‘Good, people like me, now crack on’
Ardern’s pledge to voters
The attention, says Jacinda Ardern, has never bothered her. Being in a crowd isn’t concerning. Having to talk to people all the time – well, she got into politics because ‘‘I love being around people’’.
You don’t want the public walking away thinking you’re rude. She’s very conscious of that. So only once, ever, can the prime minister recall being a ‘‘ little bit short’’ with someone. It was in the underwear section of Farmers.
A fan who had already said hello once circled around for another chat as Ardern clutched a ‘‘handful of things that would usually make someone feel like they shouldn’t be there’’. The Diplomatic Protection Squad ‘‘ staged an intervention. And they looked somewhat uncomfortable as well: they didn’t want to be anywhere near me at that time’’.
Actually, she says, underwear shopping is one chance to shake off even the security: ‘‘If I ever walk into a Bendon store, the DPS do not follow me. I can go in there just to have a little quiet time.’’
For solitude is a rarity for a prime minister. Even if her partner Clarke Gayford and daughter Neve are up in Auckland, there’s always some DPS downstairs at Premier House. On election day, Ardern went somewhere – she doesn’t say where – away from home to write her victor’s speech, and realised it was the first time she’d been truly alone. For weeks. ‘‘ It stood out to me. In that moment, I thought ‘ wow, it’s been a long time’.’’
She smiles. ‘‘If I am by myself for too long I think too much.’’
The next alone time might not be until summer holidays. There’s a lot of work to be done before then.
On election night last Saturday, she admits to having a number in mind which ‘‘I thought would be nice’’, and the 49 per cent of votes which Labour ended up with was quite a bit higher than that.
When the first numbers emerged about 7.30pm, Ardern was convinced the gap to National would close up significantly. ‘‘I thought that all night: ‘It will come away’. And at some point, I thought ‘ it hasn’t really moved that much’.’’
So she went to her bedroom and tweaked that speech, then had to decide when to head to Labour’s campaign party to deliver it. She left it late because she was fascinated by a handful of seats – particularly Ilam, where Gerry Brownlee was unseated by Sarah Pallett, and Rangitata, which went Labour for the first time.
Ardern spoke to the faithful, gave live interviews on both TV channels, held a media scrum, got to midnight, went home. There appears to be no moment of wild celebration. Worked Sunday, except for watching the All Blacks test, went to Wellington, spent the week there, came back to Auckland late Thursday, and here we are on Friday, in the downbeat setting of her electorate office in Mt Albert.
At the panelbeater next door, a mechanic is working noisily on a car. A couple of policy types are downstairs in the office kitchen, a press secretary looms and by the front door sits an unsmiling man with a holster who couldn’t look more like one of those underwear-averse DPS officers if he had his job title written across his chest.
The bathroom is in a lean- to tacked on the back, where the soap dispenser has a sticker reading ‘Labour: keeping you clean; National: cleaning you up’. Ardern’s own office is a spartan box room up a steep flight of stairs, directly overlooking the railway line to Helensville, sparsely decorated but for a cartoon of Rob Muldoon and a framed picture of ‘Big Norm’ Kirk.
It’s a suitable setting, for if there’s a theme to this discussion, it’s work. The phrase she uses most in our half- hour together is ‘‘cracking on’’.
After the election, Ardern was on the covers of British newspapers (‘‘odd,’’ she says) and received congratulations from the UK’s Boris Johnson, Australia’s Scott Morrison, the leaders of Denmark, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Niue, the Cook Islands and Nato. And Donald Trump? ‘‘ Not yet. But often leaders do it by letter, and we are not ones who text, or Tweet each other, and he also has an election, so he’s reasonably busy.’’
Of course, I say, lots of us are horrified at the prospect of Trump being re-elected. Are you? She dips her head momentarily, raises it again and with a very straight face, says: ‘‘My job is to, no matter what, make our international relationships work for New Zealand. I’ve worked hard on
‘‘There is no version of Covid management that is free of some kind of pain. We just happen to have chosen sacrificing our borders for some time.’’
that.’’ A slight change in expression and tone, heading towards jocularity, ‘‘ and I will keep working hard on that.’’
