Jacinda Ardern’s management confirmed it was doable to be each highly effective and a beacon of hope, nevertheless it put a goal on her again

In October 2017, one week changed Jacinda Ardern’s life. On the Friday she discovered she would become a mother and by the following Thursday a political twist of fate delivered her the office of the prime minister.

Nearly six years later, as she resigned, Ardern reminded New Zealand’s press gallery that she never expected to be prime minister.

It’s unlikely she could have imagined, let alone expected, what would come with the job.

She had no idea how the collision of her major life and career milestones would reverberate around the world and send a signal that maybe, just maybe there was a place where women were actually supported to have it all.

In New Zealand, it was possible to be 37, prime minister, a mother and a partner.

It was possible for a country to elect a progressive leader while believing them to be a steady set of hands.

And it was possible for the person with the political power to also be the beacon of hope.

While US president Donald Trump had tantrums every 140 characters and the United Kingdom was trying to leave the European Union, there was Jacinda Ardern with baby Neve at the United Nations General Assembly, talking about kindness.

Ardern became the second world leader to give birth while in office and made history when she took her daughter into the United Nations General Assembly.(Reuters: Carlo Allegri)

It was an extraordinary and incredibly potent symbol of female empowerment. It was also a highly visible example of women’s ability to do their job well while also doing everything else.

Whether or not that was her intention, that would become a large part of Ardern’s political identity.

And it would put a target on her back.

Because the reality of course is that women have been told they should strive to have it all while insidious forces working against their advancement have festered.

In the country she leads, there is a pocket of people who viscerally hate Jacinda Ardern.

New Zealand police dealt with 18 threats of violence against Ardern in 2019, 32 death threats in 2020 and 50 in 2021.

Her time as the prime minister of New Zealand saw the leader enjoy both a fanatical level of support and forced her to withstand shocking threats to her life and to that of her child.

When she stood up at the lectern in Napier on Thursday, she said she no longer had the fuel to do the job.

Her exhales were long and her smile was one full of relief as she spoke about how she wanted to be there for her daughter’s first day of school.

And while reporters asked her what she was most proud of, outside a group of people held placards declaring “ding dong the witch is gone”.

It is this duality that Ardern has had to navigate since that week in October.

While the world will rightly remember her achievements and her compassion in times of crisis, it would do well to also remember the hate she was forced to withstand while doing her job.

When the world was watching 

Ardern was reportedly on her way to a local school event in the coastal town of New Plymouth when her press secretary handed her a phone with the police minister on the other end of the line.

There had been a major attack in Christchurch and there were mass casualties. The city’s Muslim community were the target. 

It was March 15, 2019 and eventually the prime minister would learn that the worst terrorist attack in her country’s history had happened on her watch. Fifty people were dead. 

Ardern’s immediate response to the attack once again propelled her onto the international stage. She told Time Magazine that while she was in a makeshift situation room in New Plymouth, she started to make notes on what she would say.

“I just remember feeling this overwhelming sense of, here are people who’ve made New Zealand their home,” she said. 

In the days following the attack, Ardern visited members of Christchurch’s Muslim community, sat with families, helped crime scene experts navigate cultural rituals around death and moved to change gun legislation in New Zealand.

The hug felt around the world. (Getty Images: Hagen Hopkins)

International audiences had seen this young leader at the UN with her baby, on late night talk show couches in New York and now there was an image of Jacinda Ardern dressed in black and wearing a hijab, holding her people as they grieved.

Aya Al-Umari’s brother Hussein was one of the 50 men killed while they worshipped in Christchurch that Friday.

Upon hearing the news of Ms Ardern’s resignation, she said: “I will never forget her approachability during the outset of March 15, forever grateful for making my mum feel like the PM, listened to and really just human.” 

New Zealand held a royal commission into the attack and there is an ongoing coronial inquiry. 

Some families who lost loved ones have unanswered questions. There was no trial and it’s been hard for them to get the details they feel could bring them closure. 

On those notes Ardern made in the initial hours after the attack, she drafted the line “they are us” — a form of words meant to convey unity and inclusion. 

That is how it was received globally, but at home there were some parts of the Muslim community who took issue with the now-famous line — concerns that were aired when Hollywood came knocking, wanting to make a movie about Ardern’s response to the attack using her three-word phrase as its title.  

The Christchurch attack was the first of a series of crises that would come to define Ardern’s time as leader.

Later in 2019, Whakaari White Island — a volcano off the coast of New Zealand’s north island — erupted while tourists were hiking its crater. Again, her emergency response was tested domestically and watched from afar.

And then came the COVID pandemic.

This would be the crisis that tested all leaders, and one that that either galvanised their support or exposed their weaknesses.

For the first year of the pandemic, Ardern’s performance was a masterclass of evidence-based policymaking and public communication.

