A Different Kind of Power
by Jacinda Ardern

To understand the adult, look at the child. Jacinda Ardern grew up in the most ordinary of New Zealand circumstances: in a simple house in a small town, with decent, modest, hard-working parents, an older sister and a grey rescue cat named Norm. Her father was a cop; her mother was smart enough to go to university but never did. They were Mormons. They drove a beige Toyota Corona. They weren’t rich: almost all of Ardern’s clothes were home-made or hand-me-downs.

This was in Murupara, a small forestry town in the Bay of Plenty that was in decline by the time the Ardern family moved there, and that is where Ardern sets the first chapters of her memoir, A Different Kind of Power. And by the way, she really can write. This is how it starts:

You could drive for fifty kilometres in the Kāingaroa Forest and wonder if there’s anything left on Earth besides trees. That’s the view: radiata pines, each standing thirty metres tall, in tidy gridlines that extend as far as the eye can see. The forest is as vast as it is dense: tree upon tree, row upon row, kilometre upon kilometre.

Murupara was a small clearing in those vast, dense forests. It was also a gang town, and it had been hit hard by the fourth Labour Government’s economic reforms. Years later, when a journalist asked Ardern how she was politicised, she said it came from her time in Murupara, even though she was only primary school-aged then. The idea that she witnessed or at least sensed the kind of deprivation that was unleashed when Rogernomics made forestry workers unemployed and led to closed-up shops on the main street is a pretty easy conclusion to reach, but there is a different kind of politics.

The young Ardern was anxious and watchful. Her father was a good cop but she witnessed a tense scene between him and some gang members that never left her. Her older sister was bullied and the young Ardern became her defender. Her mother suffered from poor mental health and Ardern noticed. There is a sense of a small, decent family surrounded by danger (gangs, school bullies, mental health crises, even the dark forest beyond the clearing) with the young Ardern trying to protect them. She wanted to help; that was her politics. It wasn’t about doctrines or books – not until she started volunteering for the Labour Party at university – but it was always about wanting to keep people safe and perhaps caring too much. When she started using the word ‘kindness’ in politics, she immediately thought of Murupara.

You can trace the line from the kid who worried about everyone else to the prime minister who wanted to embrace the Muslim community, who wanted to bring kids out of poverty and give them warm homes, who wanted to keep all of New Zealand safe from a rampant virus and was finally defeated because some people simply resisted being cared for, or saw mandates and QR codes as a form of fascism. That is the clearest reading of the Jacinda Ardern story. It is why the book is dedicated to ‘the criers, worriers and huggers’, the other people like her.

The story is easy to mock because it only works if you believe politics can sometimes be motivated by an innate sense of goodness, rather than cynicism or self-interest. The idea of kindness as the basis of politics was and still is ridiculed; some are unable to trust well-meaning expressions of sensitivity and concern. That meant Ardern’s politics were characterised instead as childish, shallow, naive, all about rainbows and unicorns and hugs and tears, which is not just patronising and probably misogynistic, but ignores the reality that Ardern was also a thinker who put in the hard work and the long hours – partly because she was terrified of getting things wrong and being found out (‘My whole short life I had grappled with the idea that I was never quite good enough’). She wasn’t a show pony or an airhead.

As you read A Different Kind of Power, you warm to this person, to her empathy, her nervousness, her doubt, her idealism, her ‘grinding sense of responsibility’, her thoughtfulness, her self-deprecation. We all know people like this; some of us are people like this. Her father worried she was too thin-skinned for politics, and maybe he was right. There is a touching moment when a very nice high-school teacher, Mr Fountain, tells her about something called ‘impostor syndrome’. A self-diagnosis followed.

After Murupara, the family moved to Morrinsville, ‘the dairy farming town I will forever call home’. They live on an orchard, with a forest on one side and a golf course on the other, and it sounds idyllic but Ardern has a knack for describing the way tragedy can suddenly intrude into family life. Of course, she noticed everything, and remembered it all, and she experienced stress in childhood as persistent stomach-aches (‘I wasn’t sick, it turned out. I was worried.’). As a teenager, the suicide of a friend’s brother had her asking hard questions about her faith, but she remained in the Mormon church, and hours of door-knocking prepared her for a life in the Labour Party:

While I might have struggled with starting conversations about God and sometimes even politics, I would learn that if I was there to ask someone about their lives, what would make a difference to them – well, that I could do. That I wanted to do.

