“You can be anxious, sensitive, kind and wear your heart on your sleeve. You can be a mother, or not, an ex-Mormon, or not, a nerd, a crier, a hugger – you can be all of these things, and not only can you be here – you can lead.”
Jacinda Ardern has left New Zealand’s parliament with a highly personal, often emotional speech, calling for an opening up of politics to those who may not see themselves as typical leaders.
“I thought that I would need to change dramatically to survive. I didn’t,” Ardern said. “I leave this place as sensitive as I ever was – prone to dwell on the negative, hating [parliamentary] question time so deeply that I would struggle to eat most days beforehand.”
“I’m here to tell you, you can be that person and you can be here.”
In her final address to the country, Ardern opened up about her struggles as a prime minister, “a role I never thought I was meant to have”, talking about her worries, thin skin, and levels of anxiety that left her in cold sweats or unable to eat, as well as the political achievements and battles of her political career.
The valedictory address spanned the personal and the political, touching on her struggles with IVF and infertility and the impact of politics on her family, as well as the defining challenges of her leadership: the Covid-19 pandemic, the Christchurch mosque shootings, and the Whakaari volcanic eruption. She described her dramatic entry into politics as “a cross between a sense of duty to steer a moving freight train, and being hit by one”.
Wednesday afternoon was Ardern’s final day in parliament, and the speech marked her farewell to New Zealand parliamentary politics altogether. She nodded to the reasons that had driven her into political life, and the events that came to define her legacy.
“The reasons I came here … they’re all there in my maiden speech – climate change, child poverty, inequality. I am after all, a conviction-based politician,” she said. “Despite that, I have become used to my time as prime minister being distilled down into a different list: a domestic terror attack; a volcanic eruption; a pandemic; a series of events where I found myself in people’s lives during their most grief stricken or traumatic moments.”
Ardern became emotional as she spoke about meeting survivors in the immediate aftermath of the mosque terror attacks, and looked up to members of the Muslim community who sat in the public gallery, greeting them with “Assalamu alaikum”.
The ex-prime minister will leave a complex legacy: her achievements on the Covid response and responses to disasters and the Christchurch terror attacks on New Zealand’s Muslim community won her international recognition and acclaim, but slow progress on the housing crisis, inequality and the climate emergency tempered her achievements at home.
In Ardern’s maiden speech to parliament she had outlined her political commitments – primary among them the spectre of child poverty and New Zealand’s clean green reputation – and said that her words would come back to haunt her.
As Ardern leaves, those ghosts are still lingering. The government’s progress on child poverty since she took office has been significant, but limited – a few percentage points over the course of her prime ministership. On climate change, the process has been grindingly slow; this week, New Zealand announced its first quarterly drop in overall greenhouse gas emissions, after a series of successive increases.
One of the defining challenges of her leadership was the Covid-19 pandemic, and she spoke of New Zealand’s overall outcomes – including some of the lowest excess mortality rates in the world – as one of her most significant achievements. But she spoke, too, of the fractures that emerged in that period, the latter years of which were marked by anti-vaccine movements and protests. Ardern had been subject to a number of death threats in that time, and a near constant stream of violent, abusive rhetoric from extreme groups.
“We did lose other things along the way,” she said. “One, in some ways, was a sense of security, that we can engage in good robust debates and land on our respective positions relatively respectfully.”
She talked about being confronted by enraged protesters on the job, and her initial belief that she could talk them out of the more radical Covid conspiracy theories. “But after many of these same experiences, and seeing the rage that often sat behind these conspiracies, I had to accept I was wrong,” she said.
On Tuesday, Ardern had said she hoped her resignation could “lower the temperature” of New Zealand politics. That heat had been a regular feature of Ardern’s appearances in her final year in office – both the fever pitch of a violent occupation of parliament grounds in 2022, and in more piecemeal, often abusive protests that followed her to primary schools and speeches.
On the afternoon of her speech, however, no protesters were visible on parliament’s lawns.
She left to a standing ovation and loud singing, as MPs and the public rose to sing waiata – traditional Māori songs.
“Tutiro mai ngā iwi,” the crowds sang – roughly translated: “Line up together, people, all of us, seek after knowledge and love of others.”
