Popularity and pain: How the tide turned against Jacinda Ardern

Wednesday, 2 April 2025

Managing major crises defined the first two years of Jacinda Ardern’s Prime Ministership. But it was the arrival of Covid that tested her leadership like never before. While it brought her widespread praise and an historic election win, it also forced her to make massive calls that eventually saw the high red tide begin to turn.

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 three.

Flanked by two New Zealand flags and a photo of Labour royalty Michael Joseph Savage, Jacinda Ardern delivered an unprecedented message to the nation from her Beehive office.

It was March 21, 2020. A mysterious virus called Covid-19 was wreaking havoc around the world and it had arrived in New Zealand.

Speaking straight down the barrel of the camera, Ardern’s style was more presidential than Prime Ministerial. Those watching knew it was serious.

“I’m speaking directly to all New Zealanders.” she began. “Over the past few weeks, the world has changed. And it has changed very quickly.”

She wasn’t wrong. Just two days before, she’d closed the borders and as people watched this latest address, they must’ve had an inkling what was coming: lockdowns.

“Today I am announcing an alert system for Covid-19,” Ardern said, before outlining the four tiers and the associated restrictions. “New Zealand is at alert level two.”

It meant limiting social contact, cancelling events, and stopping unnecessary travel.

The 8 minute, 31 second-long clip finished with a message that would become part of her catchcry: “Please be strong, be kind, and unite against Covid-19.”

Covid arrives

Nearly three months earlier, at the beginning of January 2020, Green Party co-leader James Shaw noticed his “double PhD medical doctor sister-in-law” starting to stock up on face masks and other items as news came out of China of a killer virus.

“She worked next door to Michael Baker, the epidemiologist, and she doesn't scare lightly,” Shaw says. “I remember going to see Grant [Robertson, Finance Minister] and I said ‘Look, this is going to be bad, where are we at with it?’. I actually was quite anxious quite early on,” he recalls.

Ardern held numerous urgent Cabinet meetings but Shaw says it became clear when dealing with health officials, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, and the other cogs in the public service machine that concerns weren’t being taken seriously.

“I became very, very frustrated that the kind of advice we were getting was very much ‘Don't you worry ministers, it's all under control, we've got this handled.’ My blood boiled because I was like ‘You do not have this handled, you do not have a plan, you have no idea what's coming,’” Shaw says.

Once the severity of the virus became clear in places like Italy, the US, and Europe, that’s when Ardern was faced with some big decisions. Then-Cabinet minister Andrew Little was at a friend’s 50th birthday party when Ardern convened an emergency Cabinet meeting.

“I had to go onto the street and found this little empty park to do this call. It was at the point at which the US had blocked travel to and from China and we were being prevailed upon to think about the same sort of measures,” he recalls.

“We made the bold decision to close the borders. And it was a very popular decision initially,” he says.

Political reporter Jenna Lynch says it created a huge logistical challenge for Kiwis who were overseas. “Winston Peters was the foreign minister at the time and came out and said ‘Get on the planes home now or shelter in place because things are about to lock down’,” she says.

One of the main reasons for doing that was New Zealand’s abysmal ICU (Intensive Care Unit) capacity, as Shaw recalls. “We had something like 40 or 50 ICU beds and nurses to manage them. In the whole country. In other words, our level of capacity was below any level at which we could have Covid.

“There was basically no safe level and that was when we switched to the elimination strategy. We cannot have this here at all because we do not have the capacity in the health system to deal with it.”

Ardern’s chief press secretary was Andrew Campbell and he says Ardern’s dedication during the onset of Covid, the associated lockdowns and border closure helped define her premiership.

“The responsibility she took during that period was unprecedented, and I think her view was that if she was going to ask the country to do these very, very challenging things, then she needed to be working harder and longer and more than anyone else,” he says.

“She was up in the office earlier than anyone else and the last to stop working at the end of the night,” recalls Campbell.

Covid-communicator-in-chief

Just as she’d done with the previous crises, Ardern’s communication skills became vital in helping people navigate the new-normal they were living in.

Two days after her down-the-barrel address from her office on March 21, she gave another one, plunging the country into lockdown.

“She said ‘We're going to go home, stay home for four weeks initially’,” Lynch says. “The whole country. Everyone stay home. There was quite a lot of panic but this is where the communicator-in-chief really took hold because she became the only show in town,” she says.

