What if Dame Jacinda Ardern were just an ordinary Prime Minister? – Thomas Coughlan

Former Prime Minister Dame Jacinda Ardern has just published her memoir, A Different Kind of Power. Photo / Jane Ussher

THE FACTS

• Former Prime Minister Dame Jacinda Ardern’s memoir, A Different Kind of Power, has recently been published.
• Ardern scored very high personal poll ratings during the pandemic, but her support subsequently slipped.
• The second-term Ardern Budgets featured extensive new operating spending in health.

What is it about Dame Jacinda Ardern that turns some people completely mad?

The publication of her memoir, A Different Kind of Power, this week was met with a predictable mixture of acclaim and derision.

This week, in a piece by Rachel Morris explaining why New Zealand “turn[ed] on Jacinda Ardern”, the famous New Yorker fact-checkers let the claim that in 2020 “polling show[ed] that she was the country’s most popular leader in a century” slip past them.

Ardern may well have been the most popular leader in a century, but no one can use polling to prove it. The poll the story apparently drew from was produced by a firm founded in the 1990s. Ardern does hold the record for the highest preferred PM score in that poll, but there’s no way of knowing whether other giants, like Michael Joseph Savage, might have polled higher.

At the time that poll was taken, Ardern’s Labour Party was polling high enough to record the best election result of any party in a century, but that’s not really how breaking poll records works either. And the Ardern-led Labour Party was not an outlier in the TV3/Newshub-Reid Poll. During its third term, the Sir John Key-led National Party polled higher than Ardern’s post-lockdown poll result, reaching as high as 60% (although in July 2020, Ardern bested this record, polling 60.9% in Reid).

Jacinda Ardern's new book A Different Kind of Power is dividing the lovers and haters even further. Cartoon / Daron Parton

It’s incontrovertibly true that Ardern was very, very popular, but her popularity is not an outlier. It seems to be the standard response of the New Zealand electorate to competent leadership during a crisis.

If Ardern’s cheerleaders are too quick to canonise her, her critics are too quick to damn.

Writing in The Spectator just before the book’s publication, Michael Jackson, a co-founder of the Plan-B group, concluded Ardern’s leadership was really, really bad. His evidence for this isn’t wrong: Covid measures, particularly the vaccine mandates, were heavy-handed and widely criticised, even by the Royal Commission, and the economy was performing poorly towards the end of the Ardern years.

He cited an Acumen survey pointing to a sense of grievance among New Zealanders, an expression perhaps of the sense of division and frustration left by the Ardern years. Kiwis are grumpy and have lost hope – just 19% of us believe the next generation will be better off compared with today, as against a global average of 36%.

But is this the doing of Ardern? And what do New Zealanders think about her specifically? When she left office, her individual polling was indistinguishable from other leaders on their way out. Her final 1News-Kantar and Newshub Reid PPM scores were 29% and 29.9%, respectively. Key’s last scores as PM in those polls were 36% and 36.7% respectively, Sir Bill English’s were 37% and 34.7% and Helen Clark scored 36% in her final 1News-Kantar (then Colmar Brunton – TV3 did not use the Reid Poll in 2008, which further erodes the “century” claim above).

Is it possible the truth is slightly more boring than anyone gives credit? Ardern was popular, but certainly not head and shoulders above other Prime Ministers in popularity. And she was hardly “turn[ed] on” by the country. She left office less popular, but not markedly less popular than other Prime Ministers at the end of their times (which in the case of Clark and Key were considerably longer).

Decades from now, how will history remember Ardern? The facts would suggest she’s more like than unlike the rest of the cohort of 21st-century Prime Ministers. She bettered her prime ministerial peers in some areas but fell short of them in others. The choices she made, both good and bad, might have been made by any Prime Minister of recent times.

Take the Covid-19 response: clearly a success in 2020, but potentially not, or at least less so, in late 2021 and 2022.

Grant Robertson hugging former Prime Minister Dame Jacinda Ardern after her valedictory speech. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Would a Sir Bill English-led Government have managed Covid worse? The choice between our likely Covid responses was not, as the New Yorker piece implies, between New Zealand-style sanity and American madness, but probably between Australia’s looser lockdowns and New Zealand’s strict ones.

New Zealand is a nation of islands, so is Australia. Continental democracies simply could never maintain Covid restrictions like we did, not without enforcing even more rigid border controls than ours. No American President could countenance such a move, not even a President such as Donald Trump, who actually wanted a border wall.

A Bill English Government, advised by officials, probably would have shut the borders and locked down, leveraging our geographic advantage. Maybe, like Scott Morrison’s centre-right Government and the various Aussie states, he would have maintained looser lockdowns, forcing less economic pain on the country and reducing the need for enormous business support, but this would come with higher excess mortality and have risked even longer lockdowns (what happened to Auckland was bad, Melbourne was worse).

