Here Comes the Politics of Kindness

Covid tyrant queen Jacinda Ardern is set to tour the UK and US to promote her new memoir, subtitled A Different Kind of Power. In the Spectator, Michael Jackson says Kiwis remember all too well Ardern’s use of power and are still suffering the effects. Here’s an excerpt.

Just over two years on from stepping down as Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern is awaiting the imminent release of her memoir titled Jacinda Ardern, A Different Kind of Power. The launch will be supported by a nine-night US and UK book tour. The marketing around both employs the ‘kind and empathic’ messaging now firmly cemented as her international brand. Eventbrite, for example, asks us to imagine “what if kindness came first?” Today, if you ask Meta AI or ChatGPT “what one word best describes Jacinda Ardern’s leadership style” they will both respond with “empathetic”.

These words do not, however, encapsulate her brand in New Zealand – despite still being pushed by the country’s media, academics and those inside the Wellington bubble. No, ordinary Kiwis have a different take on the former prime minister.

At the time of her resignation in January 2023, Ardern’s leadership was viewed as toxic. Her party was in free fall in the polls, having plunged from 60% in October 2020 to just 27% by late 2022. Even the publication Stuff, an unabashed cheerleader of the Ardern government, admitted earlier this month that job losses, skyrocketing inflation and interest rates, increases in the cost of living, a host of unpopular policies, her leadership style and Covid mandates that “fractured social cohesion” had all driven a collapse in Ardern’s popularity.

Interestingly, this was not the first time that Ardern had struggled in the polls. In late 2019, just two years after becoming prime minister, Ardern’s party was polling 7 per cent lower than their main rival, the National party. Enter Covid: Ardern’s saving grace. By mid-2020, Labour was soaring in the polls and went on to win the October 2020 general election – an electoral phenomenon replicated worldwide as people, subjected to intense Covid fearmongering, rewarded political incumbents.

In hindsight, however, Covid – and more specifically, Ardern’s response to it – would play a significant role in her downfall. Over the proceeding years, Kiwis would come to learn that there was nothing kind or empathetic about her leadership and policies.

Kiwis saw firsthand, for example, how Graeme Hattie, who flew to New Zealand in July 2020 to visit his dying father, was treated. Hattie’s application for release from New Zealand’s mandatory 14-day quarantine on compassionate grounds was rejected twice. His father died while Hattie himself remained stuck inside a guarded quarantine hotel.

Then there were the hundreds of thousands of Kiwi citizens denied the right to return to New Zealand between April 2020 and February 2022 because of the country’s closed border policy and a quarantine lottery system, condemned by High Court Justice Jillian Mallon as “not demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society”. These Kiwis missed important life events (e.g. births, marriages, jobs), and many, like Hattie, were stopped from comforting and farewelling dying loved ones.

Thousands of Kiwis were subjected to mandatory vaccination, despite explicit assurances by Ardern to the contrary in September 2020. Frontline border and quarantine workers were the first to be made to have vaccinations in late 2021, followed by the health and disability, and education sectors. Those who refused were threatened with losing their jobs – many did.

Worth reading in full.