Jacinda Ardern: no sign of her on your local council yet

PoliticsAugust 21, 2024

Eight key quotes from Jacinda Ardern at the Democratic National Convention

Wellington editor

Jacinda Ardern: no sign of her on your local council yet

The former prime minister spoke about the parallels between Kamala Harris’s campaign and her 2017 Labour campaign.

Former prime minister Dame Jacinda Ardern spoke on Wednesday morning (New Zealand time) at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The Global Progress Action Luncheon was organised by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a progressive think tank. It is a side event at the convention; it was not televised and was held in a hotel conference room rather than the main venue, the United Centre.

The luncheon was titled “Healing the Nation—Purposeful Policies for the Next Administration”, and featured former prime minster of Sweden Magdalena Andersson, MPs from Germany and the Netherlands and some US political figures.

Ardern spoke for 15 minutes in a Q&A with moderator Patrick Gaspard, a prominent Democratic strategist and former ambassador to South Africa. Here’s what she said.

On the parallels between the Kamala Harris campaign and Labour’s 2017 campaign

“No one will know what it feels like to be Kamala Harris right now. What I do know, from my own relatively small experience from a country of five million people, is that seven weeks out from an election in 2017 I was the deputy leader of the New Zealand Labour Party. We were in opposition, and my boss came to work one day and he quit, and then he nominated me to run in the election seven weeks later.

“To give you a little flavour, the billboards with his face on them were already out there with me dutifully standing next to him as his diligent deputy. Some people thought there was no way we’d be able to reorganize our campaigns, so they just got a box cutter and they cut him out and just left me there. I’ve been walking around the streets of Boston, where I live at the moment, and seeing old [Biden-Harris] campaign signs that are folded over the top, so you just see ‘Harris’, so I’ve been thinking a little bit about what it feels like in those moments.”

On the economies of care

“For me, it came down to the simple fundamental question: Do women have enough choices in their lives when it comes to work and to childcare, or both? Are the decisions I’m making based on financial insecurity or genuine choice? The answer, unfortunately, for far too many women in New Zealand, was that financial insecurity was driving that decision making.

“When it came to women and financial security, we thought about what we could do in our first 100 days. We did things like increase paid parental leave to six months straight off the bat, we introduced a tax credit for children when they are born, we also wanted to ensure that there was greater financial support for those on low incomes. Acknowledging that study and the education of children is so influenced by the education of their mothers, we made the first year of university free. In those first 100 days, we showed a direction of travel, while acknowledging it would take time, but that was our destination.”

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On progressive messaging

“I think the real trick for us as progressives is saying: How do I share a vision message, whilst also acknowledging that change takes time, investment, and work?

“Nothing’s that quick in politics, and unfortunately, when you’ve got quite a disenfranchised and disillusioned voting public, trying to pitch hope and optimism and vision whilst delivering at pace is very difficult in a country of 5 million, let alone a country of over 300 million.”

On change and fear

“We know that as humans, change is very closely linked to fear. And it’s very easy, if you’re a politician who wishes to capitalise on that emotion, to attach change and fear together.

“I think it is a matter of looking for those issues where there is a moment to build consensus and not being afraid to reach across divides on those issues where we want long term certainty about our destination.”

On positive campaigning

“I think people crave politics being done differently. It’s not just about what we present and what our policy agenda is, but how we do it. I remember when I found myself in that first press conference [as Labour leader], not expecting that morning to be the leader of the New Zealand Labour Party and launching a political campaign, I was asked about how we would campaign, and I was very explicit that we were going to run a positive campaign.

“There’s a New Zealand saying that we were going to play the ball, not the man. It’s very old fashioned, it’s a rugby analogy. It means we’re going to play the game based on ideas, not based on personality and attacking one another. We wanted to do politics differently, and I think people are craving that kind of change.”

On the opportunities for women in politics

“In New Zealand, someone else carved the path for women to lead. My daughter asked me last night, “Mummy, are boys allowed to be prime minister in New Zealand?”. She knew that there was one, but she was just asking. She said, “how many have there been”? And I did the math – there have been 42 prime ministers and only three of them have been girls, and she was shocked. The point is, I was not the first, so I never questioned that I could be a female and in a leadership position.”

On empathetic leadership

“What I did question was, could I be an empathetic leader? Could I be a sensitive leader? Could I be someone who was often moved by the encounters I would have with people publicly? Could I be a leader as a worrier, someone who overthinks, and can get a bit on the anxious side? Could I be that kind of leader?

“I do think that there’s a place for empathetic leadership, now more than ever. I think we need to support those leaders who have that ambition of doing politics differently, because I think people crave more of that kind of leadership.”

On optimism

“Politics can be a lonely place. It can feel like no one knows exactly how it feels to be there in that position except those who are in at that time. The Field Fellowship reminded me there are fantastic people who are motivated by all the right things, by the idea of just improving people’s lives. Now, unfortunately, over the years, some of the voting public have seen politicians who have not been motivated by that, and as a result, the expectations have changed. Our job is to lift the sights and expectations of voters, again, not just to be optimistic, but to expect better, and then in turn, for politicians to deliver better.

“I have seen a countless number of politicians who want to do just that, and who are still out there leading the charge. We just have to make sure that they get enough of a platform that people see it, and I think that’s when we’ll create huge momentum for change, and we’re seeing some of that hopefulness, that optimism, right here in Chicago and in the United States.”

