The Southland Times

Ardern has no designs on top jobs

- STACEY KIRK

Fresh off a convincing win in a hurried by-election for the Mt Albert electorate in Auckland, Labour’s Jacinda Ardern is focusing on her new patch.

It helpfully blocks out mounting speculatio­n that Labour leader Andrew Little will have some decisions to make over whether to make her his deputy leader heading into the election.

Ardern pulled in 10,000 votes in Saturday’s election, streets ahead of her closest rival Julie Anne Genter on 1489.

In a competitio­n that mostly had the wind taken out of it by National’s decision not to stand a candidate, Ardern pulled a 30 per cent turnout with estimates of a total vote count of 13,715.

The more tightly contested and high-profile by-election neighbouri­ng electorate Mt Roskill last year, saw just over 17,000 votes cast in comparison.

.Ardern said leadership speculatio­n was a distractio­n.

Ardern had felt the pressure of delivering a good result, over the past four weeks, even though many were treating the outcome of the by-election as a foregone conclusion.

Despite commentary around her potential in the party, Ardern has not been known to fuel suggestion­s she has designs on a leadership role.

‘‘I guess the reason I’ve never hinted is because my aspiration­s in politics have never been about my relative position.

‘‘Of course, I want to be good at my jobs so that I’m in a position to earn a place as a minister – because that’s where you can make the greatest change.

‘‘For me it’s been about saying whatever’s best, whatever’s needed. First and foremost for me is the importance of just being part of a strong team,’’ she said..

‘‘And it’s not about whether you’ve got ambition or not, it’s just being mindful of the collective and being willing to just roll with the punches.’’

Now that she is MP for Mt Albert, Ardern has some targets to achieve in the time between now and the September general election.

‘‘There are some things that are very immediate, like making sure we set up a space and that we can get some stability for the constitu- ency work, which has actually been rolling in this whole period.

‘‘Last week I found a young man who was jobless, living in his car and those individual­s, even through this campaign and through there not being an MP, will still need help. So the priority for me is getting that up and running.’’

In the longer term, it would depend how much power Labour had behind it.

Ardern is vocal about her ambition to be a minister – preferably children’s minister.

‘‘Having had youth justice, correction­s, police – all of them for me lead back to prevention first, and the best place for that was even before birth, and the evidence backs that up.’’

Little said the win at the weekend confirmed the issues Labour had been talking about were the right ones.

‘‘The challenges for Auckland, which are about housing, traffic congestion – Labour at the centre of the campaign – confirms to me there is a huge issue around those questions in Auckland, and confirms to me that the National Party has completely misunderst­ood and mishandled Auckland issues,’’ he said.

‘‘She performs very well, she’s done very well.

‘‘Those numbers, given the turnout that we had and the strange sort of by-election that it was – those numbers are very pleasing.’’

But on whether he was thinking about line-up changes, Little said it was not something being considered.

 ??  ?? Labour MP Jacinda Ardern is focusing squarely on Mt Albert. Everything else is a distractio­n, she says.
Labour MP Jacinda Ardern is focusing squarely on Mt Albert. Everything else is a distractio­n, she says.

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