The terror and tragedies that defined Jacinda Ardern’s first term as PM

Tuesday, 1 April 2025

Jacinda Ardern faced a barrage of unforeseen events that would’ve tested even the most seasoned leader. Yet her response to the Mosque terror attacks, and the Whakaari disaster, saw her popularity soar. Oh, and she also gave birth to Neve.

In this five-part series, senior journalist Lloyd Burr looks back at this fascinating, turbulent, and tumultuous time in New Zealand politics and investigates the dramatic rise of Ardern, her fall and how the country fell out of love with her. This is part two.

Jacinda Ardern woke on the morning of March 15, 2019 in her own bed, at her own home in Auckland’s Sandringham.

After a string of phone interviews with Radio Dunedin, ZM, and The Rock, her Crown car picked her up and took her to a meeting with health company ProCare in Mangere. It was then off to the airport for a flight to New Plymouth.

Her schedule in Taranaki wasn’t too gruelling. The Prime Minister was meeting with school kids who were spending their lunch break protesting climate change, before heading to a hydrogen event and announcing plans for Taranaki to be a global leader in green hydrogen production.

The event finished at 1:30pm. Her next stops were to be a new, green school and Pukekura Park, where she’d be opening the WOMAD music festival. While on her way there, the unthinkable was unfolding in Christchurch. Brenton Tarrant had begun his murderous rampage at Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre that would ultimately leave 51 people dead and nearly 90 injured.

Ardern’s response to the terrorist attack - and other tragedies like the eruption of Whakaari White Island and the murder of Grace Millane - helped define her premiership. Her empathy earned her plaudits from across the world, and she became renowned for her politics of kindness.

‘I’ll be Prime Minister AND a mum’

You’d have never known Jacinda Ardern was suffering from severe morning sickness on October 26, 2017. She was glowing in the red and purple Kate Sylvester dress she’d chosen to wear for her swearing in at Government House. She pushed through that historic day and the subsequent months on a rollercoaster of nausea and only a select few knew.

In January, she made the news public via an Instagram photo featuring two big hooks, and a smaller one - alluding to partner Clarke Gayford’s love of fishing.

“And we thought 2017 was a big year! Clarke and I are really excited that in June our team will expand from two to three, and that we’ll be joining the many parents out there who wear two hats. I’ll be Prime Minister AND a mum, and Clarke will be “first man of fishing” and stay at home dad,” wrote Ardern.

The news made headlines around the world. She’d be the second ever Prime Minister to give birth while in office, behind Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto in 1990.

It was also particularly timely given on the election campaign, Ardern had fired up at Three’s AM Show co-host Mark Richardson over his comments about whether she wanted children. Political reporter Jenna Lynch remembers it well.

“There was a visceral reaction to that from women who have worked in a workplace and had to think about when they're going to take maternity leave,” she says.

“This was on a whole other extreme level. You're in charge of the country and have to take maternity leave, but the guilt you feel for leaving your job to do a really important job and the guilt you feel coming back after having a baby. I can't imagine what that was like for her.”

Before becoming Prime Minister or even meeting Gayford, former MP Annette King says Ardern would always talk about children. “She loves children and she talked about her desire to have children,” King wrote in her biography.

The buzz around the ‘first baby’ was akin to a royal baby but Ardern carried on as normal, often reiterating that she was “not the first woman to multitask”. Her task was much more than a typical mum, as former Cabinet minister Andrew Little remembers.

“It was about making sure Jacinda was okay. Not only was she about to be a mum and she was also the prime minister but she was freshly a prime minister. She still had to learn the ropes of the job and it was a coalition, so she had to negotiate all of that,” he says.

On June 21, 2018, Ardern gave birth to a baby girl named Neve. Media congregated outside the hospital and again, headlines were made around the world.

“She was quite private about Neve,” Lynch says. “She bought her out and introduced her to New Zealand, but other than that, it was only on quite rare occasions where Neve would accompany them to public events because they wanted to give her as normal childhood as they could”.

The then-Speaker Trevor Mallard had relaxed rules around babies in the Parliamentary precinct. Babies soon filled Parliament - many of them ending up on Mallard’s lap, seeing him dubbed the ‘baby whisperer’. TVNZ ran footage of Ardern breastfeeding which caused an uproar but it was Ardern with Neve at the United Nations General Assembly that saw kudos pour in from all corners.

“There were things like that which Jacinda Ardern did that put New Zealand on a global stage in a way that was quite organic that other other leaders couldn't necessarily do,” Lynch says.

“Your daughter should have been safe here”

The murder of Grace Millane in December 2018 shocked the nation, and Ardern’s reaction was praised here and abroad. I was based in London at the time, and it was such a big talking point that a leader was tearing up at a press conference. Her empathy and compassion was relatively uncommon in politics.

“From the Kiwis I have spoken to, there is this overwhelming sense of hurt and shame that this has happened in our country - a place that prides itself on its hospitality/manaakitanga, especially for those who are visiting our shores,” she said, visibly upset.

“So on behalf of New Zealand, I want to apologise to Grace’s family,” she said, pausing to compose herself. “Your daughter should have been safe here and she wasn’t and I’m sorry for that.”

Little says many politicians would find it hard to find the right thing to say in a situation like that, particularly because the investigation into her murder was still ongoing.

“I think Jacinda's nature is that she would immediately have understood the emotional impact on the family and she felt a need to be able to say something that was reassuring and acknowledged and gave respect to what had happened and was also respectful to the family,” Little says.

‘They are us’

In the back of a Crown van which was taking Ardern to a new enviro-school in Taranaki on March 15, 2019, she took a phone call from her chief press secretary Andrew Campbell. He told her about an active shooting situation at a Christchurch mosque where a handful of people had been killed.

