Reflecting on Ardern: Don't confuse going slow with no change
Reflecting on Ardern: Don’t confuse going slow with no change
WRITTEN BY DR LUCAS KNOTTER
28 March 2023
After her historic electoral victory in the 2020 New Zealand parliamentary elections, many commentators — myself included — expressed a certain scepticism about how meaningfully transformative Jacinda Ardern’s premiership was going to be. In retrospect, much of this scepticism has been borne out in reality. However, looking back on Ardern’s premiership after her resignation in January 2023, we should resist the temptation to thereby claim that her government made no difference whatsoever.
Promised much, delivered little
In an altogether unexpected move, Aotearoa Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced her resignation to the New Zealand (and international) public on 19 January 2023. Immediately, analyses came flying in — about her reasons for stepping down, about her legacy, and about what her departure might mean for Aotearoa politics and the upcoming general election in October 2023. One theme that emerged from these analyses was that, in the end, her tenure had promised much but delivered little.
Such views had started to tarnish her government’s image even before her resignation, as especially commenters on the left complained about Labour’s ‘radical incrementalism’. In such complaints, Ardern “squandered her chance at transformational change at every turn”. Her government allegedly “did not meet the urgent needs of working people”, and she was “not your friend”.
Now that Ardern has been replaced by Chris Hipkins as Aotearoa prime minister, it is unclear whether New Zealand’s foreign policy will change substantially.
Obviously, it was not just the Left that seemed to grow increasingly Ardern-weary. On the right, critics of Ardern persistently argued that her promotion of ‘kindness’ and ‘caring’ amounted to mere sanctimoniousness without substance. In a way, such critiques culminated in the February 2022 Parliament Lawn protest, which started out as a protest against COVID-19 restrictions, but quickly veered into more general anti-government sentiment. Some claimed that this protest consisted of simply “eccentric working class people”, and right-wing MPs dismissed the protest’s legitimacy and conduct. However, a substantial contingent of conspiracy theorists and far-right extremists clearly had a rather heavy hand in the protest’s organisation and its death threats and general misogyny towards Aotearoa’s third female prime minister.
The protests were therefore a low point for Ardern and her premiership, but it was especially in the following year that her party’s polling numbers began to take a hit. Although Ardern remained New Zealanders’ preferred prime minister by a long stretch until her resignation, Labour’s popularity rapidly gave way to its traditional electoral rival (the New Zealand National Party). The biggest reason for this decline was Aotearoa’s exacerbating cost-of-living crisis, which obviously reflected badly on the incumbent country leadership. Another factor has been a proposed water management centralisation policy, which, for a range of reasons, has become increasingly controversial.
New Zealand’s finest statesperson
To international observers, Ardern’s decreasing appeal to New Zealand voters, and her eventual resignation, may have seemed surprising. In the wake of her resignation announcement, Ardern was hailed “as a Prime Minister who elevated New Zealand's international status”. Under her leadership, New Zealand had become recognised “no longer as a small state but as a minor power on the international stage”. As Nicholas Ross Smith wrote, “[w]hile Ardern’s domestic record is hard to judge amidst the unprecedented crises she faced while in office and the growing dissatisfaction she faced at home in her last year in power, her foreign policy record cements her as one of New Zealand’s finest statespersons”.
Indeed, it seems hard to deny that Ardern’s (foreign) policies, achievements, and general intellect and disposition all significantly bolstered Aotearoa’s ‘soft power’ on the global stage. Just a month before her resignation, Ardern was once again lauded for dismissing the suggestion that her meeting with Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin happened only because it consisted of two relatively young female leaders. While it may appear all too easy to dismiss Ardern’s international status in terms of mere ‘celebrity’ — testified by, inter alia, her 2019 Vogue cover and her multiple appearances on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert — Ardern also repeatedly demonstrated formidable foreign policy nous.
This was especially evident in her ability to balance New Zealand’s foreign policy between its US and Chinese alignments. Ardern and her government prudently presented themselves as an independent middle ground between these two global hegemons — especially in the Indo-Pacific region. Ardern’s communicative talents proved invaluable for maintaining Aotearoa’s ‘constructive ambiguity’ towards China and the US, which in turn solidified New Zealand as a credible interlocutor to both Western and non-Western states.
