OPINION:
The outgoing Prime Minister is a case study in how a leader can be polarising at home, but revered abroad.
The political obituaries were flooding in all day. Jacinda Ardern, it seemed, was just too good for this grubby political world. “A true global leader,” said Sir Keir Starmer. Her difference to the world was “immeasurable”, said Justin Trudeau. And how apt that New Zealand’s prime minister – a global progressive icon – was not defiled by losing an election but had the grace to bow out, saying she is emotionally exhausted. In so doing, she began her final act: the Assumption of St Jacinda, a world leader now showing the world how to say goodbye.
That’s one way of putting it. Another is to say that her popularity was tanking and she had decided she’d probably lose the general election this autumn. But rather than let voters pass verdict on her zero-Covid policy, she bolted. Doing so in an election year leaves her successor little time to get established – thereby condemning her party, Labour, to a sure defeat. She might have used her campaigning skills to limit the damage but instead, she has bailed: on party and country.
Ardern is, like Barack Obama, a case study in how a foreign leader can be worshipped abroad while being deeply polarising at home. Her flagship zero-Covid policy seemed to work, for a while, and the 2020 New Zealand general election was, in effect, a massive thank-you for saving the country from the 35,000 deaths spoken of by Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College. She scored many firsts. She took maternity leave while in office. She united the country after the Christchurch terror attack. She was a diplomat par excellence.
But to New Zealanders who had to live with her policies (and taxes), things were rather different. Her failure to secure Covid vaccines with anything like the speed managed by Kate Bingham’s taskforce left Kiwis locked up long after Europeans were jetting off on holidays. The Delta variant then arrived anyway, leaving many to argue that the zero-Covid pain had been for naught. Then came her draconian vaccine mandate, which forced hundreds of teachers, prison officers and others out of their jobs for refusing to take the jab.
Other zero-Covid policies are now rebounding. The border closures cut off the supply of immigrants that New Zealand has long relied upon, leading to chronic worker shortages now. About a million of the famously itinerant Kiwis were shut out of their own country; most have never forgiven her. In London, she was seen to be so sympathetic to Beijing – seeking trade and reluctant to join criticism of Chinese human rights – that the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network was in danger. This doesn’t look quite so adept now after the invasion of Ukraine drew a starker line between democracy and autocracy.
The global applause for her early embrace of net zero has not found much echo among New Zealand’s farming community, the backbone of the national economy. When I was growing up in the Highlands of Scotland, farmers would speak of New Zealand as the Silicon Valley of agriculture, with techniques so advanced and efficient that they needed no subsidy. It was (and remains) a world wonder. But now, under threat from green levies, the rural vote has been hardening against her – a bad enemy to make.
As is so often the case for national leaders revered by the outside world, her biggest problem was something domestic and boring. In her case, the so-called Three Waters plan to overhaul New Zealand’s creaking plumbing infrastructure and grant Māori tribes “co-governance” of the new public assets. Given that Māori make up 17 per cent of the population, that struck many as undemocratic. Voters started complaining about “Cindy and her Three Waters”, even if it wasn’t her idea and they didn’t know much about the policy.
And we must add to this a general exhaustion with the pursuit of fashionable, polarising politics: government departments being given Māori names, for example, so the Retirement Commission became Te Ara Ahunga Ora and so on. The Wellington protests against vaccine mandates, that needed to be broken up by police, brought scenes of political violence quite rare in New Zealand: and not at all welcome. It all adds up to the appetite for a change, for someone dull, less controversial.
Enter Christopher Luxon, a bald 52-year-old conservative who once ran Air New Zealand and now runs the National Party. No one can accuse him of being charismatic or a political genius. Chosen as leader after just a year in parliament and still politically clumsy, he would have certainly struggled in the October election up against the experienced Ardern. But her likely successors as Labour leader are just as low-profile as Luxon, just as dull and as deeply implicated in zero Covid as she is. With her eloquence, the election would have been in the balance. Without her, a National Party landslide now looks likely.
And Luxon’s themes? The conservative basics: that government spending is out of control, taxes too high. That he’d make a better job of managing the economy, fixing the groaning health system, sorting violent crime. Labour ended up too keen on tax-and-spend and started targeting the “utes” (pickups) that Kiwis like driving. On such mundane issues, even the most glamorous political reign can come to an end.
Speaking in London ahead of the Queen’s funeral, Ardern let slip that she was thinking about her own political mortality. “I will never quite understand how she gave her entire life,” she said. Five years of her own job as prime minister, she said, had been enough – but to devote a life to public service? “That is sacrifice.” One that she had, quite understandably, enough of. To fight and (probably) lose an election, just to save her party some seats, is obviously a sacrifice too far.
You might call it the curse of Covid: the leaders who locked down have either lost power, or look set to. Zero Covid failed on its own terms but it was the authoritarianism – especially over vaccine mandates – that was never quite forgiven. New Zealand now wants to turn the page and rebuild, as Australia did last year. And that’s what explains the Passion of St Jacinda: she thought her choice was to be thrown out by voters after an acrimonious election campaign – or bow out now, and soak up the world’s acclaim. For a global icon, there really was only one option.
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