There’s another interesting sliding doors moment here. One of the only big public service changes to occur as the Ardern government took over was the resignation of Director-General of Health Chai Chuah, who clearly did not have the confidence of Health Minister David Clark. That paved the way for the hiring of Ashley Bloomfield. Chuah is one of the only non-clinicians to ever serve in that role (the incumbent, Audrey Sonerson, is another)

Perhaps the big question of a National vs. Labour covid response is not whether English would have followed the wise advice of officials, but what sort of advice a Chuah Ministry would have delivered up.

Australia and New Zealand pursuing similar strategies under different Governments is proof that the Manichaean frame in which that period is viewed by both sides of the divide is wrong. In all likelihood, most New Zealand Governments would have pursued a version of the strategy Ardern did.

Any marginal upside of a less socially divisive and economically injurious approach is matched by the downside that it would have been less likely to work, with equally socially divisive and economically fraught downside risks.

The Parliament occupation. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Ardern’s economic legacy is an area of irreconcilable disagreement between her critics, who would claim Ardern single-handedly wrecked the economy, and her defenders, who cannot bring themselves to acknowledge her Government’s very real failings in this area.

The most obvious failing was the Government’s failure to grapple with the consequences of the Reserve Bank’s euphemistically titled “unconventional monetary policy”. Not even attempting to cool a clearly overheating housing market before the election in 2020, before rushing to do so afterwards, is probably the high water mark of that government’s poll-driven cynicism.

Ardern’s different kind of power wasn’t different enough to challenge the orthodoxy of all her predecessors and summon the courage to come between the electorate and their capital gains.

Other parts of her economic legacy were more successful. Two of the three main measures of child poverty fell dramatically in the year after the Families Package (one by 47,000 children in a year), and all three metrics fell under her leadership.

Ardern’s three big interventions: the Families Package in 2017, indexing benefits to wages in 2019 and lifting benefit levels in 2021, bent the curve on these child poverty metrics, in the way the Working for Families tax credits did under the Clark Government. The policy worked – and very well to begin with.

But she was too focused on the microeconomics of poverty and not focused enough on the macroeconomics of fiscal policy. She was late to realise the Government was contributing to the inflation spike (Treasury doesn’t know how much the Government contributed to the excessive inflation, but reckons it could have been a third, tops).

This meant that beginning in June 2022, poverty rates began rising again. All three main metrics rose in the year to June 2023. One of the main ones, the number of children in material hardship, which measures the number of children doing without rose by 23,700 children (2 percentage points) in just a year.

That meant that by the end of Ardern’s term, having significantly expanded the social net at great cost, the Government had very little to show for it. Core welfare payments, including Working for Families, increased by 60% between 2017 and 2023 – only about a third of that was inflation. The Government’s lack of focus on the macroeconomy ended up being the undoing of its central mission, poverty reduction.

The coalition is right. Unless you have price stability, you don’t really have anything at all. But the Labour rejoinder is also true: what’s the good of stable prices if you have no money? The latest child poverty forecasts show flatlining or rising poverty. The coalition’s decision to wind back benefit indexation and trim some of the Families Package has hit household incomes. Labour’s record on child poverty was middling; the coalition’s is simply bad.

There’s been no detailed history written of the Ardern years. The Royal Commission chapter on the economic response was light on detail. The big spending came in 2022 and after, not in 2020 and 2021 as people think. Core Crown spending lifted by 16% between 2021 and 2022. Despite this, the 2022 and 2023 Budgets were forecasting surpluses in 2025 and 2026 respectively, thanks to post-pandemic economic growth fuelling a tax revenue-generating economic recovery.

The economic recovery was far stronger than expected. As tax receipts continued to come in ahead of forecast, the Government spent the windfall, rather than banking it. The 2021 and 2022 Budgets included twice as much new operating spending as promised at the election, and Budget 2023 included only slightly less than double.

As the Herald has reported, in late 2022 and early 2023, when Treasury realised the economic recovery was much, much softer than expected, it was too late. The money had been promised. The revenue to pay for it would never materialised. Voila, structural deficit.

The Ardern Government undoubtedly spent too much.

It hired nearly 6000 “back-room” (a gross but occasionally useful term) public servants between 2020 and 2023. The coalition has shown that fiscal restraint is possible with relatively contained consequences for services.

But again, those sharpening the axe should pause. Twenty per cent of the enormous 2022 Budget operating allowance was for wiping the district health board DHB deficits. A further 20% of that same Budget’s spend in the next fiscal year went to meeting inflation-induced health cost pressures. Between 2020 and 2023, the public health system hired nearly 14,000 workers. A not inconsiderable amount of the second-term deficit spend went on meeting ballooning wage demands. A different Government would have spent less – but how much less? And would those spending cuts have traded a health deficit problem for a health workforce problem?

As ever with appraising Ardern, in fixing one of her flaws you create another for yourself.

No one has an interest in honestly appraising the Ardern years, not even Ardern herself, who seems more interested in her place in the American political conversation than her legacy at home.

Perhaps the truth is simply too boring. Ardern was neither vastly better nor vastly worse than the leaders who preceded her. She succeeded like they succeeded, and is flawed in the ways they too were flawed.

If that’s the case, then the frankly bizarre reaction to everything she touches says far more about us than about her.