This pattern of daily updates and press conferences continued throughout the lockdown. The Sunday Star-Times’ Andrea Vance described Ardern’s approach as“soft propaganda”, particularly her use of “Go hard and go early”.

Ardern’s messages were taken live on TV channels, radio stations, and livestreams. Her reach was as wide as it could possibly get.

“Multiple times during the day she’d be doing communications, be it directly through the press conferences to the public, or then in the evenings through her Facebook Live,” says Campbell. “What partly distinguished her during that period was her ferocious work ethic and her communications.”

Locking a country down and closing its borders is no mean feat. While it had huge restrictions on people’s freedom, it had huge economic implications too. Businesses were haemorrhaging cash, others were asking workers to take pay cuts, and some were on the verge of bankruptcy.

“Closing the borders was just the start of it. It was what you do after and to support people and businesses to get through what was going to be a very disruptive time,” Little says.

Robertson ripped up and re-wrote the Budget and it included a multibillion-dollar wage subsidy scheme to get businesses through - which it did successfully. There was also the introduction of Managed Isolation Quarantine (MIQ) for expats and approved visitors to come across the border. It saw dozens of hotels repurposed as quarantine facilities.

The measures meant New Zealand kept Covid out and became the envy of much of the world. While others were drowning under Covid cases and deaths, New Zealand was enjoying relative freedom, concerts, and able to go about their lives like normal.

Associate Professor of Politics at Victoria University, Lara Greaves, says Ardern’s style during Covid instilled a sense of calm for people that it was all under control.

“Ardern had this decisiveness, ‘This is gonna be the communication’, ‘This is what we're going to do’ and sticking with that and not really wavering from it. That was a core component of that Covid response,” Dr Greaves says.

Opposition in meltdown

When governing parties soar, opposition parties tend to implode. Labour and Ardern had experienced a fair share of implosions in opposition against the soaring popularity of John Key’s Nats: the ousting of Phil Goff in 2011, the rolling of David Shearer in 2013, and the infighting under David Cunliffe in 2014.

But now it was National’s turn. Bill English had moved aside at the beginning of 2018 and was replaced by Simon Bridges. But Covid meant Bridges failed to make any serious dent in Ardern’s popularity. His preferred prime minister rankings were bleak, as was the party’s polling. It was the perfect environment for agitations to grow and leadership plans to hatch, and that’s exactly what happened in May 2020 in the midst of the pandemic.

Todd Muller launched the challenge against Bridges, with Nikki Kaye as his running mate. But the partnership lasted less than two months, with Muller’s mental health forcing him to throw in the towel.

The coup and the collapse of the new leadership team infuriated National MPs and it saw Judith Collins thrown into the role to contest the election, which had to be delayed due to a case of Covid being discovered and eliminated.

MMP history

No party since the introduction of MMP had won an outright majority, and many thought the system made it impossible. But the circumstances of 2020 were about to change that, and it was evident as Ardern campaigned.

“The Jacindamania that existed in 2017 just could not compare,” recalls Lynch. “It was like a pop star had come to town. It was like Taylor Swift was in town. Everywhere we went - and we were still supposed to be social distancing and with masks on - people were just mobbing her.

“We were packed like sardines with cameras walking backwards trying not to hit people, mothers throwing their babies in to get photos. It was Jacinda-mega-mania.”

Greaves says one of the reasons for Ardern’s immense popularity during this time was a phenomenon called ‘rallying around the flag’.

“We saw in a lot of governments, people cling to the status quo, even when thousands of people were dying. So there's a bit of that rallying around the flag effect plus Labour actually doing a good job, and that caused that giant jump,” she says.

Political commentator Grant Duncan says the public “rewarding” Ardern for her initial Covid response and style of leadership during it.

“They were making decisions in the face of deep uncertainty. Jacinda was prepared to be open, accountable, she appeared daily explaining to people alongside the Director-General of Health what was going on, why they were doing it, answering everyone's questions, and being really patient about it too,” he says.

Ardern went on to win the election with 50% of the vote, giving Labour 65 seats - an outright majority.

The dilemma

While the election was an endorsement from the public that the elimination strategy had been the right move, Ardern’s government faced its next dilemma: Now what? What’s the pathway out of it?

Campbell recalls the conundrum which he says weighed heavily on the Prime Minister.

