Jacinda Ardern

A New Kind of Leader

Madeleine Chapman

• Publisher: Black Inc.
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781743821312
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politische Biographien

Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern is a leader for a new generation, one tired of inertia in the face of pressing issues such as climate change, immigration and the rise of far-right terrorism. Ardern was catapulted onto the international stage with her grace and compassion following the Christchurch mosque shooting. Oprah Winfrey invited us to 'channel our inner Jacindas' as praise for Ardern flooded headlines and social media.The world's youngest female head of government, and only the second elected world leader to give birth while in office, Ardern describes herself as a progressive and a social democrat. In this revealing biography, journalist Madeleine Chapman discovers the woman behind the headlines. Politically engaged from an early age, Ardern has encountered her fair share of sexism, but rather than let that harden her she advocates 'rising above' critics. In her first press conference, she announced an election campaign of 'relentless positivity'. The tactic was a resounding success: donations poured in and Labour rebounded in the polls.But can Ardern live up to her promise? What does her new style of leadership look like in practice? And what can we learn from the world's reaction to this inspiring leader?

1

FROM MURUPARA TO MORRINSVILLE

The photograph from 1985 shows two smiling girls in a trailer with a dozen other neighbourhood kids. One of the girls has light blonde hair, the other brown. They sport impressive mullets and are the only white faces in the group.

Jacinda Ardern and her older sister, Louise, grew up in Murupara, a small forestry town in the middle of New Zealand’s North Island. The population of 2000 was overwhelmingly indigenous, so the girls’ schoolmates were predominantly Māori.

Jacinda Kate Laurell Ardern was born on 26 July 1980 in Hamilton, but her first memories were formed here, in Murupara, where the family moved when Jacinda was five. Her father, Ross, was posted there as a police officer. Murupara was a tough area. The Tribesmen – a newly formed motorcycle gang – ran the town, and the privatisation of the forestry industry had seen many locals end up on the dole. The Arderns lived in front of the police station, and Jacinda witnessed no shortage of poverty and violence in her time there. Jacinda has said her early childhood shaped her as a politician. ‘If it’s possible to begin building your social conscience when you are a small child,’ she said, ‘then that is what happened to me.’

Of course, as a five-year-old, Jacinda didn’t see kids without shoes and think of the privatisation of primary industries and the collapse of central government. She just saw kids without shoes and thought it was unfair. ‘I never viewed the world through the lens of politics then, and in many ways still don’t,’ she would later say. ‘Instead, I try to view it through the lens of children, people, and the most basic concept of fairness.’

As a child, Jacinda was relatively insulated from the injustice around her in Murupara. Her family were financially better off than most of their neighbours. But as Ross was a police officer, some of the locals weren’t fans of the family. Bottles were thrown at the Arderns’ house, and altercations occurred outside the station.

One day, Jacinda ventured out the back gate to walk to the shops and stumbled upon her dad surrounded by a group of men who clearly weren’t happy. Ross was talking to them calmly, trying to deescalate the situation. He spotted Jacinda, frozen on the spot. ‘Run along, Jacinda. It’s all right,’ he told her, before turning his attention back to the men. It was just a moment, but his approach to conflict stayed with her. Years later, as an MP, Jacinda would be known for her diplomacy when dealing with colleagues and opponents alike.

Although Jacinda’s family moved away from Murupara when she was eight, she has strong memories of her time there. The many, many jobs lost. The neighbour who died and who she later learned had committed suicide. The babysitter who turned yellow one day from hepatitis and didn’t babysit anymore. It wasn’t political, it was just unfair.

IN 1987, JACINDA’S PARENTS ANNOUNCED the family was moving. To the big city? No, to Morrinsville.

Morrinsville wasn’t a metropolis, but it was bigger and broader than Murupara – more of a microcosm of the country as a whole, with wealth and poverty close neighbours. Families that owned large, successful dairy farms lived around the corner from recently arrived refugees. The largest, fanciest establishment was the Morrinsville Golf Club, which shared a border with the Ardern family home. The house – a Lockwood design, constructed without nails – had been built by Jacinda’s grandfather.

