💥 BREAKING NEWS: Jacinda Ardern’s legacy takes a powerful turn as her genuine compassion is praised yet questioned for whether it could ever meet the weight of expectation ⚡.NH

Damien Grant is an Auckland business owner and a regular opinion contributor for Stuff, writing from a libertarian perspective.

OPINION: “I liked her more and respected her less” was David Cohen’s response to my question; how had his view of Jacinda Ardern evolved after spending two years researching and writing about our 40th Prime Minister.

We know, or we think we know, Ardern; but who is David Cohen?

He came to my attention through his many years as an NBR columnist. He writes serious books, including Fridays With Jim, a biography of the 35th Prime Minister based in part on over twenty interviews with the King Country’s Great Helmsman.

Cohen is a respected writer with journalistic credentials. He has a particular interest in the failures of state care, which he enjoyed as a resident of the Epuni Boys Home and featured in his book; Little Criminals.

It was this expertise that brought him face to face with Ardern, then a back bench MP, at the Auckland Museum in 2011. The two debated “life at the margins”. Cohen talking from his experience, research and writing was up against Ardern’s empathic authority.

Prime Minister – the film trailer

“With Respect” Cohen would begin.

“Really, dude, you’ve got to stop using that phrase” Ardern mocked. She lost the debate but won the room. A smile full of self-aware glibness and the audience leaned towards her. “I was outclassed” Cohen reflects.

Cohen’s book, Jacinda The Untold Stories, draws on interviews from those who worked for and with Ardern as well as critics, commentators, key personalities of the moment such as Dr Siouxsie Wiles and Oliver Hartwich alongside the likes of David Seymour, Matt McCarten and Stuff’s Luke Malpass. He enjoyed the assistance of fellow journalist Rebeca Keillor and funding from Canadian-New Zealander investor Jim Grenon.

The book takes an objective critique into the Ardern years and is an attempt to understand the individual.

Ardern was raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Later-day Saints in the Waikato plains. Being the only Mormon in her village meant she “…saw it as something that made me a bit different. It was a defining feature for me.”

As a young adult she became exposed to a different set of values in the milieu of university. Her faith’s hostility to homosexuality was not reconcilable with the progressive values she began to adopt. Something had to give and it was her faith. It was, Cohen writes, “… a brave move, and it is likely there was a hefty personal price for making this decision.”

You can leave Jesus, but Jesus does not leave you. Kindness is central to the religion of Joseph Smith and the values of her church lingered long after her faith was lost.

She lived overseas, making an impact in Tony Blair’s Camelot before being called back to New Zealand by a phone call from Phil Goff and given a winnable place on the Labour list. She was 28.

What, the reader is left to question, did Goff see that Ardern herself didn’t? She has spoken honestly and courageously of having imposter syndrome but the party recognised potential.

In preparation for my interview with Cohen and to get a different perspective I took myself to see Clark Gayford’s homage to his wife; Prime Minister; Elected to Serve. Inspired to Lead.

I enjoyed it. Ardern is a complex and likeable individual. So is Gayford. I never understood the vitriol. He is a decent chap who enjoys life, has his own career, is in love with his wife and committed to his daughter. These are admirable qualities.

Still. This is a movie about a consequential political figure and between montages of the protagonist as a mother, daughter, and empathetic leader there are moments when a different persona is visible.

One scene has the Prime Minister looking down in confusion at the protests on the parliamentary lawn unable to comprehend the fracture points her iron-fisted kindness had riven.

Here is where Gayford and Cohen overlap. The kindness practised by Ardern came with a heavy weight worn by those reluctant to benefit from her compassion. Ardern is genuinely compassionate. She cares. The belief in kindness wasn’t a cynical political strategy but a defining characteristic of Ardern as a person and as a politician. This is why so many, including myself, find her likeable.

And yet. Kindness is not an economic strategy. It is not a means of increasing productivity, resolving entrenched racial disparities nor combating a pandemic. Ardern, staring down at the parliamentary lawn saw but did not comprehend the limits of her doctrine.

Kindness cannot be administered at the end of a truncheon. Her philosophy is a dust jacket without a book. She did not, as Bolger did, sit down with Cohen; preferring the soft interviews of Stephen Colbert and Katie Couric. A wise decision.

The tragedy of the Ardern premiership and those who believed in her is she is advancing an ideology of illusion and not a prescription that can achieve the tangible results her, and those who believe in her, demand.

The book, and the movie, are both recommended.

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