“Okay we've got no Covid but how do we get out of this mess?,” he says. “Her approach to politics at large was that she was always prepared to make tough calls even if she knew they were going to be difficult.

“The easiest thing to do is take a more pragmatic approach, but Covid didn't afford that, a virus doesn't afford that,” he says. “She picked that up early, and we had a science-led response rather than a political response.”

Vaccination was a key part of the answer. Other countries like the UK and US had been rolling out vaccines since December 2020, and although Ardern had ordered numerous vaccine brands, the rollout was slow and lacked urgency.

Given New Zealand’s fortunate position of being Covid-free, the slow vaccine rollout wasn’t too much of a problem. Medsafe argued it needed time to observe trials overseas, while others said other countries needed them more than New Zealand.

Only frontline and essential workers were eligible from the beginning, but by May, the rollout to the general public began - albeit very slowly and not without problems. Two months later though, came an absolute spanner.

Spanner in the works

On August 17, 2021, the entire country went into lockdown when a Devonport man tested positive for Covid, with no link to the border or MIQ. The country had an alert level system at the time, and all of New Zealand went into alert level 4, the most serious. Part of the reason for this was because it was the more severe delta variant.

Even though Shaw was a minister outside of Cabinet, he had regular contact with Ardern as co-leader of the Green Party.

“I still remember Jacinda ringing me to say we've got a case. And it was a very mysterious case,” he says. “It was very, very difficult scientifically to trace how it had happened.

“The nature of Covid is once you've got one case, you know that there's about 20 others that are out there. So I guess my personal mood shifted at that point because it was like, okay, well, here we go,” Shaw says.

Measures were put in place like the mandatory use of face masks in public places for everyone over the age of 12, and mandatory record keeping and sign-ins at events and businesses.

Brett O’Riley was the chief executive of the Employer and Manufacturers Association at the time and recalls how chaotically this lockdown was handled by the Government compared to the one at the beginning of 2020.

“The initial [2020] response was pretty professional,” he says. “It utilised the same kind of resources and processes that you'd expect in the civil defence emergency.

“But the Auckland lockdown was the first time we saw a response that was - to be perfectly honest - chaotic. It wasn't driven by the same process and system that had dealt with the first national response. Instead, it was driven out of Wellington, driven by somebody in the Ministry of Health,” says O’Riley.

Small, seemingly simple things like the southern Auckland border were tripping up health officials. It was put at the Bombay Hills meaning people living south of it couldn’t go to work on the other side.

“I made my concerns pretty vocal with the Prime Minister,” he says, recalling a debrief Ardern had invited him to. “The person from the Ministry of Health said ‘We didn't realise so many people crossed the border into Auckland every day’ which was just such a bizarre statement.”

Some bizarre border-crossing stories emerged too, like gang members smuggling a boot load full of KFC into Auckland, and sex workers who illegally left the Auckland zone for Northland but it turned out they weren’t sex workers after all.

M.I.Queue

A month after the lockdown, the Government changed the way it allocated its Managed Isolation Quarantine (MIQ) spots in response to a huge demand from expats wanting to return home. Many of those expats had joined a Facebook page called Grounded Kiwis (which eventually took legal action ).

The changes meant it became a weekly lottery, and dramatically increased angst amongst those who needed to get home, many who couldn’t because they were stuck in weekly lotteries.

Around this time, a group called Voices for Freedom was starting to gain momentum from those dissatisfied with the lockdowns, restrictions, and vaccine requirements.

“Over a million Kiwis live overseas and they’re told they need a lottery ticket to get back into the country,” says co-founder Alia Bland. “There were horrific stories and images of people who couldn't get to their parent or child's funeral, or to their deathbed.

“Those are the sorts of wounds that don't heal. People don't get over that sort of thing,” she says.

Little - who was Health Minister by this stage - says the new MIQ system had its failings.

“Internally, I was very concerned about the applications for a compassionate approach in individual cases.I didn't see much evidence of compassion. And I was concerned about that,” he says.

The snowball of Covid discontent was beginning to gain momentum, and unfortunately for Ardern and her government, it was growing.

On Thursday, in part four, senior journalist Lloyd Burr looks at the elements that drove the revolt against Ardern: mandates, misinformation, and prolonged lockdowns. You can read part one here, and part two here.