By Jenna Price
Credit:
MEMOIR
A Different Kind of Power
Jacinda Ardern
Penguin $55
It’s hard to imagine now. A single perpetrator opens fire in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51. And a world leader questions if it’s terrorism.
In 2019, US President Donald Trump calls then-prime minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern after the massacre and asks if that act of mass murder is terrorism.
In her memoir A Different Kind of Power, released on Tuesday, Ardern writes: “If that wasn’t terrorism, then nothing was … ‘Yes,’ I told the president. ‘It was a white man from Australia who deliberately targeted our Muslim community. He is a terrorist’.”
Then he asks her if there is anything he can do: “My answer was simple,” she writes of her conversation. “You can show sympathy and love for all Muslim communities.”
There’s a lot of sympathy, love and empathy in Ardern’s book. Knowing what we know about political leaders, no wonder she didn’t last. Knowing what we know about ourselves, most of us understand you can’t be this kind of person and continue to give unstintingly. Six years was pretty good for New Zealand – and gave us a model of generous leadership.
Jacinda Ardern hugs a woman at the Kilbirnie Mosque in Wellington in 2019 after the Christchurch massacre. Credit: Getty Images
Memoirs are our memories, beautifully punctuated, unquestioned until after publication. As G. Thomas Couser wrote in 2011: “The memoir is the literary face of a very common and fundamental human activity: the narration of our lives in our own terms.”
And this book is precisely that. Ardern begins with her girlhood, her Mormon upbringing, her conversion to politics, falling in love, having a baby. And each of those is explored with just the same attention to detail. Here was I expecting a detailed account of her many battles as prime minister – but she spends just as much time talking about her hopes and feelings and relationships as she does on how she came to be nominated to lead the New Zealand Labour Party and how she came to be prime minister.
To be honest, I really looked forward to reading Ardern’s memoir – until I got to her dedication: to the criers, worriers and huggers. Dear God, I thought, I’m going to be inundated with all the feels and none of the facts. By the time I got to the end, I was so engrossed by all those feelings, the commitment to empathy, to listening, to kindness, that none of the rest of it mattered. Who cares why Winston Peters picked Labour in 2017? Does politics really matter? Isn’t being a good person what’s really key, whether you are in Beehives or bear pits?
But by page 60, I’ve cried twice. By the book’s end, I’ve laughed, wept and was extremely proud of Neve, the child of Ardern and husband Clarke Gayford. Born in Ardern’s first year as prime minister and who must be close to seven now, Neve asks her mother what we all really wanted to know: Why did she leave her job as prime minister after six years?
Ardern giving her final speech to New Zealand’s parliament in Wellington in April 2023.Credit: AP
One thing is clear in this book. Ardern does not shy away from talking about the emotional impact of leading a nation through a massacre, through floods, through the COVID-19 pandemic, through the insanity of conspiracy theorists. That cumulative burden is the reason – but not the only reason.
“Women shouldn’t have to choose – the way our mothers so often did – between being good at their profession and being a good mother, or daughter,” she writes. “There should be support networks, a village, whatever you call it, that can help them be all of those things without completely losing themselves in the process.”
It is surprising to me, though, that the book does not really detail the relentless hatred to which Ardern was subjected, particularly after the pandemic. As New Zealand academic Suze Wilson has documented over time: “A troubling feature of the commentary about New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern has been its abusive, violent, sexist and misogynistic tenor.” There is the odd anecdote, a particularly useless male politician, trying to get Ardern to weigh in on gender, a number of people making irrelevant comments about her appearance, media commentators.
With her daughter, Neve Gayford, in 2020. Credit: Getty Images
But don’t think for one minute that Ardern is all sweetness and light. She doesn’t criticise too many people, but for David Seymour, she makes an exception. She is no fan of Seymour, New Zealand’s freshly appointed deputy prime minister. He leads the ACT Party, a kind of libertarian hotchpotch. Her first real interaction with him is in 2022 when he caves in to the requests of a “freedom” convoy to meet with a politician. Ardern has already refused. Her view? “How could I send a message that if you disagree with something, you can illegally occupy the grounds of parliament and then have your demands met?”
Later, she writes, he was the only MP to vote against banning semi-automatic weapons after the mosque massacres.
But in the months after the convoy, after a rowdy question time in parliament, her press secretary, Andrew Campbell, comes to her office: “So, today in the House when you sat down after your questions ended, it seems your mic was still on ... and it seems to have picked up your voice as you called David Seymour an arrogant prick.”
Phew, she thinks. In her mind, she called him much worse.
I’m surprised at how well written it is, how it balances humour and pathos, kindness and hardiness – and I can’t find a hint of a ghostwriter, although many thanks to editors. But after reading this, I’m not surprised she gave up after six years. Too hard for anyone really human.
She has advice though for people who want to be politicians. It’s about humility, empathy and more.
“The things you thought would cripple you will in fact make you stronger, make you better. They will give you a different kind of power, and make you a leader that this world, with all its turmoil, might just need.”
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