Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s PM, juggles pregnancy and high office
Hailed and assailed as a harbinger of socialism, Jacinda Ardern opens up on doubt, sexism and the photo that haunts her.
Mid-morning, Auckland Anniversary Day, January 29, and the city is melting. “Yesterday, I was trying to write a speech, and it was 31 degrees in the house, and in the roof cavity it was 50. It was 50 degrees,” says Jacinda Ardern. She is standing in her kitchen, barefoot, dipping a tea bag into a mug.
“So I was instructed to climb into the roof in my underpants at midnight,” chips in her partner Clarke Gayford — also in the kitchen, barefoot — “to find …”
Ardern: “The fan.”
“The old fan hidden in the back corner. Dusted it off. But worth it.”
“Yeah, worth it.”
If Ardern is feeling any strain at the start of the first big political week of the year, it is well disguised. After the regular Monday morning round of broadcast interviews, New Zealand’s Prime Minister has popped back to the home she shares with Gayford, who hosts a TV fishing show. At lunchtime she has an appearance at the Laneway music festival in Auckland before heading down to Wellington and a congested week that includes ticking off the last few items on the feted 100-day plan, the resumption of parliament and a State of the Nation speech. Correction: not a State of the Nation speech. “It’s only 10 minutes long!”
If the week looks like a blur, hasn’t it all? On the morning of Auckland Anniversary Monday in 2017, Ardern was also preparing for a visit to Laneway. But she was doing so as an MP for a party in the polling doldrums, gearing up for a sleepy and genial by-election. In the year since, Ardern has become an electorate MP, been promoted to deputy Labour leader, elected party leader, and made Prime Minister — at 37, the youngest female leader in the world. A thing or two has happened in her personal life, too. She lost a grandmother. She lost a cat. In the middle of January she told the country she was pregnant and that the baby was due in June. And those are just the bits we’re privy to. Has she had a chance to reflect on it all?
“I always said I was going to do that over summer, and then I just decided, over summer, to not think about anything,” she says. “So, no, not really.”
Ardern is sitting on the sofa, flanked by frames containing a Dick Frizzell print and a chart of the Tamaki Strait. On the sideboard stands a watercolour of her late cat Paddles, sent by a wellwisher after the pet was hit by a car in November. In front of the Prime Minister is a long, thin coffee table, laden with a bowl of little ornamental globes, a plate of blueberry muffins and piles of books and magazines. Sample titles: Secrets of the Baby Whisperer: How to Calm, Connect, and Communicate with Your Baby (“We’ve been given all of these books; I just haven’t done anything with them yet”) and The Best of Shed Magazine. Gayford has disappeared to another part of the house.
“I did think about her quite a bit when we announced that I was pregnant.” Ardern is referring to her grandmother, who died in the final days of the campaign. “I called my grandfather, and I think it’s fair to say he was quite speechless. He just said, ‘Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness.’ Over and over. And then he said: ‘Poor you!’
“‘Poor you!’ He kept saying that and I said, ‘Look, grandad’ — because obviously he was just completely thrown by the news — I said, ‘Look, grandad, just don’t listen to talkback for two weeks.’”
Ardern had mentioned her grandmother a number of times in the weeks since the pregnancy was revealed, implicitly sending an olive branch to those who have misgivings about the announcement. “I did think about how my grandma would have reacted. She probably would have questioned me juggling both things, a little bit. My grandma was a very traditional woman, but at the same time would want me to have kids. So a bit torn, probably.”
The first ever press conference to discuss a New Zealand prime minister’s pregnancy, held 10 days earlier outside the same modest two-bedroom house we’re sitting in now, had come after a lot of planning. Everything had been tied down: her deputy, Winston Peters, would babysit the PM’s seat for six weeks; Gayford would be a stay-at-home dad; it was “a complete surprise” for a couple who had begun seeking fertility advice — a note sounded to forestall criticisms that the nation should have been given louder warning of the first couple’s procreational ambitions. Grandad, don’t listen to talkback.