There were other, greater emotional burdens later. Her sections on the Christchurch mosque shootings are as powerful as you would expect. She writes about feeling ‘a sorrow so immense that even now, years later, there are still no words to describe it’.

The book is skilfully written and even suspenseful. Ardern is good at describing people in quick sketches. Grant Robertson is friendly and dishevelled. Helen Clark is an intimidating superhuman with a dry sense of humour who has the same lunch every day (an egg sandwich and a cup of tea). Andrew Little is a quiet man whose office was always too cold. Simon Bridges is easy and affable. Scott Morrison is dozy and indifferent. Only Winston Peters remains enigmatic. No surprise.

And then there is David Cunliffe. The politician who led Labour to a catastrophic defeat in 2014 comes across as self-absorbed, grandiose and ridiculous. That includes his famous apology for being a man, which seems to have been experienced as a seismic shock by other Labour MPs on the campaign trail (‘He did what?’). Ardern’s basic goodness makes the passages about Cunliffe even more devastating.

From 2017 on, the beats are familiar. There was her defining takedown of TV host Mark Richardson, whom she calls ‘the man who read the sports news’, soon after she became leader. Outraged by his commentary about employers deserving to know if women plan to have babies, she was ‘a hot ball of anger’ by the time she sat across from him in the studio. That moment was anticipated by an earlier and less successful one, when she angrily confronted some rude Victoria University students who were heckling Helen Clark. ‘Control your woman,’ one of them shouted at MP Steve Maharey, who was with Ardern.

Some other foreshadowing may seem a little clunky to some readers. When she writes about the success of the government’s M. bovis eradication strategy, she is also preparing readers for why we needed to eliminate rather than live with Covid-19. An early encounter with a conspiracy theorist while working in Phil Goff’s office anticipates a future world in which all the lonely, distressed, angry people could find each other and be manipulated by people who ‘played on their distress for their own gain’. Imagine that.

It’s sad that it remains impossible to be neutral about Ardern two and a half years after she abruptly left New Zealand politics. The idea of a ‘derangement syndrome’ was coined for George W. Bush – and has been applied to John Key and Donald Trump – but it fits Ardern better than any world leader. Something about her does indeed derange people; they literally go mad. You only need to read some of the comments on reviews of this book in the days after it was published, or even some of the reviews themselves, to see that syndrome in action.

Positions on her cut to the core of character. Praise her and you are seen as a sap who is easily tricked by spin and the politics of kindness; on the other side, there is the mob who drew Hitler moustaches, swastikas and nooses on pictures of Ardern, and who were inspired to dig up Parliament’s lawn, throw paving stones at police and burn down trees and a children’s slide, having been liberated from any kind of decency and restraint by the example of the crowd who stormed the US Capitol a little over a year earlier.

Will this book change the minds of the crazies? If they dare to read it, they won’t find a tyrant here. They will find someone who tried to do the right thing, but doubted herself – and still doubts herself. They will find someone who is earnest, but not completely. They will find someone who is not pious, but funny about herself and others. Sometimes she is funny in a classically understated, Kiwi way, as in her description of Murupara before Rogernomics: ‘By 1980, Murupara’s downtown was bustling with not one but two fish-and-chip shops.’

She is not entirely saintly. She can also have a dig when it’s appropriate, as in this fine passage about the days after the mosque shootings:

Someone had called me ‘New Zealand’s chief mourner’. At the time I wasn’t sure how I felt about this. Was I the chief mourner? And was that a good thing? I’d been trying to focus on the grief of those who’d been most affected. But a journalist had recently asked me if I cried at night when I went home. Of course I cried at home. On the night of the attack, I returned to Premier House, long after Neve had gone to sleep, I’d found Clarke waiting for me at the end of the hall, and I’d cried into his shoulder for what felt like an eternity. But I wasn’t going to tell that to Barry Soper of Newstalk ZB.

Beautifully done. By the way, that ‘someone’ was probably Masha Gessen in the New Yorker, who thought Ardern had ‘staged a revolution’ in the way she responded to the mosque attacks. The sad truth is that Americans get her more than we do.