Tears, cheers and chills
When Kathy Oliver went to school yesterday she did not expect to end up wearing the prime minister’s coat.
The 11-year-old and her fellow pupils at Christchurch’s West Spreydon School were not told who the dignitary visiting their school yesterday was. Teachers joked it could be an American pop star.
When Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern walked in, the kapa haka group waiting to welcome her started yelling with excitement. After the performance, Ardern stood up to thank them. ‘‘I’m so sorry if you were expecting Beyonce,’’ she said.
Ardern was in Christchurch to mark the six-month anniversary of the March 15 terror attack, in which 51 people were killed and scores more injured. During the visit, she announced an extra $8.6 million for Canterbury mental health services to deal with the ongoing impacts of the attack.
Canterbury had gone through some ‘‘really tough stuff’’, Ardern told the children. Afterwards, pupils and teachers flocked around her for photographs. One girl, Charlotte Price, burst into tears.
‘‘I noticed she was crying. I don’t know what triggered it. ‘‘I thought, ‘I’ll go and sit next to her. I hope I don’t make it worse’,’’ Ardern said when asked later yesterday.
Her instinct was to sit there. ‘‘I said to her: No-one stood on your foot, did they? She said: I’m OK.’’
Kathy said Ardern had asked the performance group if they were cold. She responded she was freezing, so Ardern handed her her coat. It was an exciting moment, and one Kathy said she wouldn’t forget.
Ardern had no worries about handing over her coat, ‘‘which has many pen scribbles on it anyway’’.
Christchurch, six months later. On a grey Friday afternoon in the Justice and Emergency Precinct, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern turned her mind to deeper stuff. Not the nuts and bolts of policy, but the bigger picture of values and aspirations.
Ardern had announced a further round of gun law reform and some mental health funding – both were responses to the March 15 terror attacks, and they were welcome responses. But there was an urge to get underneath all that, to the root of the problem. Racism, prejudice, the human condition. These are not small subjects.
‘‘Having read a number of articles and having observed the environments in other jurisdictions certainly does not make me an expert, but I have been thinking about New Zealand post-March 15 and New Zealand before,’’ she said.
‘‘It became clear to me that some of the experiences of our Muslim community of racism almost became normalised to them and they won’t be the only group that experienced that.
‘‘As much as we all collectively called that out, my ambition and our ambition as a country should be to lock in the sense of humanity that existed at that time, and normalise that. There was a period where you stripped away all the cultural and ethnic differences and just saw that raw humanity there, that someone’s lost loved ones and been indiscriminately targeted.
‘‘New Zealand saw through differences that may exist between communities and just saw people.’’
This was the ‘‘they are us’’ aftermath of the terror attacks, when Ardern modelled a style of empathy that was admired not just nationally but internationally.
‘‘I do think we are fundamentally changed,’’ she said. ‘‘But we should not adopt complacency and say that changed us and therefore we move on. I think we changed in the sense that we had an awareness that discrimination exists and that a group could be so horrifically targeted in that way.’’
There is also a need to have the painful conversations about history that we may have swept under the carpet. The compulsory teaching of New Zealand history in schools, announced this week, is one way of doing that. In less than a month, the Tuia 250 events that commemorate rather than celebrate Captain James Cook’s arrival in New Zealand in 1769 will be another.
‘‘But the alternative is to not have those conversations and I don’t think that takes us any further. We are a young country and we have stories we haven’t always told. But in telling them we do build greater understanding. We don’t grow from avoiding them.’’
Another conversation that has emerged since March 15 is around the failure to collect data on hate crimes and hate speech, despite recommendations from the Human Rights Commission and United Nations bodies. Justice Minister Andrew Little is looking into whether the Human Rights Act is covering everything it should cover.
This could be a concrete step, but Ardern did not sound 100 per cent convinced on the need to collect data.
‘‘I’m not arguing for a moment that this shouldn’t be something we explore, but having now heard from members of particularly the Muslim community, it would never give us the full picture, and I think we have to keep that in mind. It relies on reporting but I believe we will always have an element of underreporting.’’
This is because racism has become so normalised for the communities involved. As for the human condition, there is argument that all people exhibit implicit bias, even if they think they have overcome racism. Even someone like an enlightened and thoughtful prime minister.
‘‘I would like to think that I think enough about these issues that I am hyper-aware of them,’’ Ardern said. ‘‘But part of what we collectively need to do is never claim perfection and always be open to being challenged.’’
It is not news to Ardern. During her diligent, post-March 15 reading, she came across an article in a journal of psychology that told her bias and tribalism are hard to avoid.
‘‘As humans we have a natural instinct around being tribal. No matter what, we find a way to be tribal.
‘‘The key for us will be creating a set of values that New Zealand instinctively connects to and becomes what we’re tribal about. The idea of being an inclusive society that looks out for one another, that is empathetic and compassionate.’’
Rather than defining ourselves by things that exclude others, we should instead define ourselves by values that we are unified by.
‘‘I think March 15 demonstrated what those are for us. We can see ourselves as a place that is empathetic and compassionate and diverse and inclusive but that is not perfect, and has issues that we have to address. And we do.’’
‘‘We are a young country and we have stories we haven’t always told. But in telling them we do build greater understanding.’’ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern