Only New Zealanders can judge Ardern

The latest edition of the left-leaning American monthly magazine The Atlantic includes a piece about Jacinda Ardern that might be described as fulsome. Most journalists wrongly use this word as a synonym for extravagantly generous, as in “fulsome praise”. But strictly speaking, fulsome means nauseatingly sycophantic or excessive. To be truly fulsome, the praise must be laid on so thickly that the automatic reaction is to screw your nose up at the excess of it all.

Journalist Uri Friedman pretty much satisfies that requirement with his profile of our prime minister. The tone is set by the headline: New Zealand’s Prime Minister May Be the Most Effective Leader on the Planet. The following blurb carries on in similar vein, declaring that “Jacinda Ardern’s leadership style, focused on empathy, isn’t just resonating with her people; it’s putting the country on track for success against the coronavirus.”

Friedman writes: “Her leadership style is one of empathy in a crisis that tempts people to fend for themselves. Her messages are clear, consistent, and somehow simultaneously sobering and soothing. And her approach isn’t just resonating with her people on an emotional level. It is also working remarkably well.”

Make no mistake, Friedman dug deep before reaching these conclusions. His principal source seems to have been Helen Clark, Ardern’s mentor and former boss – a thoroughly objective observer, in other words.

Clark told Friedman that New Zealanders feel that Ardern “doesn’t preach at them; she’s standing with them”. She continued: “They may even think, Well, I don’t quite understand why [the government] did that, but I know she’s got our back. There’s a high level of trust and confidence in her because of that empathy.”

The other source quoted in Friedman’s article, an American who’s described as an international relations scholar at Victoria University and former US Defense Department official under the Obama administration, largely echoes Clark’s assessment. “She [Ardern] doesn’t peddle in misinformation; she doesn’t blame-shift; she tries to manage everyone’s expectations at the same time [as] she offers reassuring notes,” Friedman quotes Van Jackson as saying in an email. “She uses the bully pulpit to cue society toward our better angels—‘Be kind to each other’ and that kind of thing. I think that’s more important than people realise and does trickle down into local attitudes.”

Friedman goes on to cite Ardern’s “informal and informative” Facebook Live chats. “During a session conducted in late March, just as New Zealand prepared to go on lockdown, she appeared in a well-worn sweatshirt at her home (she had just put her toddler daughter to bed, she explained) to offer guidance ‘as we all prepare to hunker down’.”

Later in the article, he writes: “In a more recent Facebook Live, one of Ardern’s staffers walked into her office just as she was launching into a detailed explanation of what life would look like once the government began easing its lockdown. ‘Oh look, it’s Leroy!’ she exclaimed, assuring viewers that he was in her ‘work bubble’. A children’s toy was visible just behind her desk. The scene seemed apt for an era in which work and life are constantly colliding.”

That these folksy-sounding interludes may have been orchestrated to reinforce Ardern’s media image doesn’t appear to have occurred to Friedman. (I’m not saying they were, but a little journalistic scepticism might be in order.) He might also have noted the conspicuous placement of a photo of Michael Joseph Savage on a shelf behind her in a televised speech from her office in the Beehive. It would mean nothing to an American journalist, of course, but it would resonate with many New Zealanders, subtly conveying the impression that Ardern has inherited the mantle of New Zealand’s revered first Labour prime minister – the man entrenched in political mythology as the saviour who hauled the country out of the depths of the Great Depression.

For the record, I think Ardern has done a pretty remarkable job handling the Covid-19 emergency. At her daily press conferences she comes across as composed, assured and personable. There’s little hint of the immense pressure her government is under.

Considering that only three years ago she was a newly installed deputy leader of the opposition with no experience in government, still less any preparation for the demands of leading a country through not one but three major political crises (the Christchurch mosque attacks, the Whakaari/White Island eruption and now this), her coolness and apparent decisiveness under pressure is almost preternatural.

Moreover, I don’t believe her affability (or as Ardern would pronounce it, affabilidy) is phony. I don’t think anyone could fake that charm for all this time, and under all this intense scrutiny.

Neither do I doubt her sincerity. But when all is said and done, she’s a politician and will do whatever works for her. In her case that means oozing empathy, appearing on Facebook Live in a grungy sweatshirt and smiling a lot (even when what she’s saying isn’t particularly cheerful, a habit she may have picked up from Clark). Her response to the mosque attacks made her a global media superstar, and naturally she’s going to play to that strength.

