WE’RE DOING THIS
Amanda Hooton spent two days shadowing Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and finds – behind all the hugs, the enormous smile and the intensely likeable exterior – a skilled negotiator with a clear vision for New Zealand.
At the end of high school, her year book contained various “Who’s most likely …” descriptions. Ardern’s category? “Most likely to be prime minister.”
On a cool grey morning in Wellington, in the doorway of her office on the ninth floor of parliament, the 25th prime minister of New Zealand is looking about as worried as anyone with her famously enormous smile is capable of. “I’m so sorry, I’ve given you nectarine hand,” says Jacinda Ardern, a moment after shaking hands. “I was just eating one, and you know how the juice goes everywhere. But anyhow, welcome!”
Wiggling her fingers, she leads the way into her office, a big room with a curving wall of windows. She takes a seat at a large wooden desk and begins detangling a pair of headphones while examining a pink T-shirt with the words “Rt Hon Splorer” written on it. Adern has attended annual music festival Splore several times. “I better not strip and put this on,” she says reluctantly. Did her partner, fishing show presenter Clarke Gayford, get a T-shirt, too, asks her social media editor, setting up camera gear. “Yes,” says Ardern. “Something to do with fishing – I can’t remember. But mine is better.”
I’m not supposed to be bothering Ardern – I have permission to shadow her for two days, with an interview only at the end – and at this point, my assigned media person begins to usher me out of the room. Ardern turns. “You can stay longer while I do my boring rattle-off thing, if you like,” she smiles.
She spends the next 10 minutes doing a series of unscripted, perfect-first-time clips for social media. Then, obviously changing her mind, she pulls her dark floral shift dress off.
She’s wearing a modest black slip underneath, but still, I’m glad I’m not Charles Wooley. She puts on the pink T-shirt, then records a welcome to Splore. Smiling into the camera, she apologises that she can’t be present in person, and says she’s looking forward to seeing someone dressing up “in a brown wig, Labour rosette and pregnancy gut”.
So, fruit juice, partial strip, self-parody. We’ve seen and heard a great deal about Ardern since she became prime minister last October, but clearly, there’s more to the world’s youngest elected head of government (until she was pipped by the new 31-year-old Austrian chancellor in December) than meets the eye.
Let’s not forget that Ardern performed a political miracle last October. Amid an international climate of disastrous defeats for social democratic politics – the US, UK, France, and Italy have all rejected their centre-left parties in the past 18 months alone – this
37-year-old woman led the Labour party to victory after almost a decade in the political wilderness, having taken over the leadership less than eight weeks earlier.
Ardern had been an MP for nine years but had no ministerial experience. Yet after a 54-day campaign – “Let’s Do This” – she did it. She got Labour to within
10 seats of the National party, which had been in power for three three-year terms (almost all of them under John Key). Then she conducted weeks of coalition negotiations that – against all expectations – snatched electoral victory.
“She was meeting with the Greens in one room, and New Zealand First in the other, and she kept both partners in the tent, talking,” recalls Annette King, former Labour deputy leader and 30-year political veteran, who was on the negotiating team. “And don’t forget, they were talking to the National Party as well. She was moving from room to room, morning and afternoon, day after day. She had to hold in her mind exactly what she was negotiating – you can’t make a promise to one party and then renege on it with the other. It was a massive feat, and she led it all.”
Along with negotiating skill, Ardern had charisma on her side: she’s one of those intensely likeable people that almost everybody, well, likes. As David Farrar, a right-wing pollster, blogger and ex-National Party staffer (so theoretically not a Jacinda fan) puts it: “Jacinda herself is very warm, very genuine, very comfortable in her own skin.”
Certainly, every time I go somewhere with Ardern – whom the entire country seems to call by her first name – there’s a feeling that can only be described as giddy. Grown men and women smile and laugh when they see her; they rush up for selfies; they clutch their hearts with excitement; they hug her – often – and hold her hand. At the first event I attend, the opening of a building at Victoria University in Wellington, someone gifts her a grey onesie for the baby she’s having in June. Someone else helps her hold a tuatara. “He may bite,” I can see the worried handler mouthing. Predictably, the lizard relaxes in Ardern’s hands, legs dangling.
Jacinda Kate Laurell Ardern was born on July 26, 1980. She has one older sister, Louise, and just before she started school, her family moved to the Bay of Plenty town of Murupara, infamous during the 1980s for gang violence. Her father Ross was the local police sergeant, her mother Laurell worked in the school canteen. It sounds like a dramatic place to be a little kid: their house was pelted with bottles, the man who lived next door hanged himself, and the family babysitter turned yellow from hepatitis C. Ardern once recalled sneaking barefoot out through the back fence and coming upon her dad being confronted by several scary-looking men. “Keeping walking, Jacinda. Keep walking,” he told her.
Reading between the lines, one suspects she was one of those super-bright, super-nice kids you sometimes come across: a star debater, a school defender of the vulnerable (aged 5, she stood up to kids bullying her older sister), and the underprivileged – those who had “no lunch and no shoes”. At home: “I was always trying to fix everything,” she explains. “I was the peacemaker. I remember hearing my sister packing her bags once to run away, and slipping a note under her door begging her not to go. I would have been so irritating!”
She studied politics and communications at Waikato University, and was employed as a staffer in Helen Clark’s government in the mid-2000s before a stint in London, where she headed the International Union of Socialist Youth and worked for Tony Blair’s Labour machine. When she returned, she entered politics in 2008 as a list MP.
She was 27, the youngest sitting member of parliament. One of her former teachers, Gregor Fountain – whom she invited to her swearing-in as PM – recalled her “amazing ability and curiosity. I remember her staying behind in class to talk about issues, because she really wanted to grapple with them.” At the end of high school, her year book contained various “Who’s most likely…” descriptions. Ardern’s category? “Most likely to be prime minister.”
Her mother and father were major influences and the family are close, though her scientist sister lives in London and her parents live in Niue, where Ross Ardern has been High Commissioner since 2014.
Ardern was raised a Mormon: her nanna was converted via the classic Mormon doorknock and the rest of the family followed. And even though she left the church many years ago (mostly over its rejection of homosexuality), there’s no breach with her family. “I can’t separate out who I am from the things that I was raised with,” says Ardern. “I took a departure from the theology, but otherwise I have only positive things to say about it.” She’s retained certain Mormon characteristics: the positivity, the surprising openness, the at times almost painful sincerity. “I’m really earnest,” she agrees. “I think it annoys people! I asked a reporter about it once.” She laughs. “And she said, ‘Um, look, yes, maybe.’”
But if she’s earnest, she’s also ballsy: and perhaps that’s a Mormon legacy, too. “I’ve never had any hesitancy in talking to people,” she says. “If I’ve got a purpose and I need to go and speak to people, or knock on doors, I will. I don’t mind doorknocking for politics.” She grins. “Because nothing is as hard as doorknocking for God!”
The morning after we meet, I travel to Christchurch with Ardern’s entourage. Or rather, in front of it. Ardern, who uses commercial domestic flights, boards last, at the very back of the plane, and I’m not even sure she’s present until I see her after we land: a tall, black-clad figure striding across the tarmac pulling her wheelie bag, nodding (earnestly) as an elated-looking air steward talks beside her.
Her first meeting is to commit $10 million to the restoration of earthquake-damaged Christ Church Cathedral. Various officials stand around awkwardly until she arrives and gathers them up with a big embracing motion. “This isn’t staged at all, is it?” she jokes cheerfully, as everyone shuffles towards the cameras. She gives a little speech, explaining that “the people behind me here have actually done all of the work”. She performs this praise-deflecting