Good Riddance to Jacinda Ardern, Arch-Statist
Jacinda Ardern was not, as U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris has claimed, “a forward-looking global leader who has inspired millions around the world.”
We will continue to be your single source of truth. . . . Unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth. —Jacinda Ardern
On January 19, 2023, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced her resignation, saying she “no longer has enough in the tank” to stay in the role until the coming October election.1 Many New Zealanders, who lived through some of the harshest lockdowns in the world under Ardern’s leadership, are rejoicing.
But media and politicians alike have piled praise on Ardern’s premiership while dismissing her critics as an extreme fringe. Guardian journalist Jess Philips said that Ardern “presented the world with the kind of leadership that uniquely leaned on her emotional intelligence. . . . She leaves a legacy she can be proud of.”2 Ardern’s Canadian counterpart, Justin Trudeau, thanked her for her “empathic, compassionate, strong, and steady leadership over these past several years,” and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Ardern “has shown the world how to lead with intellect and strength. . . . She has demonstrated that empathy and insight are powerful leadership qualities.”3 The only mention Philips made of Ardern’s critics was in reference to a “constant threat of abuse” from “people who hate progressive women and believe they are damning masculinity; anti-vaxxers outraged by her tough Covid stance; those with a general loathing of all politicians.”4 Major New Zealand news outlet Stuff said Ardern had faced “vile vitriol directed at her by oafs and lunatics.” (That line was hyperlinked to an article titled “Jacinda Ardern: An Inspirational Role Model and Victim of Ingrained Misogyny.”)5 Many look up to Ardern as a role model of leadership, but does she warrant such adulation?
Ardern has been active in politics since joining the Labour Party at the age of seventeen. She went on to become president of the International Union of Socialist Youth (IUSY), where she advocated “progressive answers to the 2008 financial crisis,” including “redistribution between the north and the south and . . . between the poor and the rich.”6 Both the IUSY and Ardern herself have advocated “decolonization” (seeking to revert the impact Western powers had on their colonies and reasserting elements of native cultures in its place).7 While leading the IUSY, Ardern adopted the organization’s Soviet-inspired use of “comrade” in her speeches and led a movement against “today’s dominating economical system of Western capitalism.”8
Shortly after becoming Labour Party leader in 2017, she lost that year’s election to the National Party. Nevertheless, determined to become prime minister, she entered into a coalition with New Zealand First (NZF), a populist nationalist party. NZF’s policies and values stood in stark contrast with hers; she held that developed countries had a responsibility to help citizens of poorer nations, whereas NZF advocated barring those people from pursuing a better life in New Zealand with a 10,000-person-per-year immigration limit (down from 72,000 at the time). The party also opposed her goal of increasing the representation of the historically indigenous Māori people in New Zealand’s government.
The first defining moment of Ardern’s career as prime minister came in March 2019 when a gunman walked into the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch and murdered fifty-one innocent Muslims. The shooter, who livestreamed his spree, had planned the attack as retribution for Islamic terrorism in Europe and as a response to what he considered the erosion of European culture and its replacement by Islam. In response, Ardern announced a tightening of New Zealand’s gun laws, including a ban on automatic weapons. She set up the Christchurch Call to Action Summit, a regular meeting of world leaders and social media providers aimed at defining rules to prevent terrorists and those advocating violence from using social media to spread their messages. “We cannot simply sit back and accept that these platforms just exist and that what is said on them is not the responsibility of the place where they are published,” she said. “They are the publisher. Not just the postman. There cannot be a case of all profit, no responsibility.”9 This was despite the fact that Facebook had voluntarily taken down the attacker’s livestream—and with astonishing rapidity, after it had been seen by only a few hundred people.
Ardern’s response to the massacre won her widespread support. Although her measures violated rights, restricting people’s ability to own guns and threatening new restrictions on social media platforms, her victims were gun owners and business leaders—not people with whom most of the public sympathizes. But the way she resorted to bans and restrictions demonstrates how she views government: as an arbiter of truth and morality, free to censor and violate rights as it sees fit. This would become much clearer when COVID-19 arrived the following year.
