Jacinda Ardern: How the Mighty Fall

When New Zealand Labour Party leader Jacinda Ardern announced her resignation as New Zealand’s Prime Minister on January 19th, people abroad seemed to react generally positively to her time in office. Most of the world is most familiar with her from her  effective response to the pandemic that had kept much of New Zealand from contracting the disease and her quick response to a mass shooting in Christchurch. This enthusiasm was unlikely to be shared by her compatriots, however. This may be relatively surprising to those who haven’t paid close attention to New Zealand’s politics recently. Two months after the election in 2020, the number of Kiwis supporting Labour in the election reached 53%, compared to the conservative National Party’s 25%. However, by the time Ardern announced her resignation, National had consistently taken the lead from Labour in the polls for months. Though Ardern led her opponent in polls for preferred Prime Minister, Kiwis on balance disapproved of her direction. Despite Ardern’s relatively positive reputation outside of New Zealand, particularly among those left of centre, there is a case to be made that Ardern’s premiership was a time of disappointment for those on the left of the political spectrum.

Perhaps a fitting British comparison to Ardern is that of her former boss, Tony Blair. In her mid to late 20s, Ardern took up a post working for the British cabinet office under then Prime Minister Tony Blair. Though there are a few differences between Ardern and Blair, there are also a number of uncanny similarities. Blair took over the reins of the Labour Party following then Labour leader John Smith’s sudden death and subsequently ended the Tory Party’s 18-year grip on Downing Street at the next election. Ardern’s predecessor resigned suddenly from the leadership weeks before an election, an election that, while nowhere as dramatically conclusive as Blair’s 1997 landslide victory, saw the formation of the first Labour led government in nearly a decade. But Blair, unlike Ardern, made it abundantly clear that his Labour Party accepted the fundamental shifts in British political thought brought about by his predecessors. From the revision of Clause IV in Labour’s rule book, which committed the party to public ownership, to a rebrand to “New Labour,” Blair never hid that his Labour Party found its home to the right of where Labour had traditionally been, and upon entering Downing Street in the summer of 1997, Blair’s Labour governed in exactly that way. Ardern was different in that regard.

Mere weeks before the 2017 general election, Ardern stated that she accepted the premise that the neoliberal project had failed, and that New Zealand required state intervention to succeed. She had promised three years of free post-secondary education and declared in the same interview that housing insecurity and poverty ought not to exist in wealthy societies. Labour’s education policy in that cycle included an increase of the student cost of living allowance by $50 (£27.76 in 2017) per week. In that campaign, she pledged to introduce a capital gains tax, introduce modern rail infrastructure, and build enough housing to ease the burden of New Zealand’s housing crisis on Kiwis. This was the politician who criticised New Zealand’s economy as a housing market with little else to offer while still an opposition backbencher. The 2017 manifesto further included a $60/week child allowance for every child for up to one year following the end of paid parental leave, and it also extended paid parental leave to 26 weeks. Ardern’s 2017 manifesto may not have been as explicitly radical as the one released by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour only a few months before her, but it was a noticeably progressive manifesto and one that Labour’s left-flank could find acceptable, even if not ideal.

Ardern’s government, however, fell far short of the progressive vision that she offered. On the matter of welfare, Ardern’s inability to be bold left much to be desired. In a February 2020 budget, Ardern’s government announced an increase of $10/week (£5.03 when the policy was announced) to certain benefits such as job-seeker’s allowances, single parent support, and supported living payments, amounting to an approximately 3.1% rise. Though increasing benefits is a cause that the left should and does unabashedly champion, Ardern’s milquetoast proposal was hardly worth celebrating. Ardern hailed the proposal as “more than any Government has done in decades to address child poverty,” but she neglected to mention that the government’s own expert panel on poverty and benefits recommended that it increase the amount by 47%, not the measly 3.1% that Ardern’s government implemented. Ardern’s stinginess with regards to benefits ought to be completely unfathomable for a woman whose interest in politics ostensibly stemmed from her teenage desire to end the scourge of child poverty. Ardern’s government was noticeably stingier with furlough and benefit payments than her other ostensibly centre-left allies in other countries, offering less than Trudeau’s Liberal Party or what then Presidential Candidate Joe Biden proposed. As food bank use in New Zealand skyrocketed during 2020, Ardern’s government had the audacity to say that her budgets would be “careful” all while shoving $30 billion (~£15.81 billion in April of 2020) into keeping corporations afloat. And while pumping billions into the markets, Ardern decided to freeze public sector pay. Somewhat infuriatingly, despite the state throwing that money around, Ardern’s government used the promise of an “economic straitjacket” in order to explain why it wouldn’t invest as much as it promised into spheres such as infrastructure and health.