Little was travelling with her, and as the minister in charge of the intelligence agencies, was getting phone calls too, including one from director general of intelligence Rebecca Kitteridge.

“It was very early days,” Little recalls. “She said, ‘We think there are one or three fatalities.’ That was what they understood at the time. But she did say it looks like a terrorist attack.”

Ardern headed to New Plymouth’s police station and the horrors of the situation soon began to unfold. That afternoon, she held a press conference at the Devon Hotel.

“This is one of New Zealand’s darkest days,” she told reporters. “Clearly what has happened here is an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence.

“Many of those who will have been directly affected by this shooting may be migrants to New Zealand. They might be refugees here. They have chosen to make New Zealand their home and it is their home,” Ardern said.

“They are us. The person who has perpetuated this violence against us is not.”

Campbell helped write her statement, but it was Ardern who came up with ‘They are us’.

“She was writing those things on a napkin in the back of a car,” he recalls. “The thing that she was absolutely amazing at was framing really complex information or how she felt about things in order to explain those situations to New Zealanders.”

Campbell says it was common for Ardern to come up with her own stuff. “I would write a speech or write some remarks and give them to her and you'd get this very polite note back with some changes that inevitably made it infinitely better.”

Little was deputising for Ardern and opening the WOMAD festival, which was all about peace, unity, and harmony - the complete opposite of what Tarrant represented. He recalls being amazed at Ardern’s ability to encapsulate the mood of the nation in that press conference.

“It was very inclusive. Those who were worshiping at the mosque weren't treated as others, they were treated as all of us - which very much defines Jacinda’s view of the world,” he says.

An Air Force Plane took her and officials back to Wellington, where she met with and was fully briefed by a consortium of advisors, before giving another press conference.

“This can now only be described as a terrorist attack,” she said, before delivering a message to Tarrant himself. “You may have chosen us, but we utterly reject and condemn you.”

The following day, Ardern flew to Christchurch to meet the families of the victims. She wore a black and gold hijab as she hugged, comforted, and talked to those whose loved ones had been so brutally taken away from them at places sacred to their Islamic religion.

“She showed how absolutely critical it was to make those immediately affected - but also the wider migrant community in New Zealand - to feel included as opposed to excluded,” says Campbell.

“It was one of the rare instances of terrorism - anywhere in the world - where the community comes down a bit more united and stronger. Often these things lead to deeper divisions,” he says.

Ardern was accompanied by a handful of MPs including Greens co-leader James Shaw - who was sporting a black eye after being assaulted as he walked to work two days earlier.

“It was a privilege to be there with her,” he says. “She just had this facility for understanding the pain that people were feeling and then being able to say exactly the right thing. It came from a place of real empathy.”

Shaw says if anyone else had been Prime Minister, the response might have been one of inflaming rather than calming.

“There could have been a way where there was a more macho response of ‘We're gonna declare a war on terrorism’ or the kind of stuff that amped up the temperature. But she had a way of just getting that people were grieving, they needed support through that and that we needed to do something about that kind of extreme right terrorism and hate, and gun laws,” he says.

Images of Ardern’s response to the attack made headlines around the world, and one was even projected onto the side of the Burj Khalifa - the world’s tallest building. Brett O’Riley, who was the CEO of the Employers and Manufacturers Association at the time, says Ardern’s handling of the atrocity still resonates when he travels to Islamic nations.

“I had a taxi driver in Dubai who cried in the car when he realised I was a New Zealander and thanked me for the response that we made. He said there's no other country in the world that would have done what New Zealand did, of which Jacinda led the response to,” he says.

Political commentator Grant Duncan says New Zealand could not have asked for a better prime minister at that time.

“Her compassion, empathy, reaching out to the victims, helped to prevent a potential cycle of blame and polarisation and brought the country together at a really critical moment.

“There was the potential for that to turn into a really, really nasty blame game. She short circuited that and she knew instinctively how to do it and we should give her credit for that.” Duncan says.

While she’s often remembered for her compassion at this time, Lynch says there’s another thing too: her decisiveness over gun law reform.

“There was the immediate looking at the gun laws, the immediate banning of the semi-automatic weapons used. Everything happened really quickly in the aftermath so it was also about her decisive nature in that moment,” Lynch says.

Despite the slow speed at which government wheels turn, gun laws were overhauled almost unanimously by Parliament less than a month later.

Whakaari Eruption

Two weeks before Christmas in 2019, 47 people - tourists with tour guides - were exploring Whakaari/White Island, an active volcanic island off the coast of Whakatane. Its sulphur formations, steam vents, mud pools, and fumaroles made the island a popular place to visit - especially for cruise ship visitors to Tauranga.

Just after 2pm on December 9, it erupted and killed 22 people. Another 25 were injured, many of them severely. The rescue effort was dangerous and was mainly left to local helicopter operators and boaties.

“There were a lot of international travelers who were affected,” says Little. “So she was aware that the news would go further and wider and it was about demonstrating New Zealand was able to respond in an empathetic sort of way”.

Campbell says Ardern went into another gear on the ground in Whakatane, where the response was being coordinated.

“One of the things that was so impressive about her was her work ethic and her rolling up her sleeves,” he says. “We got to Whakatane and she immediately went into meetings with local police, local council, and trying to sort a whole bunch of stuff out.”

That included trying to put together a list of those who were missing, because they were from different tour companies, and different countries.

“She was immediately pulling in resources, and mobilising more people to come in and help. She was very hands-on and very practical in her support,” Campbell says.

But Ardern was about to face her biggest challenge yet - one that originated in Wuhan, China.

In part three, senior journalist Lloyd Burr looks at Ardern’s soaring support and how the tide turned on her popularity.

If you missed part one, you can read it here.