Keep going!

Christopher Luxon (Photo: Getty Images; additional design The Spinoff)

OPINIONPoliticsAugust 21, 2024

Yes, Luxon keeps mangling his words. But what he’s talking about matters far more

Duncan Greive

Founder

Christopher Luxon (Photo: Getty Images; additional design The Spinoff)

The prime minister continues to make basic communication errors – but a fixation on them risks masking some important truths.

It’s uncontroversial to note that Christopher Luxon’s basic political skills are coming along more slowly than his supporters hoped. A tiny sample from the last six months: “I’m entitled”, when asked about him claiming the accommodation allowance. Selling a rental property, thereby drawing attention to his vast portfolio. Multiple avoidable fumbles on benefit levels and staffing.

Most recently, it was mangling reading with maths during a press conference in Australia. “If you think about what we are doing with respect to mathematics, when you have 88% of Māori kids at Year 8 unable to read, those are the things and the conversations that we’ve been getting into.”

He made a basic communication error – saying unable to read, versus unable to complete mathematics to the expected level. It was a screw-up, and hardly an isolated one. Reporting on Luxon flubbing routine communications is now almost a beat unto itself. He is not exceptionally bad – Winston Peters is often comically abysmal, though it’s baked into his brand by now. Luxon might also be suffering by comparison, largely because the two most-recent long term prime ministers we’ve had, in Key and Ardern, were exceptionally prepared and precise.

Yet in the scheme of things, he garbled delivery at a press conference. It has distracted from what he was talking about, sure – but were it not for his misspeaking, the point he was trying to make would have gone entirely unreported.

How can we be so sure? Because the sentence is from a press conference which happened on August 16, and only made the news cycle on the evening of August 19, after blowing up on Reddit (as Meta and Twitter become less useful for news, Reddit continues to rise in salience). This shows the extent to which viral social content now drives the news agenda, sure – but it reveals something bigger, while also pointing to what is considered acceptable in our politics.

Namely that his sloppy language causes more concern, while troubling reading and maths attainment levels are now baked into our operating environment. This data was reported (and partly disputed) some weeks ago, but it did not mark a major break from the established narrative of an arc of achievement bending south. We talk about a cost-of-living crisis, a housing crisis, a health crisis (rightly, on all fronts) – but educational achievement levels that head one way don’t attract anything like the same consternation.

They’re part of a litany of worrying statistics around academic achievement, both external markers like the most-recent PISA study (itself masking the real level, due to some schools refusing to participate) and internal, like the MOE’s own data. For those who believe in education as a valve to reset inequality, there’s also a bleak trend noted by education minister Erica Stanford: the rise in middle-class parents using costly private tuition to bridge attainment gaps.

It’s entirely fair to argue about the contributors to the decline in educational attainment. The right says it’s down to excessive Covid-era school closures, a culture of lower attendance, open-plan classrooms, new teaching theories emphasising decolonisation over basic building blocks like maths and writing, along with the “balanced literacy” approach to teaching reading. The left says poverty, hunger, overcrowded housing, the impact of Covid, inequality of access to technology and lower status and pay afforded to teachers. The truth is surely some combination of the two perspectives.

an image of kids with their hands up striped in different colours — Image: Archi Banal

Yet one thing that is really different about this government is its request to have its success measured and regularly reported as a matter of considerable emphasis. This is the biggest contrast with the Ardern government. One of its first acts after being elected in 2017 was to abandon national standards in primary schools. They were somewhat controversial, but the process over what might replace them became long and muddled.

For many parents the result was that their child’s educational progress became far more opaque, and the country’s performance across regions, schooling years and demographics became harder to parse. The government has recently moved to reinstate more regular testing, but has selected a testing regime that is more broadly accepted than the national standards of the Key era.

There are arguments that testing can intrude on teaching time or encourage rote learning over more pliable knowledge. But without some sense of how a child is tracking, how can a parent, a school, a system know whether it’s improving or backsliding?

There was also some consternation about the fact Luxon’s statement referenced Māori learning levels, that Luxon said “unable to read” rather than “unable to add”, when neither is a great way of characterising the more complex reality. It connected to the coalition government’s fractious relationship with Māori. “If the state tells you that you are sick, dumb and poor enough times, you will grow up sick, dumb and poor,” wrote former NZ First and National MP Tau Henare in lambasting Luxon’s comment.

This might be the charge that stings and sticks most out of the episode. Luxon leads a coalition government that has a difficult relationship with Māori across a plethora of fronts, from te reo in the public service to the wind-back of Māori wards to Act’s Treaty Principles Bill. National has tried to position itself as the adult in the room, trying to “take the temperature down”, as John Key suggested. Sloppy language from the very top hardly helps make that thesis land.

Still, for all the justifiable critiques of both government policy broadly and Luxon’s style narrowly, the emphasis on curriculum measurement, targets and measurement – one it says it wants to mirror across the state – is a welcome change. Within education, it’s being driven by a energetic minister in Stanford, and means that come the next election there will be a raft of evidence about whether its programme is succeeding or failing. Voters will ultimately able to issue a verdict on that basis. Surely that is the whole point of government – and significantly more important than a garbled sentence.

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