Jacinda Ardern

• Regardless of the election result, a form of austerity was always going to win.
• While National and Labour both offered targeted support for those struggling to get by, such as tax cuts (National) or the removal of GST from fruit and vegetables (Labour), such mitigation seems paltry by comparison.

Radical incrementalism?

• Many contend Labour has abandoned the free-market fundamentalism associated with “Rogernomics” that it adopted in the 1980s.
• Under the Labour governments led by Jacinda Ardern and then Chris Hipkins, there was an attempt to ameliorate the worst excesses of market capitalism.
• Hipkins, for instance, insisted Labour’s policies were not simply about “tinkering around the edges of the neoliberal model”.

The ‘third way’

• A rough scholarly consensus has emerged that neoliberalism has shown a remarkable ability to evolve.
• Labour – and to some extent National – have rejected the harsh “vanguard neoliberalism” of the 1980s and ‘90s.
• For example, the Labour government’s COVID business support and wage subsidy scheme was supposedly undertaken to protect workers from unemployment.
• Read more:
  With ACT and NZ First promising to overhaul Pharmac, what’s in store for publicly funded medicines?

Intervention for the market

• In this sense, the various palliative reforms made by the Ardern-Hipkins governments do not represent a fundamental swing away from neoliberalism.
• She said Labour accepted the need for government intervention in the market.
• Rather, at its core, it is about imposing a global and state framework that favours business and private property.

The underlying consensus

• National is more business-friendly and seems poised to make deeper cuts to public services.
• To differing degrees, National and its probable coalition partner ACT reject the “progressive” aspects of what feminist scholar Nancy Fraser called “progressive neoliberalism”.
• But beneath those apparent ideological differences there remains an underlying neoliberal consensus.
• This is especially so with the election success of parties promising to reduce government spending.

• When Ardern delivered her valedictory statement earlier this month, I was in Canada as a visiting speaker at the University of Alberta.
• My lectures and workshops included sessions on gender politics and the pandemic, media representations of women leaders, and the possibilities for leading with kindness.
• People questioned why New Zealanders appeared to have forgotten their country’s internationally recognised success in the fight against COVID-19.

Gender politics

• For example, in her study of news coverage of four women prime ministers from New Zealand, Australia and Canada, Linda Trimble reveals that gender is explicitly referenced.
• The research also shows this use of gender references is most common when a country experiences its first female political leader.
• Read more:
  Jacinda Ardern says goodbye to parliament: how her politics of kindness fell on unkind times

  Yet when Ardern became Labour leader, throughout her tenure and on her departure from politics, it seemed her gender continued to have news value: we first read about “Jacindamania” just two hours after she became leader, followed by questions from talk show hosts about her motherhood intentions.

Ardern’s ‘otherness’

• Certainly, having a baby while in office accentuated her as novel and newsworthy, nationally and internationally.
• In her valedictory statement, Ardern implicitly addressed this “otherness”:
  I leave knowing I was the best mother I could be.
• You can be that person and be here […] I do hope I have demonstrated something else entirely.
• Read more:
  Anniversary of a landslide: new research reveals what really swung New Zealand's 2020 'COVID election'

Great expectations

• Those “expecting her to be the party’s salvation and deliver them the government benches”, the columnist went on, “have set their expectations too high”.
• Perhaps by promising policy “transformation”, Ardern set her own expectations too high.
• And, as I witnessed in Canada, there are young people elsewhere who Jacinda Ardern has inspired to lead with kindness.

• Today, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau joined Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern, President of France Emmanuel Macron, other government leaders, and industry leaders to adopt the Christchurch Call to Action a global pledge to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online.
• Through the National Strategy and the Christchurch Call, the Government of Canada will continue to provide international leadership on countering radicalization to violence and eliminating terrorist and violent extremist content online.
• "Terrorist and extremist content online continues to spill out into the real world with deadly consequences.
• Today, we are stepping up to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online.