To earn pocket money, Jacinda kept the family fruit stall stocked. Golfers heading down the fairway over the back fence could buy an apple for 20 cents, slotting their coins into the honesty box. Beyond the green, Mount Te Aroha sat in the distance, snow on its peak.

In Morrinsville, there was poverty, but it was not so explicit as it had been in Murupara. Still, Jacinda had developed a keen eye for unfairness and at Morrinsville Intermediate she found a way to channel her energy: the Student Council.

At meetings held in the staffroom, young council members, aged between eleven and thirteen, aired their concerns about the inflating price of juicies, a frozen drink snack, or their scepticism over safety concerns that prohibited them from riding their bikes the last 50 metres to school. The issues were presented seriously enough, but the earnestness of the young council members’ delivery masked the fact that most students applied to the council for one reason and one reason only: to get out of class for a period.

Except, that is, for the council president, Jacinda Ardern. Jacinda genuinely saw herself as the voice of her peers, representing them in a democratic system, a concept that had almost certainly never crossed her peers’ minds. Once the half-hearted juicie complaints had been voiced, Jacinda got down to business. Having done some independent research into local charities and their funding situations, she proposed (read: decided) which one to support with the funds raised from the school’s next mufti day. Her fellow council members nodded along to her proposal in solemn agreement. Jacinda was very good at being in charge.

Jacinda’s interest in student politics from a young age didn’t appear to be the work of overzealous parents, and the sentiments she conveyed weren’t parroted: they were genuine. Even as a twelve-year-old, Jacinda had a spontaneous and genuine interest in advocacy.

At Morrinsville College, four years later, the issues were somewhat more substantial. The Board of Trustees had to weigh up the matter of shorts: for girls, that is. Jacinda, now seventeen and the sole student representative on the Board, argued passionately for girls to have the option of wearing shorts. As it stood, the uniform was skirts for the girls, shorts or pants for the boys, and collared shirts for everyone. Jacinda seemed to be on a mission to overhaul the uniform entirely, having successfully argued the previous year for a redesign of the shirts. Staff wanted students to tuck their shirts in and the students didn’t want to. So Jacinda had put a proposal to the Board for new shirts to be introduced that were designed to be worn untucked. She convinced them and oversaw the change.

The Board, mostly men, were used to having a student representative present at meetings, but never before had that student been so vocal or so effective. It was strange. Jacinda would come to the meetings, held outside school hours, with notes prepared, and argue at length about numerous issues. She was animated and engaged the entire time. It was almost like she wanted to be there. That wasn’t just unusual for a girl from Morrinsville in the ’90s, it was weird for any kid, anywhere.

Beyond her success in Board meetings, Jacinda excelled in a year group that was particularly high-achieving. She wasn’t Head Girl; that was Virginia Dawson, who, after stints at Oxfam and UNICEF, is now the Head of Development Co-operation at the New Zealand Embassy in Myanmar. Jacinda chose instead to focus her efforts on being the student representative. She knew that was where the power to make real change lay. Years later, we would see an echo of this, when – as a thirty-something MP – she insisted on numerous occasions that she did not want to be prime minister because she believed she could have more impact as a minister instead.

Morrinsville is a dairy farming town. It proudly claims to have the most cows per hectare in the world. At its busiest, the town’s Fonterra factory processes over one million litres of milk per day. Two hours south of Auckland and a nondescript left turn off State Highway 1, the road narrows on the way to Morrinsville. Mobile phone coverage drops out but eventually returns. In her 2008 maiden speech to parliament, refuting claims that she was ‘radical’, Jacinda said: ‘My answer to that is very simple. I’m from Morrinsville. Where I come from, a radical is someone who chooses to drive a Toyota rather than a Holden or a Ford.’