In the last week of February and the first week of March 2020, New Zealand recorded its first two confirmed COVID-19 cases. By the middle of March, recorded cases were only in the mid-teens. Yet, despite the tiny number of confirmed infections, on March 15 Ardern mandated fourteen days of isolation for inbound travelers, proudly boasting that New Zealand had “the widest ranging and toughest border restrictions of any country in the world.”10 They clearly weren’t tough enough for her, though, and four days later she completely closed the borders to all noncitizens or permanent residents. She put the country into full lockdown on March 25 as recorded cases edged up to the low hundreds, a week before New Zealand recorded its first COVID-19 death. The restrictions on international travel and a system of regional lockdowns for different parts of the country remained in place for more than two years, even locking some New Zealand residents and citizens out of the country.
Ardern pursued a “zero-COVID” policy, with cities and regions locked down for as little as one case. She implemented the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act 2020, which gave the minister of health the power to issue COVID-related orders to the public and empowered law enforcement to “enter, without a warrant, any land, building, craft, vehicle, place, or thing if they have reasonable grounds to believe that a person is failing to comply with any aspect” of the lockdown restrictions.11 The National Party and the ACT Party described the act as an overreach, and New Zealand Human Rights Commission’s Paul Hunt said he was “deeply concerned” about the lack of scrutiny during the act’s passing, calling it “a great failure of our democratic process.”12 But Ardern was unconcerned, treating the consequences of her restrictions like a joke. In one announcement she laughed and smiled as she told travelers, “You either get your tests done and get cleared or we will keep you in the facility longer.” In another, she announced a small relaxation in restrictions by saying, “You can now see family and friends again in their homes, and use the bathroom—inside. Luxury.”13
The following year, her government passed the COVID-19 Response (Vaccinations) Legislation Act 2021, which gave it the legal authority to impose vaccine mandates. It also authorized “the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety, the Minister for COVID-19 Response, or any minister under any warrant or the authority of the Prime Minister” to issue direct orders to the public. Later in 2021, the government announced a “no jab, no job” policy for teachers and health-care workers.
Ardern instructed the public to disregard any organization that disagreed with government pronouncements regarding the pandemic, claiming that the state is the sole legitimate source of truth:
You can trust us as a source of that information. You can also trust the Director General of Health and the Ministry of Health. For that information, do feel free to visit—at any time—to clarify any rumour you may hear. Otherwise, dismiss anything else. We will continue to be your single source of truth. We will provide information frequently. We will share everything we can. Everything else you see—a grain of salt.14
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ardern has been a consistent ally of one of the world’s most rights-violating governments. In 2022, during the latest of several meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping, she reaffirmed New Zealand’s support for the Chinese Communist Party’s “One China Policy”—in other words, its stated aim to conquer and subjugate independent Taiwan.15 She publicly celebrated the fact that China remains New Zealand’s biggest trading partner, rather than risk Chinese trade embargos by criticizing the Xi regime’s rights abuses in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, as did neighboring Australia. In late 2022, when China finally started relaxing its own draconian COVID-19 restrictions (one of very few countries to implement heavier restrictions than New Zealand), Ardern announced a desire to lead a trade mission to China, clearly undeterred by the shocking details that have emerged of the Uighur genocide or the violent suppression of antigovernment protests there.16
Ardern’s closeness with the Xi regime shows that she has no compunction about supporting governments that mislead and abuse their citizens. There is a measure of irony in the fact that Chinese government disinformation—particularly its suppression of information about COVID-19’s existence, origins, and transmissibility—was a major cause of the pandemic that Ardern leveraged to trample New Zealanders’ rights.17
Jacinda Ardern was not, as U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris has claimed, “a forward-looking global leader who has inspired millions around the world.”18 She has not, as London Mayor Sadiq Khan claims, showed “exceptional leadership and an unwavering commitment to creating a better world.”19 By contrast, GB News presenter and New Zealand expat Dan Wootton identified her true nature:
The first COVID authoritarian has fallen. . . . A China-loving politician who tried to present herself to the world as the epitome of “be kind” . . . when her response to the pandemic was anything but compassionate. In fact, it was downright dystopian, nasty, and heartless, as she brainwashed her fellow woke disciples—thanks to a compliant media obsessed with her celebrity status—into embracing a zero-COVID prison island while legally locking out over a million citizens trapped overseas, no matter how tragic the circumstances. All while demonizing the unvaccinated.
For a leader who allegedly showed an “unwavering commitment” to creating a “better world,” this is a pretty terrible legacy. If Ardern were as empathetic, compassionate, and insightful as most reactions to her departure suggest, she would have respected the rights of New Zealanders, including their liberty to travel and to speak their minds freely. She didn’t, and that is how she should be remembered.