Jacinda Ardern broke the longstanding mould when she based her leadership style in empathy, Marc Daalder writes
Comment: Journalists, commentators and, eventually, historians will all have a robust debate about Jacinda Ardern's greatest legacy as Prime Minister.
Clearly, her response to crises like March 15 and the Whakaari/White Island eruption will mention a ranking. In eliminating Covid-19, the greatest crisis of them all, Ardern saved the lives of tens of thousands of New Zealanders. Her Government also passed the Zero Carbon Act and oversaw the construction of more new houses than any previous one - both actions which will have a lasting effect for young people today.
On Thursday, near the conclusion of a teary and emotionally revealing press conference, Ardern herself offered up another way she hopes she has changed the world for the better: Opening the way for a new kind of Prime Minister.
The gathered reporters - like most of the country and much of the world - spent the first 20 minutes of the press conference processing the shocking news. There were plenty of questions to be asked about what this meant for the election or who she backs in the unexpected race to replace her, but Newsroom asked about the lessons she's learned after five years in the country's toughest job - the lessons she could impart to the rest of New Zealand.
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"When you became Prime Minister in 2017, you probably didn't expect to deal with a lot of the things you ended up dealing with," the question started, before she cut in to add, "I didn't expect to be Prime Minister either". The question went on: "In hindsight, what are the traits that it takes to make a good Prime Minister?"
In response, Ardern laid out her perspective on the way she has broken the mould and shown a new way to be the Prime Minister.
"This is my view and it is perhaps not a commonly held one but the top of my list would be empathy. Unless you can at least work to comprehend the experience of others, [it's] very hard to deliver solutions and respond to crises without that starting point. So that's been a really important principle for me. Empathy," she said.
"And I think we have to be willing to reject some of those old characteristics as well. If you ask someone of my generation what they believe a politician to be, and to name some of the traits, I doubt that they would list kindness, I doubt that they would list empathy. But I hope the next generation does."
It echoes Ardern's quote from an interview for the Nelson Mandela Foundation in November 2019, after the horrors of the Christchurch terror attack but still before she would be called upon to unite the country against Covid-19.
"You can be both empathetic and strong," she said then.
"I think one of the sad things that I’ve seen in political leadership is – because we’ve placed over time so much emphasis on notions of assertiveness and strength – that we probably have assumed that it means you can’t have those other qualities of kindness and empathy. And yet, when you think about all the big challenges that we face in the world, that’s probably the quality we need the most."
Through crisis after crisis, Ardern demonstrated the immense value of empathy. In the aftermath of March 15, she brought the country together in solidarity with New Zealand's Muslim community.
In a way, through her own personal displays of emotion - of compassion - she served as something of a grief counsellor for a nation in mourning. She saw her duty was not just to lead the political response to the attack (gun law reform, launching a Royal Commission, creating the Christchurch Call) but also to listen to and guide the country's fragile conscience.
As Covid-19 loomed, she was able to use that same empathy and the incredibly simple but effective mantra of "Be Kind" to overcome national terror (remember the panic buying?) and truly unite a "team of five million".
Over time, the kindness and empathy felt at times like a useful political shield, to avoid having to respond to Opposition attacks or to defend her own position. But at the most crucial moments, it was clearly genuine and it worked.
It also wasn't limited to emergencies. Ardern is the same person whether the cameras were running or not. In fact, some of the greatest moments of unexpected empathy (for a politician) came when there were few or no reporters around.
Charlie Mitchell, a Stuff national correspondent based in Christchurch, related on Thursday a story from the Prime Minister's first week in office. She visited a local Christchurch school and then an arts programme for people with mental health issues. Most of the reporters left after the school, with just Mitchell following along to the second venue.
There, Ardern was gifted a painting from a woman with schizophrenia and the Prime Minister said she'd keep it on display in her office. The woman had earlier told Mitchell she had dreamed of meeting a Prime Minister since she was a little girl. Cynically, Mitchell assumed the painting would be "dispatched to a cavernous basement in the Beehive and never seen again".
Five years later, he watched a video message from Ardern's office and saw something he recognised: the painting, on the wall behind the Prime Minister's desk, half a decade after she was first gifted it.
"It's just a small thing, but given everything that happened in the years after - much of it traumatic, toxic, chaotic - I was pleased to see that painting, which meant a lot to its creator, meant something to its recipient, too," he wrote.
That's Ardern's empathy, the genuinely difficult but rewarding work put into comprehending the experiences of others.
The generations who have grown up watching that empathy on display, in public and in private, will come away from the past five years viewing it as an integral part of leading a nation. It's not a nice-to-have, it's one of the fundamentals now.
