This book isn’t for us. It’s hard to escape that sense for much of Jacinda Ardern’s memoir, whether it is her translating the word “waka” or saying she was in her “junior year” of high school.
No, you will think as you plough through the 337 breezy pages in search of juicy political gossip, this is a book for her overseas fans, for people who know her for the big moments that wowed the international media – not for the domestic reader interested in getting a fuller view of those historic years.
Indeed, Ardern becomes prime minister only on page 200. The 2020 election comes about when you have a frustratingly small amount of the book to go. Large policy fights are explained to the overseas audience, Ardern’s position spelt out in its simplest form, and then they are never heard of again.
But perhaps it is asking too much for a prime ministerial memoir to either dish mountains of dirt or delve deeply into the policy fights of yesteryear. At least Ardern has done us the service of writing a book setting out her version of some of the events, something no other prime minister since Jim Bolger has managed. And she has written one that is compulsively readable, easily consumed in two or three sittings, and often very funny.
Ardern writes with a fluency familiar to anyone used to her speeches, many of which she wrote herself. Long sentences are followed by very short ones. Moments of acute personal embarrassment or doubt are relayed on the page with a startling rapidity, as if she is not just your best friend but your best friend a few wines in.
This largely works. You start to trust her when she is writing about her personal thought processes thanks to the genuine sense that she is opening up and giving you a look at how surreal it is to go from an MP dismissed as unserious in early 2017 to meeting world leaders as an equal later that year, all while finally managing to get pregnant, and experiencing a hefty dose of impostor syndrome.
So expect intimacy. Expect to know just how close she was to vomiting at the Speech from the Throne in Parliament in 2017, or just how much she embarrassed herself at her first meeting with Helen Clark. Expect to learn about the quite real struggle her mother had trying to raise Ardern and her sister in the tiny, very rough community of Murupara, nervous breakdown and all, before her own worries about motherhood as daughter Neve learns a whole handful of words before the one most babies learn first: “mama”. Expect to get a play-by-play of her decision to quit, including the cancer scare which sparked the thought process that got her there. Her first thought when a doctor found a lump in her breast was that this might finally be a way out of being prime minister. Don’t expect much hindsight on whether that decision was the right one.
This intimacy is crucial to the wider point Ardern is trying to make in the book: that she wants people to know they can be politicians while still doubting themselves, can be humans first and politicians second, and that indeed the first job will make them better at the second job. This is the closest thing to a one-sentence summation of Ardernism she ever really offers.
Ardernism was always more a sensibility than an ideology. It was a way of looking at the world and reacting to it, not a theory of change. It was being good in a crisis – and she really was. Reading about those fraught days in March of 2019 and 2020 again from her perspective is clarifying. Ardern was able to reach into a reserve of something in those two horrible months that few of our leaders ever have, a kind of pure political power that transcended the office and represented exactly what Kiwis like about our country, not just empathy and warmth but an organised resolve. It wasn’t just her saying “they are us”, it was her going on to ban the guns weeks later.
But the problem of being so good in crises is how rudderless you can look outside of them. Most of the prime ministerial sections of the book are either about a crisis or a foreign trip. There is some discussion of her decision to rule out the capital gains tax for good while she was leader, and David Parker’s work on a wealth tax, but nothing about Chris Hipkins squashing that idea, or really any discussion of whether she looks back on that decision differently now.
Sometimes you feel that all the introspection and confessional details are allowing her to get away from really reckoning with whether she made the right calls outside of those crises. At one point she recalls sitting with Michael Cullen as he teared up watching National repeal bits of KiwiSaver, internally vowing that whenever Labour would next get to power they would have to do more to make their policies permanent. There is no follow-up where she grapples with the fact that the Helen Clark/Michael Cullen government was far better at bedding in its achievements than hers. KiwiSaver still exists – alongside Working For Families, the NZ Super Fund, interest-free student loans and KiwiBank. Fair Pay Agreements do not.
There are some hints, near the end of the book, that perhaps she isn’t so certain quitting was the right idea. But there is little reckoning with the facts on the ground as they are – that much (but not all) of her political project was immediately repealed when Labour left office. There is little attempt to engage with the arguments against the latter half of the Covid period, when MIQ’s usefulness looked shaky and vaccine mandates radicalised thousands of people.
Perhaps that will come later on, when things aren’t still so raw. And perhaps this is still a book for us, for a domestic audience not yet ready to let go of the fights of those years. It is unlikely to win over any confirmed Ardern-hater, and moments will seem cloying to almost everyone with a pulse. But there are bits where you really feel you are in the head of a prime minister trying to make some of the biggest decisions our country has required since the war. What more could you ask for?