I’ll admit this wasn’t the most subtle hand grenade to lob, but I can still admire the adroit handling of it. This is the first time I’ve interviewed her, and while it’s no great revelation that she’s incredibly polished, it comes without that obvious, irritating, over-coached flannel of many politicians who will only talk about what they want to talk about.
If a question doesn’t particularly interest her, she’ll still return a fairly direct, straight but closed answer. If it does interest her, she’ll engage, smile, then at some stage in her reply, subtly shift it towards a point about policy.
How long will she last as prime minister – two more years, four? She deflects, saying she focuses on what she wants to achieve, not personal plans, a tactic adopted because ‘‘I’ve seen people not accept their new political reality as quickly as they need to’’. She says she’s told her inner circle to let her know when she ‘‘ stops making a difference’’.
What would she do? ‘‘No idea. Probably spend a bit more time with my daughter.’’
She tries, she says, to be there in the evenings for 2-year-old Neve if she isn’t around in the mornings. During the campaign, she couldn’t. She was ‘‘absent’’.
‘‘That’s hard. Very hard. People are lovely, and they ask how she is, and they say ‘ oh, it goes so fast’ and I think that’s true, it is going fast, and I am missing it.’’
She looks briefly downcast. ‘‘I do my best to be the best mum I can be, and as present as I can be, and I can see she is happy. I work very hard not to have any regrets.’’
We approach the idea of succession from another angle. I ask if there is an inevitability to the political cycle – that Labour will win again in three years’ time, but lose in six. ‘‘Politics in New Zealand is very cyclical, absolutely it is,’’ she says. ‘‘I would be arguing against fact if I tried to argue anything different. So there is a degree to which you can’t take it too personally: that’s just the way our political cycles have worked. It doesn’t mean you don’t give everything to maintain support for what you are doing.’’
So with a time limit on her administration, she talks about how achieving much in the first term is hard because of ‘‘the time it takes to stop the machine and turn it around’’ but how she expects to do a lot this time around. She agrees that threeyear political terms are ‘‘crazy’’, that four years between elections would be much more sensible, and hints at a referendum to see if the public, as she suspects, agree.
There’s a fear on the Left that the language used by both Ardern and Grant Robertson on election night hints that they will play towards the National voters who crossed over, rather than their base. She dismisses that with vigour.
‘‘If you put an agenda out and people vote for it in good solid numbers, it doesn’t mean you change your agenda – you say ‘good, people agree with me, now crack on’. That’s what intrigues me about the commentary which says ‘ a bit of your vote came from these people’. Does that mean you change your agenda? They voted for the plan, they know exactly who you are, and I think there is a difference when you vote in your second term … they know who you are, they expect you to keep being who you are and keep rolling on.’’
She also says you can follow the polls, see your programme has support, but also have the courage to follow an unpopular policy knowing it’s right.
On Covid, Ardern is particularly slick. How long can we all stay in a locked room? Other countries, she says, are having the same conversation about lockdowns or living with a surging virus. Everyone is making a trade- off. ‘‘ There is no version of Covid management that is free of some kind of pain. We just happen to have chosen sacrificing our borders for some time.’’ She thinks that can continue until a vaccine comes along midway through 2021, and when it arrives, she says it will roll out fast and be essentially universal.
Without the Covid crisis, would Labour have won this election? Yes, she says, she’s confident they would have, but she turns it around: ‘‘I put to you a reverse proposition – would we [win] if we didn’t manage it well? I think Covid, or the management of any crisis, can make or break a Government. I’d far rather have an election without it, far rather have a country without it, it brings so much pain for our people and our economy … but I think we got a message from our voters to keep going and roll out our plan.’’
So time to ‘‘crack on’’ with the biggest thing – Covid recovery. She talks about extending the small business loan scheme, about creating regional jobs, but also about getting early results on the environment and climate change.
I ask her about house prices, and she goes into some stuff about progressive home ownership, allowing buyers to pool funds, work to make deposit levels lower. ‘‘There’s more work to do,’’ she says. ‘‘Generally, all this work to do.’’
And with that, it’s time, as she would say, to crack on.