Even so, Friedman has allowed his admiration for Ardern to override any sense of journalistic detachment. He could have approached any number of New Zealand sources for a more measured assessment of Ardern, but that’s probably not what The Atlantic and its readers want. Journalists (even those on The Atlantic) love stereotypes, and the image the world media have built around Ardern is that of a warm, caring Madonna.

The only acknowledgment that New Zealanders are not unanimously enamoured of the prime minister comes when Van Jackson suggests that Ardern, like Barack Obama, is “polarising at home [while] popular abroad”. It’s the most perceptive observation in the piece; Friedman would have done well to take note of it.

There have been other articles in a similar vein. CNN carried an item headlined Lessons in leadership: New Zealand’s virus response which highlighted Ardern’s announcement that the Easter Bunny had been declared an essential worker – a bit of Kiwi whimsy bound to appeal to those accustomed to thinking of politics as staid and humour-free. A column in the Financial Times headlined Arise Saint Jacinda, a leader for our troubled times (was a subversive headline-writer taking the piss?) described Ardern as “a model of compassionate leadership”. London-based New Zealand freelance journalist Laura Walters suggested Ardern’s “clear and decisive” leadership made Boris Johnson look floundering and ineffectual. Meanwhile, back at home, Stuff columnist Sue Allen, whose background is in PR (or as they prefer to call it now, “communications”), wrote that Ardern’s daily press conferences were “appointment viewing”. (Allen also praised the clarity of the government’s pandemic messages, but in fact they were – and still are – often fuzzy, ambiguous and inconsistent.) And of course there was that piece in the Washington Post by the paper’s Beijing bureau chief, New Zealander Anna Fifield, which portrayed the government under Ardern as showing the way in the fight against the coronavirus.

There’s a common factor here. Many of the journalists cooing with approval are young(ish) women, like Ardern. It would hardly be surprising if they felt an affinity with her and wanted her to succeed. The same is probably true of the female journalists in the Wellington press gallery, which may explain the largely uncritical coverage Ardern gets domestically. The old journalistic notion that reporters should try to distance themselves emotionally from their subject has been suspended.

But an additional factor comes into play when the journalists are outsiders. Many overseas journalists’ perceptions of Ardern are coloured by their disdain for their own leaders. They look at Ardern – young, female, left-wing, intelligent, articulate, empathetic (that word again) and attuned to concerns like climate change and multiculturalism – and lament that their fellow Americans (or Brits, or Australians, or whatever) are too dumb or racist or myopic to elect someone like her. Behind every homage to Ardern penned by a star-struck journalist from overseas, there’s a sense of hurt and resentment that they’re saddled with leaders they see as yesterday’s politicians – male, stale, pale and worst of all, conservative.

New Zealanders lap all this up, of course. Friedman’s article was reported in the New Zealand media as if it were the voice of God. We love to be noticed, and never more so than when other countries look up to us. (After decades of sheep jokes from across the Tasman, it’s taken as the ultimate compliment that many Australians, especially those from the achingly woke inner-city suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, gaze longingly at our prime minister and fervently wish she were in The Lodge in Canberra instead of Scott Morrison. They just know that Jacinda would never have gone to Hawaii on holiday while her country was burning.)

But while we may feel a warm glow reading these adulatory appraisals of Ardern in the foreign media, they don’t amount to a hill of beans, as she must know. Because ultimately, it’s only what New Zealanders think of their leader that counts.

Years ago, I stopped being a judge in the New Zealand newspaper awards because I reasoned that the only people in a position to know whether a paper was doing a good job were the people who read it every day, 52 weeks a year – not a group of outsiders making their decisions based on what the paper considered were its four best issues of the year. The same applies to prime ministers. Only New Zealanders are entitled to decide whether Ardern is doing a good job.

There was a parallel of sorts in the 1980s and 90s, when extravagant praise was showered on Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson by overseas admirers of their economic reforms. While I supported many of those changes, it jarred with me that Douglas and Richardson were lionised on the international conference circuit. The reforms may have looked great when seen from the glass towers of New York and London, but the economic shock and dislocation experienced in New Zealand led to a far less sanguine view at home. That explains why Jim Bolger, noting Richardson's unpopularity, came to regard her as a liability and sacked her as Finance Minister.

But back to that Friedman piece. Arguably his biggest mistake was the premature assumption that Ardern and her government have shown the way to beat Covid-19. While that assessment may yet prove to be true, it’s almost certainly coloured by the writer’s obvious liking for Ardern and his desire for her to succeed. But defeating the disease is one thing; dealing with the economic mayhem created in the process is a potentially much tougher challenge. And in the end, all the glowing reports from overseas journalists will count for nothing, because only New Zealanders will be in a position to judge how well Ardern has done.