“I definitely tried to look at it really dispassionately,” she says, pausing for a sip of her tea. “To think, ‘What would someone who doesn’t know me at all, who may have a slightly different view towards my leadership, how are they going to take this news?’ I really tried to think about it from that perspective. I think probably they’re looking for certainty. And the best way I can provide that is by providing a plan. And so that’s what I really thought through. How can I really demonstrate that, yes, amid all this happy news, I have a plan. That was quite important to me. Also because I wanted people to know, given how soon it was after being elected, that I took this job really seriously. I felt like the best way to convey that was to show that I’d thought it all through, surprise or not.”
Six months ago, Andrew Little quit the Labour leadership and endorsed Ardern as his successor. After being unanimously elected by the party caucus, her first public task as leader, with less than seven weeks to polling day, was before the cynics, scholars and cadavers of the parliamentary press gallery. It couldn’t have gone better — she was assured, confident, witty. Did some kind of switch flick? “No, I don’t think so. Unless you take the view that you’ve never seen it since,” she deadpans. “I’d say it was always in me — it’s just what’s required of you is very different in the moment that you become leader. When you’re part of a team you defer and you’re there to support your leader.”
And there was no time to overthink it. “That was probably a good thing. I just came straight out of caucus and went down there, and I thought, ‘The one thing people just need to get a sense of from me in this moment is that I can do this. And I’m not going to leave any room for doubt that I can do this …’ There was no time to be anything else, or anyone else, other than just who I was. Even in the debates. You had a bit of debate prep time. Not much. So it meant that, if nothing else, people at least got authenticity.”
Another reality that Ardern had to manage in the 2017 campaign was sexism. Infamously, there was the sign held aloft at a rally opposing Labour’s water tax plans: She’s a pretty communist. There was the standoff with talk show host Mark Richardson over whether it was acceptable to quiz a female employee about child-bearing plans. And there’s plenty more in the archive: rugby league legend Graham Lowe’s “pretty little thing” remark (“I wasn’t offended by that,” says Ardern now) and the branding of the Auckland Central electoral race against Nikki Kaye “The Battle of the Babes”.
But how bad was it in 2017? “It wasn’t Helen Clark circa 2005,” says Ardern. “I remember that campaign. There were some horrific moments in there. So I, you know, note the progress. And I don’t take that lightly because other people have gone through quite a bit in order to get you there.”
Like it or not, Ardern is seen by countless people as a torchbearer for women in New Zealand and beyond. “It took me a while to acknowledge that,” she says. “I remember there was this cartoon. It was just after David Cunliffe had taken over as leader. They portrayed me as a ring girl. I was in a bikini with stilettos and holding up ring cards, and it said: ‘The caucus won’t be happy unless I find a job for Jacinda’. “I got a call from a journalist who wanted comment on it, and the said journalist was quietly enraged by the portrayal, and I had this huge hesitance. I thought, ‘If I say anything particularly negative will I be portrayed as humourless?’ And that’s probably a little bit indicative of how I’ve sometimes treated those issues. If you say something do you further your cause or make it worse? And yet, over time I’ve decided there are enough young women watching that I just can’t choose to say nothing every time.”
At the September 2017 election Labour did fade, but it didn’t fall. In the final tally The National Party took 44.4 per cent of the vote, well ahead of Labour’s 36.9 per cent, but New Zealand’s proportional representation system meant neither could govern alone. The prospect of a Labour government with NZ First and the Greens in support looked shaky on election night, but after the tally of special votes — a great number of which came from first-time voters enrolling as they cast their ballots — Winston Peters’ NZ First party had two clear options. Its decision — or his decision, who knows — as dramatically revealed to all on the evening of October 19 saw Ardern complete her vertiginous rise to the premiership.
Anyone hoping for a good lie-down was quickly disappointed, however, with the starter gun fired immediately on the 100-day plan. The final items have been ticked off — the inquiry into mental health, the program to tackle child poverty within 10 years, and finally the inquiry into abuse in state care. Almost everything in the 100-day plan is a starting point — the government remains in its infancy. But as far as momentum and energy goes, the test is yet to come. That challenge was part of a focus of the speech — the not-the-State-of-the-Nation speech that Ardern delivered on January 31, during which she laid out the ambition of halving the incidence of child poverty within 10 years.
