Jacinda Ardern through her own eyes

Sunday, 1 June 2025

Then-PM Jacinda Ardern embraces a member of the Muslim community following the national remembrance service for the victims of the March 15 mosques terrorist attack at Hagley Park in Christchurch, Friday, March 29, 2019.

Tracy Watkins is editor of The Post and Sunday Star-Times.

OPINION: The title of Jacinda Ardern’s book, A Different Kind of Power, may turn out to be prophetic. As Ardern prepares to hit the celebrity circuit to promote the book, her new home and employer - Harvard University - is at war with US president Donald Trump over international students and faculty.

Ardern went to Harvard on a fellowship in 2023, so it seems unlikely the matter won’t be raised during her round of media interviews.

Ardern still receives the star treatment overseas - she is pencilled in for interviews with both US and British media, including TV. So her words will almost certainly carry to the ear of the US president, especially as her leadership was often lauded as the anti-Trump.

The book is labelled a memoir, which translates as “a personal narrative, written from the perspective of the author, about an important time in their life”.

Covid, and government mandates and lockdowns, became increasingly divisive.

Few could argue with the fact that it was an important time in Ardern’s life: her time as prime minister was one of the most turbulent, most defining periods in our history.

For Ardern personally, it was just as defining; told that she was unlikely to ever conceive a child naturally, she found out she was pregnant almost at the same time she was anointed prime minister by Winston Peters. She opens the book with a chapter about her pregnancy test.

Ardern and partner Clarke Gayford with their new baby daughter, Neve Te Aroha Ardern Gayford, at Auckland City Hospital.

The Ardern government ended office with an unenviable record; flagship policies like KiwiBuild, and lifting children out of poverty, were abject failures.

It also had lofty goals on the environment, and climate change, that it never lived up to; in fact, the Ardern government seemed on track for likely defeat in 2020 until Covid came along and everything changed.

We all know what happened next; it was a period of great highs and great lows. The highs - the initial euphoria of beating Covid, thanks to our natural advantage of isolation - gave way to huge lows, as mandates, the inevitable spread of Covid, and lockdowns, led to crumbling social cohesion and public opinion turning against Ardern and her government.

But despite that there were also triumphs; Ardern projected onto the world stage an image that New Zealand basked in; young, progressive and unfailingly cool.

Her leadership during tragedies like the 2019 attack on a Christchurch mosque, killing 51 worshippers, inspired a global outpouring of support. We embraced the image of us that she projected: kind, empathetic, inclusive.

The Right Honorable Dame Jacinda Ardern, former prime minister of New Zealand, was the 2025 Class Day speaker.

And for a time there during Covid, we truly were the team of five million, even if that sense of “team” eventually disintegrated.

The book deals with these moments, but if, like me, you’re looking for fresh insights, or signs of regret over some of the decisions her government made, you may be disappointed.

Ardern’s trademark self-deprecating humour is weaved throughout the book, and we learn more about some of her emotional highs and lows. We also gain some fresh insight into her own personal mechanisms for coping with such momentous events as the terror attack, and Covid.

But we don’t learn a lot more about what was going on behind closed doors within her government, which must, at times, have been under enormous strain.

And for someone who has talked often about her huge capacity for self-doubt, the book holds back from the sort of self-reflection that you might expect from Ardern, given the enormity of the events she led the country through, and the far-reaching consequences of some of her decisions.

As someone who worked in the press gallery during that time I turned the pages looking for answers to some of my questions from that period. I would have loved a forensic blow-by-blow, for instance, for some understanding of how we got to where we were by the end, a country divided by lockdowns that carried on long after they had lost their sense of purpose.

But those questions remain unanswered.

There are no explosive new revelations in Jacinda Ardern’s memoir, but it helps us better understand the woman behind such a tumultuous time in our history.

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