Jacinda Ardern, I have a problem: people keep writing open letters to Jacinda Ardern. It has to stop.

Hello Jacinda Ardern,

Thank you for reading this letter, which I have sent in a genuine effort to contact you, and not as a hackneyed vehicle for a tedious, self-aggrandising sermon relitigating some bugbear from years ago. Anyway, I remember years ago, New Zealanders aired their disagreements the traditional way, by either getting drunk and arguing with each other or getting drunk and fighting. If the dispute was of national significance, it could be resolved through warring newspaper opinion columns, or in the case of Winston Peters, by calling someone a cuck in parliament. 

I yearn bitterly for those more sweet, innocent days. Back then I could go weeks or even years without seeing some minor gripe or whinge escalated into an open letter to the former prime minister of New Zealand, the Rt Honorable Dame Jacinda Ardern. Jacinda, hi, I’m sending this letter to see if you can do something about the scourge of people sending you open letters all the time. 

It didn’t start with you, of course. Writers have been penning open letters for decades. Who could forget Paul’s open letter to the Ephesians, Jacinda Ardern’s open letter to MediaWorks chief executive Mark Weldon, or more recently, Spinoff fool’s open letter to the Waitangi Dildo? But over the last six or so years, these missives have increasingly been addressed to one person alone. Open letters to Jacinda Ardern have been published by The Spinoff, The 13th Floor, the Herald, the Country, the Outdoors Party, the Taxpayers Union, and The Spinoff again.

Whenever a New Zealander has a quibble or setback, their first port of call is to contact the nearest media outlet and fling a letter out in the general direction of our former prime minister. In 2021, Stuff published an open letter to Jacinda Ardern from a woman complaining she’d been forced to put her “bi-hemispheral life” on hold and miss “pea season” over the trifling matter of a global pandemic. Just last week, Sir Ian Taylor published what scientists estimate to be his 73rd open letter to Jacinda Ardern complaining that seeing your book in the airport made him spend 22 hours obsessing about the Covid response, which was definitely justified, your fault, and not cause for self-reflection.

Enough! Jacinda, I know you’re reading this. There has to be a way to put a stop to the madness. Maybe set up a PO Box where people can send their gripes about climate change and vaccines without subjecting the rest of us to their grousing. Lobby the government for a bespoke, financially crippling open letter tax. If all that fails, maybe quit politics and move to the US, where surely only the most desperate or deluded would continue to write you open letters.

Dame Jacinda Ardern, I expect quick action over this issue. This letter is my attempt to effect meaningful change for our great nation. If it wasn’t, you could be forgiven for thinking I’m shoehorning your name into the world’s most parasocial media format for the sake of attention and clicks, and cloying, folksy, first-person sentences like this one are kind of a bit disingenuous and patronising.

But we both know that’s not the case, eh mate. How’s the fam? Let’s catch up soon to talk progress on this one. 

Yours sincerely, Hayden