It was a quality that perhaps comes more naturally to a female leader but it is one that all future Prime Ministers should try to emulate. Publicly assisting coalition parties is a nut they haven’t quite cracked after a quarter century of MMP.
I also admired her response to the international celebrity attention she attracted from women’s magazines and the like. When asked about it in interviews, she simply said she didn’t take it seriously. She genuinely didn’t appear very interested in it, though it was well deserved.
She was a fine model of a modern, young female political leader for the age of diversity and I think most, like me, who disagreed with her on most issues of policy, principle and direction, were as quietly proud as any New Zealander of the image she presented of this country to the world.
In other countries, where it became common to hear they wished she was their Prime Minister, there will be amazement that New Zealand must have turned against her. Overseas media have had reporters here this week trying to explain it. After all, people who have achieved power don’t give it up of their own volition, do they?
Well, it’s rare. But here, in a second successive government, a Prime Minister has quit at the height of their popularity – or not far from the height in Ardern’s case. This could become a trend.
Sir John Key resigned after eight years. With three election victories behind him and the polls pointing overwhelmingly to a fourth, he decided he didn’t want to do another term. The reason, he explained, was that he couldn’t face the bitter end that comes to all elected leaders if they stay as long as they can.
Ardern’s reason was different. Unlike Key, she became emotional as she explained her decision. She sounded disappointed that she did not have “enough in the tank” to fight this year’s election.
It was shaping up to be her hardest election so far, much harder than the “Jacindamania” and pandemic elections. It will be fought in a probable recession and amid a potent undertone of racial concerns that will be carefully understated.
But until she resigned, I’d thought Labour would probably squeeze back in this year. The polls have consistently had the margin very tight between National-Act and Labour-Green. Ardern, I thought, would make the difference. She was still Labour’s ace card.
Now this looks like a two-term government. None have survived a change of Prime Minster in my lifetime – Holland to Holyoake, Holyoake to Marshall, Kirk to Rowling, Lange to Palmer and Moore, Bolger to Shipley.
The only precedent that gives Chris Hipkins any hope is Key’s handover to Bill English. But English inherited a party still comfortably ahead in polls and kept it there. Hipkins has to change his government.
While I believe the economy needs more hard-nosed management now, it is disappointing to lose her so soon, disappointing for her, her party and, I suspect, for her generation, especially its young women balancing parenthood with demanding professions.
Can five and a half years be called success? History may decide the pandemic wore her down. No previous Prime Minister has been advised to close the country and I’ve never believed she enjoyed commanding our lives as she did.
Her niceness grated after a while but it was genuine. She was good.