In Morrinsville, Ross Ardern was one of two local officers, before working in Hamilton as a detective. Jacinda’s mother, Laurell, worked in the Morrinsville College cafeteria. She had given up a job in office administration to raise Jacinda and Louise. According to students at Morrinsville College at the time, no culinary favours were afforded the Ardern sisters despite their connection to cafeteria staff.

The Matamata-Piāko farming district is traditionally a blue (National) area, and Morrinsville is one of many rural towns in New Zealand to reliably vote National, the country’s largest conservative party, at every general election. Students of Morrinsville College in the ’90s had grown up with David Lange as prime minister. A Labour man, Lange was an exceptional orator and an otherwise popular prime minister, most famous for his anti-nuclear stance and for quipping that he could ‘smell the uranium’ on the breath of his opponent during a debate around nuclear weapons on British television. He was a star for politically minded teenagers all over New Zealand, but in the corridors of Morrinsville College he was the enemy, because that was the talk students overheard at their family dinner tables. The Ardern dinner table was a local anomaly: Laurell Ardern came from a family of staunch Labour supporters.

Jacinda began at Morrinsville College in 1994. It was the only local choice for secondary schooling, though some of the wealthier parents sent their kids to schools in Hamilton, 30 kilometres away. At Morrinsville College, each year group had between seventy and 100 students: essentially every teenager in the town went there. The make-up of the student population mirrored that of Morrinsville as a whole: largely Pākehā, with a growing Māori population, a strong Indian community through the farming industry, a number of Cambodian refugee families who had been placed there upon arrival in New Zealand, and, according to students and staff there at the time, not a single Pacific Islander.

Everyone knew everyone in Morrinsville. And they knew who your family was. For Jacinda, that meant she and Louise were seen as a pair. Louise was considered a bit ‘cooler’ than Jacinda, which roughly translates as ‘less earnestly enthusiastic about student politics’. Since then, Louise has managed, quite impressively, to go largely unremarked upon in the New Zealand media. Although she’s the only sibling of the prime minister with the greatest name recognition around the world, Louise Ardern remains an enigma.

Jacinda might not have been cool, but she wasn’t uncool, an important distinction that many former classmates are quick to make. She did lots of things that teenagers would deem uncool. She was the Board of Trustees student representative for not one year but two, a feat never before seen and never repeated. She participated in debating. She entered, and won, speech competitions. She didn’t drink alcohol. A decade later Jacinda would be known as the cool, young politician who could engage thousands of followers on social media and was a DJ on the side, but at school, by all definitions she was a nerd. A successful and well-liked nerd, but a nerd nonetheless.

If her fellow students remember her at all, they describe her as ‘nice’, which is damning with faint praise. For a lot of people, being referred to as ‘nice’ equates to being considered boring. And maybe she was a bit. There are people who went to Morrinsville College in the same year as Jacinda who have no distinct memories of her at all. Unsurprisingly, it’s the staff who remember her the most: since she was a student representative, debater and speech-giver, they heard the most from Jacinda while she was at school. And of all the staff, no one was more instrumental in Jacinda’s life than Gregor Fountain.

Mr Fountain began teaching at Morrinsville College in 1995 as a 22-year-old. Fresh out of teachers’ college in Christchurch, after growing up in Wellington, he took a step into the rural unknown in moving to Morrinsville. Students remember him for his interactive style as a social studies and history teacher. He often made the class re-enact historical moments instead of simply reading about them. When teaching a class about Gandhi, he dressed up as the Indian activist, an approach that perhaps wouldn’t fly so well in 2020 as it did in 1995, but was nonetheless effective. He was interested in local politics and activism and was proudly liberal in an overwhelmingly conservative school. Barely older than the students he was teaching, and bringing with him his liberal ‘city’ sensibilities and enthusiasm, Mr Fountain was an immediate hit. And particularly with fourteen-year-old Jacinda Ardern.

Not only did Mr Fountain have similar interests to politically engaged students, he had a lot of knowledge he was willing to pass on to any students who showed an appetite for it. Speaking to Mark Sainsbury shortly before the 2017 election, Ardern recalled that Mr Fountain had taught her ‘to question the basis of all my opinions. Why do you think that? Where did it come from? He was my teacher when I found out how to think.’

