Dame Jacinda Ardern and her Government’s Covid-19 policies have been picked apart in a review of her new memoir by a popular US magazine The New Yorker. Photo / Jane Ussher
Dame Jacinda Ardern and her Government’s Covid-19 policies have been picked apart in a review of her new memoir by a popular US magazine The New Yorker. Photo / Jane Ussher
Dame Jacinda Ardern’s Covid-19 policies were so polarising for New Zealand it prompted her to “vanish from public life in her home country”, a popular United States magazine says.
An article published in the New Yorker on Friday (UST) says nearly half of Ardern’s book, A Different Kind ofPower, is about her life before Parliament and “Jacindamania”.
But the article also questions how an apparent initial enthusiasm for Ardern from around the country turned.
It also discusses how differently Ardern is viewed by her compatriates as compared with onlookers from overseas.
The New Yorker said Ardern’s Covid-19 policies were a “radical decision to pursue a strategy of eliminating Covid-19 by closing the border to visitors and briefly enacting one of the strictest lockdowns in the world”.
An article published in the New Yorker on Friday says nearly half of Dame Jacinda Ardern’s book, A Different Kind of Power, is about her life before Parliament.
The New Yorker is questioning how an apparent initial enthusiasm for Dame Jacinda Ardern from around the country turned. Photo / Mark Mitchell
The magazine, which the Guardian says has a reported worldwide circulation of 1.3 million, said those policies had “crystallised an image of Ardern’s New Zealand as a quasi-fantastical place – the land that toxic populism forgot”.
The article then recounted Ardern’s response as the pandemic continued, the introduction of managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) and Auckland’s prolonged Delta lockdown.
“By then, New Zealand had been cut off from the outside world for more than a year. The quarantine system had become increasingly overloaded, with thousands separated from spouses or children or unable to visit dying relatives,” the New Yorker said.
“The country’s pandemic response no longer appeared to be world-leading. An upside-down narrative emerged, in which New Zealanders were trapped in a mode of draconian deprivation while all sensible nations had opened up and moved on.”
People exercise at a Government MIQ facility at Sudima Hotel, in Auckland's Māngere in September 2021, Photo / Sylvie Whinray
A woman holding her placard during the Covid-19 protest and occupation at Parliament in February 2022. Photo / Mark Mitchell
The article then cites research into the “explosion of extremist content on social media” and conspiracy theories about Covid-19 and Ardern, culminating in the anti-mandate protest in Wellington at the beginning of 2022.
The New Yorker said it was “a strange irony” that New Zealand’s Covid-19 experience of “success in keeping the virus out” and buoying of the economy had still resulted in polarisation, disinformation and declining trust in the Government.
The magazine surmised the controversy was not what Ardern wanted to write about, instead, A Different Kind of Power was her manifesto for a kinder form of political leadership.
“Ardern herself has spent the past two years living in the United States, having become so polarising that she has virtually vanished from public life in her home country.
“In New Zealand, the word ‘pandemic’ doesn’t conjure memories of mass deaths and round-the-clock sirens but, rather, the restrictions that kept the country Covid-free for so long. Over time, Ardern came to embody those restrictions,” the New Yorker said.
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