Case in point, Aotearoa’s relationship with its Pacific Island neighbours strengthened markedly under Ardern’s prime ministership. While her government’s indigenous foreign policy allegedly “amounted to little more than window dressing”, its approach to the Pacific States manifested in growing budget prioritisation and policy proactiveness. According to Anna Powles, Ardern came out “very strongly with respect to the Solomons-China security agreement, advocating regional solutions for regional problems”, and showed herself to be “a very strong voice… on climate management issues” in the region.
Now that Ardern has been replaced by Chris Hipkins as Aotearoa prime minister, it is unclear whether New Zealand’s foreign policy will change substantially. Yet, insofar as successful diplomacy hinges on maintaining relationships and dealing in subtlety, any new leader will find it very difficult to match Ardern’s skill in this area.
Imagining the alternative
All of the above is not intended to imply that Ardern and her governments have been without their faults. Even her much-acclaimed COVID-19 elimination policy certainly came with costs — especially considering the Managed Isolation and Quarantine requirement at the border, which in the end made it effectively impossible even for New Zealand citizens to enter the country. Over the last few years, petty crime rates have “skyrocketed” in Aotearoa — the same can be said for wealth disparities. On both accounts, Ardern and her government’s policy responses have been — mostly justifiably — criticised as lacklustre and perpetually outsourced to ‘working groups’.
On housing, Ardern was infamously quick to “rule out” a capital gains tax on property sales, which provoked the ire of many traditional Labour voters. On climate change, Ardern has been accused of leaving a “mixed record”, as New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions have not tracked downwards, large public transport construction projects suffered from budget blowouts and delays, and plans for lowering agricultural emissions have not meaningfully come to fruition.
However, precisely in these two policy areas, we should remind ourselves that slow, insufficient, or low-quality progress is not the same as stagnation. Last year, a record number of new homes were consented to be built, as well as a record number of social housing. On climate change, although her government’s Emissions Reduction Plan and National Adaptation Plan are long-term strategies, they clearly constitute progressive moves towards addressing a serious problem.
Lamenting the middle-of-the-road character of Aotearoa’s political make-up, Max Rashbrooke has noted how none of the last three prominent New Zealand prime ministers — respectively, Helen Clark, John Key, and Jacinda Ardern — brought radical change to New Zealand. Yet, observing only gradual change should not lead to a ‘both-sidesing’ of Key’s privatisation of energy companies and selling state housing with Ardern’s Zero Carbon Act and benefit raising. Regardless of how incremental each of those policies may be, they are not qualitatively the same.
In other words, while we may accuse Jacinda Ardern of insufficient progress and critique parts of her politics, imagining the alternative serves as a useful vehicle for valuing the merits of her premiership. Looking back, “[i]t’s difficult to imagine any other prime minister” managing COVID-19 as well as she did. Looking forward, a possible governing coalition of the New Zealand National and ACT Party looms to be one of the most regressive governments in New Zealand’s modern history. It seems hard to overlook that on any given policy area — climate change, poverty, education, justice, health care, infrastructure, housing, foreign policy, and so on — such a government looks to be unequivocally worse than anything Ardern ever did or did not do. Especially the National Party has been piecemeal in proposing new policies, and such proposals have been almost consistently panned by relevant experts.
Absence of ego
Reflecting on Ardern’s tenure as prime minister, we also cannot gloss over the various forms of misogyny directed at her over the past five years. Indeed, while Ardern herself stayed away from mentioning sexist abuse as a reason for stepping down, some commentators were a lot more assertive in singling it out. As Ardern stated that “politicians are human” and that she no longer had “enough in the tank”, analysts wondered if such phrases formed an implicit admission that the attacks on her gender had got to her, although John Key uttered very similar words about his resignation in 2016.
In any case, Ardern’s referral to her own personal life and feelings in explaining her decision to resign resonated with audiences one last time. Even in the United Kingdom, where political leaders seem to leave office only when they die or have become utterly untenable, analysts realised that Ardern’s voluntary departure was a move of political and personal strength rather than weakness. Highlighting Ardern’s “absence of ego”, such analyses rightly observed that it is unmistakably better to step down from power, honouring commitments to spouse and daughter, than to have one’s downfall imposed upon. In light of Ardern’s shining international stature, speculations over a follow-up career in the “United Nations or some other big-time international organization” are to be expected. Alternatively, no one can begrudge her if she prioritises some personal and family fun for the foreseeable future.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Dr Lucas Knotter is Lecturer in International Security at the University of Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand. He is Associate Editor for 9DASHLINE, and specialises in questions of sovereignty, self-determination, and IR theory. Image credit: Flickr/NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization.