Covid-19 pandemic, Ardern’s almost two terms coincided with a sole gunman’s March 2019 murders of 51 Muslim worshippers as they prayed in two Christchurch mosques, the December 2019 volcanic eruption of Whakaari/White Island that took the lives of 20 tourists and two guides, and the last year of soaring living costs.
“She did not have the luxury of determining the agenda. All Prime Ministers are subject to events and the way things unfold, but some are more able to decide how things proceed.
“But she had a very difficult time.”
The noisiest voices often blast from the outer edges of the two political poles, and most especially on the modern blight most of our Prime Ministers have never had to contend with - social media.
Love from the left and loathing from the right.
Usually.
But some on the left expressed disappointment in Ardern’s achievements - or, they felt, lack thereof in key priority areas such as climate change, housing affordability and child poverty.
Ardern has been strongly committed to the latter, Child Poverty Action Group health spokeswoman Nikki Turner says.
She oversaw the implementation of measures to improve it, and set up an accountability process to measure and monitor, the University of Auckland department of general practice professor says.
But progress so far is disappointing.
“There have been some genuine reductions overall in child poverty, but progress is slow, and the gap for our children in the most severe poverty remains large and an urgent issue.”
McAloon, a Labour Party member who co-wrote a book on the party’s history, can relate to others’ frustration.
“I might well be able to think of some areas where I would’ve suggested she might’ve gone further.”
But, facing tension between the aspirations of committed supporters and the need to hold on to the middle was the lot of any progressive Labour Government leader, he says.
“Frustrating [as] that might be for the philosophically committed, it’s pretty much a truism, even with MMP, that elections are still largely won in the centre.
“And she had a very good instinct for that middle New Zealand - we saw that when she ruled out a capital gains tax [before the 2017 election]. Agree or disagree, it was her evaluation of political realities.”
But beyond the hard-to-win dreams of the party faithful, McAloon says Ardern will be remembered for bringing generational change to Government, national identity initiatives such as the teaching of New Zealand history in schools and the new Matariki holiday and recognition - and use - of Aotearoa’s soft power in foreign affairs.
“And I think she’ll be given credit for managing extraordinarily difficult circumstances… in time, she’ll be viewed as pretty much a successful Prime Minister.
“Not one who achieved everything she wished to, but which of them has?”
And while a lot can happen in 50 years to either boost or bomb Ardern’s legacy, the next five may be the most nerve-wracking for her fans.
The outcome of October’s election could affect how history judges her contribution, University of Auckland professor of politics Jennifer Curtin says.
“[Ardern’s legacy] depends on, after the next election, how much of the broader Government policy reforms are revised or removed.”
But there’s no doubt she’ll be remembered, Curtin says.
“For becoming leader six weeks out from an election, running an amazing campaign that brought Labour’s base back and then forming a coalition that we haven’t seen the likes of in MMP, […] where a party that comes second can be the one that forms the coalition.
“That might not be a global legacy, but for New Zealand, that was pretty unique.”
Ardern’s authentic, less-adversarial style of leadership, her youth - she was our second-youngest Prime Minister - and that she became only the second elected world leader to give birth while in power is also significant.
“Fending off a fair amount of slack from people who didn’t think she should be a new mother and a Prime Minister at the same time, that’s part of her legacy.”
Avoiding reform in areas such as tax meant her name wouldn’t be among the policy radicals, and future generations may have some angst that she didn’t go further on climate change or say how she’d vote on cannabis reform, Curtin says.
But Ardern’s response to the mosque attacks and, later, Covid-19, also won’t be forgotten.
Lives were saved and the country’s unity over pandemic measures held, mostly, much longer than elsewhere, she says.
And as well as embracing the Muslim community after the March 15 attacks - Ardern spoke about inclusivity and a photo of her wearing a hijab and hugging Wellington mum Naima Abdi went international - the Prime Minister also hurried through gun reform aimed at preventing another tragedy.
“Because of her different way of doing leadership, people will tell stories about her. The way she managed [those crises] probably will mean she’ll be more fondly remembered […] than she is now.”
Kyle MacDonald already is.
Their values “broadly” align, even if all their politics don’t, the former Green Party candidate says.
But MacDonald believes “hundreds, if not thousands” of Kiwis are alive to see the last weeks of Ardern’s time in office because of how she led when the novel coronavirus taking lives in the thousands overseas arrived in the country almost three years ago.
“It’s a counterfactual we can never know, but I genuinely think if we hadn’t done what we did then a lot more people would’ve died - and I think that’s a pretty incredible legacy.”
Generations not-yet-born may see her contribution as many overseas do - somewhat differently than us, here, now.
“One way we can see a bit more objectively is how international media has portrayed her leadership.
“We’re pretty insular here. And I think there are aspects of how she’s chosen to lead that will probably also be her legacy… people seeing it’s possible to have a less hard-nosed, more compassionate, more human approach to leadership - that’s a pretty positive legacy to leave.”
But, as a psychotherapist who understands how emotion can - especially in the moment - get the better of the human mind, MacDonald also understands why some might not share his views.
Right now, at least.
“History judges more kindly, because with the benefit of a little more space, we’re able to see things more objectively than when we’re in it.
“And the emotions are still so hot.”
Labour is holding its caucus retreat one day after National held its own in Hamilton.