Jacinda Ardern sat at a plastic table, laughing and chatting with primary school students as they unpacked their lunchboxes. “What’re your favourite lunches?” she asked the group, as they chewed through sliced quarters of orange.
It was a routine, bread-and-butter visit for the then-prime minister in February last year, checking on the progress of a government lunch program at a small school outside Christchurch. That afternoon, however, it quickly turned ugly.
Protesters gathered at the school’s gates, chanting “go home Jacinda”, bearing an “arrest warrant” for “genocide” and “crimes against humanity”. As the demonstrators pushed down the school’s drive, Ardern was bundled into a van and driven away, chased by protesters screaming profanities and abuse. The day ended in ugliness: a scuffle, furious parents, and a handful of children crying and screaming on the school lawns.
It was a scene that became increasingly common in the last year of Ardern’s prime ministership. Over the course of the year, we saw the weeks-long occupation of parliament lawns, violent mass protests against vaccine mandates, and a spate of death threats against the prime minister personally.
Collectively, they represented a swamp of online vitriol that was increasingly spilling over into real-world violence, in moments that seemed a bleak and unfamiliar change to New Zealand’s relatively temperate and accessible political landscape.
In the wake of Ardern’s shock resignation, New Zealanders face a reckoning over the degree to which abuse and threats could have contributed to her burnout in the top role. Ardern herself has broadly rejected the idea that these attacks were the decisive factor in her resignation, saying that she simply did not have “enough in the tank”. In one of her final press conferences, the outgoing prime minister said she would “hate for anyone to view my departure as a negative commentary on New Zealand”.
“I have experienced such love, compassion, empathy and kindness in the job. That has been my predominant experience,” she said.
But as the scope and volume of abuse directed at the former prime minister becomes increasingly apparent, some New Zealanders have asked whether a toxic political environment helped empty the tank for Ardern – and the degree to which an abusive and vitriolic strain of discourse is fundamentally reshaping New Zealand’s political landscape.
“What we have seen unfold is not something that is going to be rolled back as a consequence of Ardern’s departure,” says Dr Sanjana Hattotuwa, an online extremism researcher at Te Punaha Matatini. “There is something much more fundamental that has changed in the tone, timbre and trust of commentary and conversation.”
He says researchers have seen an explosion in violent, misogynistic and extreme rhetoric in New Zealand’s online spaces and social media networks.
Nicola Willis, deputy leader of the opposition National party, said that while angry messages had increased, the positive encounters still far outweighed the negative.
“I wouldn’t want any young woman - or woman of any age or stage - to be put off entering parliament for fear of this sort of behaviour, because there is a whole sisterhood out there who … wants to support us and won’t let us be silenced,” she said.
The Green’s Golriz Ghahraman, however, says this is already happening.
“It’s actually shutting down debate,” says Ghahraman, New Zealand’s first MP of refugee background. The rising level of vitriol, she says, contributes to members of the public “leaving political spaces, let alone joining a political party, running as a candidate becoming an MP. At a very basic level it’s going to be affecting people’s mental health and turning them off politics and democracy.”
While researchers have documented an overall shift in online discussions of New Zealand politics, no figure copped it like Ardern.
Vitriol ‘just continued to rise’
In the days after Ardern’s resignation, the Hate and Extremism Insights Aotearoa research team at the University of Auckland began a brief quantitative study of online discourse directed at the prime minister, comparing comments directed toward her with those aimed at other prominent political figures.
“We expected that Ardern would get more,” says Dr Chris Wilson, director of the research team. “The striking thing was how much more.” Overall, they concluded that Ardern faced online vitriol at a rate between 50 and 90 times higher than any other high-profile figure. Of the posts classified as negative, hateful, sexually explicit or toxic, a full 93% mentioned Ardern. The posts were classified automatically, by language analysis programs, but Wilson said even a cursory look through them was “horrific, to be honest. Targeting her family and daughter, a lot of language referencing sexual violence.”
While posts mentioning other political figures tended to ebb and flow, spiking around major news events, vitriol directed at Ardern continued unabated. “It was a constant,” Wilson says – even the rollback of pandemic restrictions seemed to do nothing to dent the online rage.
“The other striking thing was that in the second half of 2022, when you might expect it to be easing off, it just continued to rise.”
Vile, often misogynistic comments increasingly spilled over into overt death threats. Police data released in 2022 indicated that threats against Ardern had tripled over the past three years. Since 2019 police had recorded more than 100 threats against Ardern, at least eight of which were considered serious enough to be prosecuted in court.
Even before the prime minister’s shock exit, however, New Zealand political operatives and campaigners had been increasingly discussing the shift in political discourse – and what it would mean for the coming election.
At the Labour party conference last year, outgoing president Claire Szabo said the party was preparing for the coming election by ramping up safety measures for MPs and volunteers on the campaign trail, and aimed to place a specialised safety officer in every campaign.
“The campaign next year is going to have some elements we’d rather not see,” she said. “Those things that increasingly creep into our politics as unwelcome guests: attacks, vandalism, harassment, unlawful behaviour, and insidious trolling.”
“I’m a real grassroots politician – I love being on the ground. I love our people. It’s where I get my energy from. But something’s changed,” said Labour minister Kiri Allan in a panel discussion by the Spinoff last year. “Stuff when you’re by yourself is actually OK – but if you’ve got little kids and your … kids see you scared, that’s not something I think is acceptable.”
Some roots of this simmering fringe lie in the pandemic years. The same era that won Ardern enormous popularity and support had a dark side: increasingly disfranchised and alienated, some New Zealanders became embroiled in conspiracy theories. The economic hardship that has marked the last year may also have contributed to an anti-government mood.
“There’s a fractured sense of community out there at the moment,” Allan said in 2022. “We need to really heal the rift that has occurred in our social fabric over the last couple of years. These last couple of years have been very hard.”
Having a woman at the highest level of government has also highlighted the bitter underbelly of misogyny.
“In New Zealand, we have one of the highest rates of gender based violence in the world,” says Ghahraman. “It’s not actually too much of a stretch to say that it’s part of our culture to some extent.”
“I think the first step is to acknowledge that it is a problem,” says Hattotuwa. “Not just a problem on social media,” he says. “Also as a society.”