Ardern handled regular COVID press conferences with a calm and methodical approach.(AP: Nick Perry)

Even among the worldwide noise of COVID coverage, her approach stood out. 

“Fortress New Zealand” became the example of how a COVID elimination strategy could work when the population was largely in-step behind its leader.

Compared to Australia, Ardern had an advantage in that New Zealand does not have states and health is a national responsibility. Communicating is a lot easier when there is a single message.

The best measure of the popularity of her approach came in October 2020 when Ardern was returned to office in a general election, with her Labour Party winning more than 50 per cent of the vote.

It was an unprecedented result in modern New Zealand politics.

The political twist of fate that had delivered her office in 2017 was an unlikely coalition with Winston Peters’s New Zealand First party, but now Labour was able to govern on its own.

Just a few months before that landslide win, academics observed that women in politics had been celebrated during the pandemic for displaying traits that are traditionally acceptable feminine qualities, such as caring for the sick.

Ardern frequently gave updates on the latest restrictions from her home, telling viewers in March 2020, “excuse the casual attire, it’s a messy business putting toddlers to bed”.(Facebook: Jacinda Ardern)

But they warned this may not last once attention returned to reopening damaged economies.

“Like so many other women political leaders, Ardern is depicted as providing the maternal comfort that we seek when we are ill — the one to comfort us and lessen our anxieties,” University of Adelaide’s Carol Johnson and Australian National University’s Blair Williams wrote.

“Whether such an appreciation of the stereotypically feminine will continue remains to be seen.”

Throughout 2021 New Zealand agreed to a trans-Tasman bubble (which quickly burst), rode out a Delta wave, but then couldn’t stop Omicron. 

Eventually the New Zealand border had to open and once vaccines were available, the Ardern government’s strict mandates became a powerful tool for the far-right.

When Jacinda Ardern met Donald Trump for the first time at the East Asia Summit, the US president gestured at the prime minister and said “this lady has caused a lot of upset in her country”.

After some back and forth, Ardern responded: “Well no-one marched when I was elected.”  

That was November 2017. By February 2022 the so-called “freedom movement” was marching through Wellington.

After three years of crises, 2022 would serve Jacinda Ardern some hard political realities and some of the worst abuse New Zealand political leaders have ever experienced. 

What Ardern wanted to achieve 

Time before the next election was running out.

New Zealanders were struggling in the post-COVID downturn and minds quickly turned to some of the promises Ardern made when she first walked into the Beehive. 

One of those election pledges was to build 100,000 homes over 10 years. Once in office, her government launched a program called Kiwibuild to do it. 

But by late 2019 that plan was abandoned for being “overly ambitious” and a raft of other housing policies and schemes replaced it. 

Ardern’s term spanned a period when New Zealand had the highest homelessness rate per capita in the OECD.(ABC News: Luke Bowden)

It might have been an ambitious plan, but it set the tone for the type of prime minister New Zealanders had expected. There was a promise of life getting a little easier. 

Auckland University political analyst Lara Greaves said once the COVID crisis lifted, New Zealanders were looking to the government to deliver on that ideal. 

“A lot of the falling poll numbers had to do with perceptions that the government hadn’t done enough in terms of incomes, the economy, the cost of living crisis, inflation,” she said.

But there were of course many wins during Ardern’s time in office. 

Her Labour government was able to get climate change legislation through parliament, as well as pass a Child Poverty Reduction Act, which requires all future governments to report progress on the issue. 

In a very moving ceremony, Ardern apologised to New Zealand’s Pacific Islander population for the dawn raids of the 1970s. 

It was a day of healing for a lot of families who had buried the shame of those raids for decades. 

For a prime minister who spent so much of her tenure at home behind closed international borders, Ardern certainly covered some ground and leaves an impact on New Zealand’s international relations.

Jacinda Ardern’s time as prime minister saw three people move through the role in Australia — first Malcolm Turnbull, then Scott Morrison and most recently Anthony Albanese. 

Most recently, Ardern made progress on Australia’s policy to deport New Zealand nationals who have committed crimes here, with Albanese committing to softening the approach.  

With Morrison, things weren’t as easy and when Australia’s then-prime minister publicly criticised China, Ardern was careful to distance New Zealand and take an independent approach in managing the relationship with her country’s biggest trading partner.

Ardern was careful to distance herself from Morrison’s hardline approach to relations with China.(Reuters: Loren Elliott)

There was a notable shift in Wellington’s language on China in 2021, when Ardern flagged it was becoming “harder to reconcile” the differences between the values of Beijing and New Zealand. 

Ardern has always been very intentional with her use of language.

The personal cost

She made a decision to never say the name of the Christchurch terrorist and she was precise in her daily COVID press conferences.

She could be questioned and repeatedly followed-up on detailed infection control measures and it was evident she not only knew the material, but she had decided exactly which way it should be communicated. 