Mr Fountain taught general history but also made a point of teaching a fuller version of New Zealand’s history. In New Zealand, as in other colonised countries, the history most often taught is that of the colonisers. In this version, adventurous Captain Cook discovered New Zealand and signed a treaty with the indigenous Māori people (The Treaty of Waitangi/Te Tiriti o Waitangi) so that Europeans and Māori could live peacefully alongside each other. The more accurate but less commonly conveyed history is full of conflict and violence and the attempted genocide of the New Zealand Wars that were waged between Māori and Europeans for ownership of the land. Mr Fountain introduced both versions to his students, and some, like Jacinda, were hooked.

It was timely. In 1995, the Crown formally apologised to Waikato-Tainui as part of a Deed of Settlement for the lands that were unjustly confiscated during the New Zealand Wars. Jacinda was fifteen at the time and in Mr Fountain’s history class: she wanted to know more. Years later, Mr Fountain recalled her searching for guidance and understanding of the region and country she lived in. ‘She was someone who was looking for and developing a set of values to guide her. I remember having a conversation with her about the Tainui settlement . . . and thinking she was someone a bit different. She really wanted to get her head around the whole thing.’

In Jacinda’s search for values she found that she shared many with Mr Fountain. He set up a number of social activism groups at Morrinsville College and Jacinda was an enthusiastic member of all of them. One of these was the Human Rights Action Group, established in 1997, with Fountain as the supervising teacher. Like most school activism groups, it didn’t change the world but members were at least vocal in their attempts. They wrote letters denouncing human rights violations in other countries, and supported prisoners of conscience. The group even held a Fax-a-Fascist day, inviting students to write letters to fascist leaders around the world denouncing their actions.

In the 1997 yearbook, the Human Rights Action Group photo shows twenty-six members, with Mr Fountain front and centre, Head Girl Virginia Dawson (a close friend of Jacinda’s) to his immediate right and Jacinda to his left. A number of people pictured in that photo have no recollection of a) being in the group, or b) the group’s existence. One student remembers Mr Fountain rounding up random students to be in the photo and inflate the group’s numbers. In reality, most of the ‘action’ in the Human Rights Action Group was undertaken by the three members in the middle of the front row.

But Mr Fountain was popular. Enrolments in history classes at Morrinsville College increased during his time there, and not because of a sudden love for the subject. However, he was never going to stay in Morrinsville long. He was a big fish in a small pond and, like Jacinda, was destined for greater things. He taught Jacinda in each of his three years at the college and left after the 1997 school year to teach at a private school in Hamilton. He went on to work at a number of schools around the country and in 2018 became the principal at Wellington College, his own alma mater and one of the most prestigious state schools in New Zealand. One of his first moves as principal was to research and establish a set of school values.

When Gregor Fountain left Morrinsville College, Jacinda still had one more year of schooling left, but he maintains that he already knew Jacinda would go far. ‘I absolutely thought she was someone who would change the world.’

But before she set about changing the world, Jacinda worked to change her small town – by leading SADD (Students Against Driving Drunk). In rural towns all over the world, drink driving is a problem. No public transport at night, minimal police presence, and not a lot to do: it all comes together to result in casual driving under the influence and, if luck is on their side and nothing worse happens, the occasional car through a farm fence. The SADD group at Morrinsville College advocated about the issue and even staged a dramatic re-enactment of a car crash on the school field in an attempt to discourage students (and the wider community) from driving drunk. But it wasn’t all just messaging. Jacinda didn’t drink, so she took it upon herself to ensure that her friends who did stayed safe. After the school ball in 1997, acting as both student rep and SADD member, Jacinda organised buses for students to get home. If they missed the bus, she drove them home herself.

A decade later, as a member of parliament, Jacinda would be criticised for being a ‘career politician’, meaning she had only ever worked in politics and never as a ‘regular’ New Zealander. It remains a fair comparison: many politicians had full careers in other professio...