Austerity for New Zealand’s labouring class was not Ardern’s only wrongdoing: while corporations in New Zealand received millions of dollars from the government under the guise of protecting workers’ wages, they also laid off tens of thousands of workers while also being massively profitable. The Ardern government’s response was to ask corporations nicely to return some of the money that they essentially stole from the government (and taxpayers by extension) and to rule out a windfall tax on corporate profits that even Britain’s unabashedly right-wing Tory government implemented. Even outside of windfall taxes, Ardern’s government seemingly took much issue with measures designed to tax the wealthy. Two years following her 2017 victory, she ruled out implementing a capital gains tax during the coalition government and announced that Labour had not even tried to bargain with its more conservative junior partner in order to implement it. But Ardern’s excuse looks even flimsier in the years that followed: following the 2020 election, Ardern’s Labour was no longer hamstrung by a conservative coalition partner. In the time since, New Zealand has yet to implement a capital gains tax, despite Labour holding a majority government. Few drawbacks exist for a left-wing government implementing such a measure: it is a tax that hits the profits made by investments, and thus significantly less likely to hit workers who make a living through earning wages, but would hit people like stock traders and landlords, people who tend to be significantly wealthier. Her government baulked at the idea of implementing a wealth tax, rejected an inheritance tax, and refused to raise taxes on trusts, New Zealand’s most popular form of tax avoidance.

Her failures end not at her consistent unwillingness to claw back money from New Zealand’s wealthiest, but extend into other sectors. She declined to cap rent prices, despite New Zealand’s average rent being astronomically high and rising. The country already had a housing crisis, a crisis which she pledged to address by building a hundred thousand social homes in a decade. Three years into the job, Ardern’s government had built less than 400. That was partially why twenty thousand people were on the state’s waiting list for social housing four years into Ardern’s premiership. The government not only failed to build the houses that it promised to build, but it also actively kneecapped itself in doing so. Ardern’s Labour privatised some state housing that existed, demolished others, and then sold the land on which state houses used to exist to private developers. Such infatuation with private sector solutions to problems that can and should be solved via the public sector makes it impossible for anyone with a pulse to take Ardern seriously when she self-described as a socialist.

Ardern’s tenure was not one of only failures, and she should rightfully be proud of some of her government’s achievements, among these include increasing winter energy payments, reducing mandatory sentencing, enforcing health and safety standards in privately rented homes, doubling sick leave, increasing social security, and raising the minimum wage. But none of this makes up for her shortcomings. Ardern’s old boss Tony Blair too had achievements that leftists can respect, such as repealing section 28, cutting poverty, and introducing the minimum wage. But as most British leftists correctly argue, none of Blair’s achievements excuse his unwillingness to fundamentally challenge Thatcher’s shift of the British political scene, epitomised by increasing income inequality, the expansion of PFIs under his government, or his commitment of British troops to an unforgivably unjust and cruel war. It may not be morally necessary for Ardern to take a stand at the Hague, but the same principle that achievements do not negate failures applies to Ardern as well. In contrast to her slogan "Be Kind," Ardern was not the kindly materteral figure that she is commonly portrayed as. Ardern's legacy is one for the left to mourn. It was one that began as a dream: a hope for a fairer New Zealand and a hope that her working masses may have finally found an ally in power. Unfortunately, instead of proudly celebrating the sublimation of that dream into tangible reality, the left is left holding its funeral.

Image courtesy of the Governor-General of New Zealand via Wikimedia Commons, ©2021, some rights reserved.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.