But back up a bit: why no State of the Nation address? “The State of the Nation feels really backward-facing to me,” says Ardern. “We spent the election campaign really canvassing where we were as a nation, deciding who had the mandate to change that up, going forward. But I think the challenge for us will be [that] as with any government, your actions demonstrate your legacy.
“You know, when you think about the Kirk government or the Lange government, there’s often things that will come to mind. That’s not just about what you do, but how you do it. So in among it is your relationship with Maori, the reputation you build on the international stage, the way that you choose to operate, your transparency, how transformative you try to be — all of that builds into the kind of government you are. So I think the next stage is scene setting, a little bit, for the kind of government we want to be. Not leaving that to chance, being really deliberate about the things we want to achieve.”
The prime minister has been using the word “transformative” a lot lately. “Ultimately I do want us to be a transformative government,” she says. “I want, when we’ve left, for people to say we’re not just clean-green any more, we’re carbon neutral, or we’re striving to be. That we genuinely have got things in place now that could make us the best place in the world to be a child. And that we have our international reputation back.”
Ardern has been hailed and assailed as a harbinger of socialism, just as she has for being a voice of third-way orthodoxy. Which is it? Is she Jeremy Corbyn or Tony Blair? “We’re just going to be ourselves,” Ardern says. “I get this constant need to compare and find a mould — because that makes it easier to determine what kind of government this is going to be. But we will be our own government. And I’m not modelling myself after any political leader. In particular I’ve got a very different set of circumstances that we’re having to govern under. I’m a pragmatic idealist. You have to be pragmatic when you’re in an MMP [mixed-member proportional] government. I’m going to try the blueberry muffins.”
At the end of the week Ardern heads to Waitangi in North Island’s far north, and the annual commemorations to mark the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi — the agreement made in 1840 between the British Crown and Maori chiefs that is New Zealand’s founding document. She will buck with recent tradition not just by attending, but by staying five days in the north. How was that decision arrived at, I ask — did a high-level party strategy team come up with the plan? “It was just me,” says Ardern with a laugh. “In part it was programming that drove it” — the diary became filled up and it just made sense. “So the option was: dip up, and go back, and I thought, ‘No, there’s a lot of things that I can usefully do up there.’”
How’s her Te Reo Maori (language) coming along? “Poor. It’s poor. I’m working on my pronunciation,” she admits. “I’m just finding, in among everything else, that I’m taking in the constant briefing phase, that my memory for the Reo isn’t what I’d like it to be. But I’m working on my pronunciation. I’m really mindful of it, because I’m right on the cusp of a generation that should be better, but isn’t. Right on the cusp. So I feel a weight of expectation.”
The more immediate demands of that generation are in the baking heat at the Laneway festival in Auckland’s Albert Park. But anyone expecting a repeat of her 2014 appearance as a DJ will be disappointed. “No. No, no, no. No,” she says, just in case that’s not clear. “That was many years ago.”
I wonder aloud whether she sighs every time that photograph of her DJing is rolled out. She’s unambiguous on this point, too. “I hate that. I really hate it! I really, really hate it. Not least because it’s, like, full bingo wings from underneath my …” she says, tailing off into a grim laugh.
At the Glastonbury festival in England last year, the crowd chanted “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” to the tune of the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army. “That will not happen. That will not happen,” says Ardern. “Firstly, I’m not that presumptuous to ever assume that that would spontaneously happen.” You could start it? “I don’t think it works like that. Secondly, I’m there as the gates open. No one goes to Laneway right at the beginning [except] a few diehard fans who really want to see the opening acts. And, thirdly, I’m not delivering some watershed speech. I’m literally welcoming everyone there, and acknowledging the artists and the audiences … it will be a passing moment in time.”
Which loops us back to the beginning: how to process everything, that blur of passing moments in time? “In some ways, I think people have all sorts of things that happen in their lives; mine’s just particularly public,” Ardern says. “People see my life list writ large. And I think, if anything, you probably realise how most of us at some point just put things in compartments. Sometimes, whether rightly or wrongly, we just deal with it later. I just haven’t done any of that yet.”
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