St Jacinda - yeah right!

St Jacinda - yeah right!

Jacinda Ardern’s memoir: In "A Different Kind of Power,” is like some sort of virtue-signalling, pat on my own back, rubbish.

The former New Zealand Prime Minister advocates for empathy in politics, but she didn’t show much for her own colleagues when she quit office just before the 2023 general election; in my honest opinion because she already predicted the worst defeat for an incumbent government in decades.

She states in the memoir: “My whole short life, I had grappled with the idea that I was never quite good enough,” and in hindsight she was right.

The memoir has a large part of it describing her growing up in Murupara where she was born.

 Her father was a cop, her mother a school catering assistant. The Arderns were Mormons, and we learn that she lost her faith after watching a romcom, about a gay Mormon missionary who gave up God for love. Lucky Ardern didn’t watch Top Cat, or she might have embarked upon a life of crime.

She states that she had a “constant compulsion to be ‘useful” and concluded that “the world is so big and life could be fragile… but not so big that one person can’t do something to change it.”

She completed a degree in “Communication Studies”, joined the Labour Party and entered Parliament in 2008. She seems to have done almost nothing outside of politics.

As for what drew her into politics: the memoir tells us that one influence came early on when she saw a newspaper cartoon of a Tory stealing soup from children and thought, “that definitely didn’t feel right.”

She became prime minister at the age of 37 and held that position from 2017 to 2023.

The Labour Party in 2017 dropped its leader at the last minute and swapped in Ardern – to win what was an unwinnable election. They failed to gain a majority but she says entered a coalition with the New Zealand First party that had previously called her a “meatless hamburger”.

“Yes, I was the prime minister,” she wrote and “I was also pregnant”; don’t get me wrong: it’s good to be reminded that politicians are human beings, and healthy that a modern woman can both have a baby and run New Zealand. 

During her time as Prime Minister, New Zealand saw a natural disaster and a terror attack, but much of the book is given to relationship talk and cake baking – she tells us that she replied to every child who wrote to her – and it starts to feel as though the author’s self-doubt lies not in her leadership skills, but in a fear that people can’t see how nice she really is.

The memoir may be seen to be signalling her virtues brightly enough to be seen from the moon but her empathy certainly doesn’t extend to critics of her Covid policy. When the pandemic began, New Zealand cut off the outside world. Restrictions and mandates were applied off and on, sometimes severely, through to early 2022.

She acknowledges the psychological effects of lockdown, but by contrast she describes, the anti-lockdown crowd protesting outside New Zealand’s Parliament, as wearing “literal tinfoil hats”, flying “swastikas” and “Trump flags”. She implemented real, controversial policies that ended in a property bust, bad finances and a crime wave.

Ardern cited child poverty as her reason for entering politics and when she first ran for Prime Minister, she declared climate change was her ‘generation’s nuclear free moment’.

Yet on both of those issues she failed comprehensively. All the child poverty statistics were much worse and her climate change commitments were a sad joke.

After leaving her colleagues before the 2023 election, she became a fellow at Harvard University, teaching a course in “empathetic leadership”. The principle that the world would be a better place if we just empathised with each other is nice in theory, but bollocks in practice.

Leadership is about doing the hard yards, making the hard decisions on the basis of sound policies; but Jacinda got the hard part wrong, lacked sound policies and when it became obvious that she was failing badly to carry the popular vote she resigned and left her colleagues to fend for themselves ending in the biggest defeat seen for many years.

Labour’s party vote was cut from their 50.1 percent share in 2020 to 26.8 percent on election night 2023. The party total was 34 seats (17 electorate and 17 list seats) in Parliament down from 65 in 2020.

If we were to solely rely on the international media reports of her achievements we would believe that she was a super star on the stage of politics both in NZ and across the world but in fact if you closely study her list of achievements as leader of the Labour government (the first government under MMP to be elected with an absolute majority), you soon see that the list of achievements is very short and in fact far outweighed by her list of failures.

It is my opinion that Jacinda Ardern’s government has done more harm to NZ’s democratic systems of government than any and all of the preceding governments going back to the beginning. I believe that the proof of this statement lies in the evidence provided by the results of the massive defeat of her Labour Party at the 2023 election.

After her resignation she was put forward for a royal honour; it amazes me that a committed socialist such as Jacinda Ardern, with a dismal record of policy failures, should first of all be offered a royal honour and secondly that she would accept it when the whole idea of the honours system seems to be anathema to the socialist ideals which she promoted as President of the International Union of Socialist Youth.

“A Different Kind of Power” yes definitely, but not as she has described it in her memoir; I believe that her record in the Prime Ministers position shows that her grappling with the idea that she was never quite good enough, was in actual fact proved to be right.