This week she kept coming back to the line: “I just don’t have enough in the tank.”

It was a line that allowed her to be honest while leaving something unsaid. 

Ardern spoke of leadership that could be “kind but strong, empathetic but decisive, optimistic but focused”. (Reuters: Edgar Su)

Ardern is a formidable campaigner and without her, New Zealand Labour faces a mighty challenge to defeat the right-leaning coalition in October.

But it’s not just the prospect of a tough campaign, it’s not even just the prospect of being prime minister for another four years.

It’s campaigning and being prime minister as Jacinda Ardern, and that means being subjected to extreme vitriol and hatred every day. 

Whom among us could stare down that challenge, with a small child by your side, and decide to take it on? 

As a woman in politics, Ardern was no stranger to misogynistic treatment, confidently calling out sexist questioning by reporters from her first day as opposition leader, then time and time again as prime minister.

But by 2022, the criticism had taken on a particularly menacing tone. 

Suze Wilson, a senior lecturer and leadership researcher at Massey University, wrote Ardern was “one of the most-reviled people in New Zealand, attracting vitriol that violates the bounds of normal, reasoned political debate”.

“Insults directed at her appearance, insults questioning her femininity or her womanhood, and insults focusing on … abusive terms related to women’s genitalia feature high among the stuff online. So there is a very, very clear, misogynistic element to all of this,” Dr Wilson said.

In her resignation announcement, Ardern made it clear the job had taken its toll.(AP: Warren Buckland/New Zealand Herald)

The Disinformation Project, an independent research group studying misinformation and disinformation in New Zealand, began tracking the impacts of dangerous speech, particularly misogyny, in March 2022.

Among the key words they monitored on a daily basis were “horse”, “horseface”, “F*** Ardern” and “Neve”.

Ardern was presented with findings from the Disinformation Project, seeing the worst of the abuse and learning about what this pocket of people wanted for her and what they wanted to do to her, and to her daughter. 

“[When] you’re just continually subjected to abuse because you happen to be a woman in charge, how could it not get to you?” Dr Wilson said.

“I mean, how could it not be upsetting to see that your five-year-old child is a target of their abuse?”

Anti-Ardern sentiment increased in 2022, with “freedom protesters” using misogynistic language and threats against the prime minister. (AAP: Ben Mckay)

Dr Greaves said direct and legitimate threats to politicians and their families was something “that’s not part of New Zealand’s political culture, or has been really ever”. 

“Mainly it’s that grating of all the threats and insults and potential for your physical safety to be harmed that potentially affected this resignation.” 

On Friday, Jacinda Ardern told reporters she had slept soundly “for the first time in a long time”.

Dr Wilson believes the impact of these attacks has created an environment in which the abuse of women who aspire to leadership roles is normalised.

Former New Zealand prime minister and Ardern’s mentor Helen Clark said on Friday: “Jacinda has faced a level of hatred and vitriol which in my experience is unprecedented in our country.” 

To endure that level of abuse through another campaign while fighting hard enough to win it, would have required and immense amount of fuel — perhaps a lot more than Ardern’s male opposition. 

Where to now

Sunday will see New Zealand’s Labour Party caucus attempt to elect a new leader and, in turn, a new prime minister.

No doubt the party’s hope is that it will be an easy process and Labour can emerge from the resignation of the leader who shot New Zealand into the global spotlight with someone who will at least be a strong contender for the October 14 vote. 

And for Jacinda Ardern, if her successor is promptly named, she can promptly move on.

To what is the question. 

On Thursday, she insisted it was time for a break, time to get married and time to spend her days with her family. 

But for someone who can get Mark Zuckerberg on a conference call, walk the diplomatic line with Xi Jinping and crack jokes on Stephen Colbert’s couch, there are surely options.

“She’s 42 years old, and that’s another 30 years of working life, so I can’t imagine this is going to be the end for her, or that she would go into a New Zealand-based role.”

After some time to relax and recover, Dr Wilson suggests, it’s hard to believe Ardern won’t want to make “some kind of significant public contribution — she’s got a lot of skills, a lot of connections”.

A global audience will be watching to see what comes next for New Zealand’s 40th prime minister.(Reuters: Brian Snyder)

Jacinda Ardern has given her community — and many others — something to think about for decades to come. 

When a leader comes along that is different and is willing to do things differently, how will society respond to that? 

When a country is tested in devastating and unprecedented ways, how do you want your leaders to behave? What principles should guide them? 

Because here was a person with plenty more years to work and all the experience in the world, and she had to walk away because the fight was too great. 

“I hope I leave New Zealanders with a belief that you can be kind but strong, empathetic but decisive, optimistic but focused,” Ardern said as she resigned.

“And that you can be your own kind of leader — one who knows when it’s time to go.”