Normal text sizeLarger text sizeVery large text sizeJacinda Ardern was being tested and she wasn’t enjoying it. It was 2017. She’d been deputy leader of the New Zealand Labour Party for two months. She was the guest speaker at a provincial press club lunch and subject to “raw questioning which put her under concerted pressure”, as one observer put it.The chair opened the session by displaying a list of all the soft interviews she’d done with women’s magazines. “In short, I know pretty much absolutely f…ing nothing about Jacinda Ardern,” said her host, the life chair of the Wintec Press Club, journalist Steve Braunias. “Neither would anyone reading this sort of pleasant garbage, and I think it’s one of the reasons why she’s widely regarded on the right as an MP of little or no substance. What has she achieved?”And that was just the introduction before Ardern took the stage. Hard questions followed. Then came this one: Why should voters choose her, a career politician, when Donald Trump’s victory showed the appeal that outsiders could offer the people? “What, so you elect a professional arsehole instead?” came her rejoinder.This exchange did several things. First, it revealed that, in spite of the reverential international media coverage she’s received, Ardern is flesh and blood, not a supernatural being.A cheeky piece in The Guardian this year hailed – “What a hero!” – and posed that “there must be something bad about her we can dig up”. But it immediately pointed out that London’s Financial Times didn’t think so. It cited a headline in that sober, salmon-shaded journal of capital: “Arise Saint Jacinda, a leader for our troubled times.”The foreign media gushing has caused some resentment in New Zealand. People abroad have the luxury of seeing her as a symbol and projecting on her whatever qualities they choose, but Kiwis live the reality of daily life in NZ. Foreigners see the big dramatic moments of Ardern’s prime ministership. The Christchurch massacre, the White Island volcanic eruption, the COVID-19 clampdown. Locals have the days in between as well.“There’s no criticism of her abroad, but she has critics at home,” says Stephen Mills, executive director of Labour’s polling firm, UMR. The gap between the two jars with many.“Forty-four per cent of voters really got peeved with a Labour prime minister getting all this ‘Wow’ media internationally, there was real pushback,” explains Professor Jennifer Curtin, director of the Public Policy Institute at the University of Auckland, referring to the percentage of voters who’d chosen the National Party at the last election, in 2017. Labour won a smaller share at 36.9 per cent; Ardern formed government not because she won more votes but because she was able to put together a coalition.It’s come to this bizarre circumstance: a politician avoiding the media for fear of positive coverage, surely a first.“People were going into stationery shops and bookshops and turning magazines over” so that their Ardern-adoring covers were obscured, Curtin continues. It was a mini-movement which arose late last year with its own hashtag, #turnardern. A mini counter-movement arose and tagged itself #returnardern, its followers going around flipping the magazines back again.It’s so sensitive a point that Ardern currently has a blanket ban on giving foreign media interviews for profile pieces, says her chief press secretary Andrew Campbell, wary of irritating the locals in election season. It’s come to this bizarre circumstance: a politician avoiding the media for fear of positive coverage, surely a first.The respected elder statesman of NZ journalism, Colin James, says he’s never seen anything like the frenzied level of international media interest in his country’s politics. The BBC, The Washington Post and The New York Times were among the many that called him for his views on Ardern “but my favourite was the question from the Asia editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, a major German masthead. “ ‘Is Jacinda Ardern the future of liberal democracy?’ ”James’s answer: “We are 4.8 million people at the bottom of the world.” Perhaps, but small countries can be leading ones. I remind James that New Zealand was the first to allow women the vote, for example, and that idea seems to have caught on around the world pretty well. “We’re not used to being taken seriously,” he rejoins.The question about Ardern’s record of achievement – and failure – remains a live one as she asks New Zealand to give her a second term at the October 17 election. The question of her influence on world politics remains live, too. In the midst of a global democratic recession that’s 14 years old and deepening, as measured by the US research group Freedom House, could Ardern be the future of liberal democracy?She did not appear miraculously, immaculately conceived and perfectly formed, one day to save the world. The international news media are fond of describing her as “a new kind of unconventional 21st century leader”, according to The New York Times. And there’s a freshness about her, as well as a novelty. When she was elected prime minister in 2017 at the age of 37, she was NZ’s youngest since 1856 and the youngest female leader of any nation in the world.She’s the second head of government to give birth while in office; Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto was the first. And Ardern is the first to take maternity leave; Bhutto concealed her pregnancy and dared not take leave. These points are unfailingly recited in every foreign media profile. Ardern wishes we’d get over it, saying last year: “I hope when I leave this job that I leave enough behind that I’m not remembered as the lady leader who had a baby, but someone who actually did some good things for NZ.”As the press club question said, she is indeed a member of that untouchable class, the professional politician. Apart from a teenage job serving fish and chips, she’s only ever worked in politics. She failed to heed Bob Hawke’s routine advice to aspiring young politicians: “Make a life first.”A darling of the foreign media, Ardern has faced increasing political pressures at home.Credit:Getty ImagesArdern is no political ingénue. She joined the NZ Labour Party at 17, was elected vice-president of Young Labour and, after graduating with a communications degree, took a job working for sometime Labour leader Phil Goff. At 24 she was hired as a researcher in the office of Labour’s Helen Clark, NZ’s first elected female prime minister.She made the typical young Kiwi’s trek to London but got an atypical young Kiwi’s job working in the cabinet office of British prime minister Tony Blair and, at 28, was elected president of the International Union of Socialist Youth. She’s always disavowed the tag of young radical: “Where I come from [the small dairy farming town of Morrinsville on the North Island], a radical is someone who chooses to drive a Toyota rather than a Holden or a Ford.”Labour offered her a guaranteed seat in Parliament at age 28. By the time she took the post of Labour leader, she’d been there for nine years and active in politics for 18. She’d worked for three Labour leaders in two countries.A young prime minister, yes. Fresh to politics, certainly not. She was incubated in the hothouse of hypocrisy that is politics, a craft defined by Ambrose Bierce in The Devil’s Dictionary in 1906 as “a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles”.And yes, although she has impressive self-control in the face of provocation, her patience has limits. Saint Jacinda even swears in public, if rarely.LoadingHer press club answer contained her unvarnished view of the US president, a man she would soon be dealing with face to face. Tellingly, it suggested that perhaps she saw herself as the antithesis of Trump even before Vogue magazine dubbed her “the Anti-Trump” a year later.When Ardern eventually met Trump, leader to leader at an APEC summit in Vietnam, he mistook her for Sophie Grégoire, the wife of Canadian PM Justin Trudeau. Once the US president figured out who she was, he thought he’d try a little Trumpian banter on her. Pointing at Ardern as the two leaders waited together to be introduced at a gala dinner, he said to a bystander: “This lady caused a lot of upset in her country.”“No one marched when I was elected,” she shot back, as she later told reporters. Is that all? Is that the reason Ardern is celebrated worldwide, because she’s his diametric opposite?He’s an angry old man, a billionaire celebrity turned populist reactionary politician, feeding division and trading on anger. She’s a positive young woman, a middle-class everywoman turned progressive politician, fostering unity and trading on kindness.Trump phoned his NZ counterpart last year to offer sympathy after the murder of 51 New Zealand Muslims at worship in Christchurch. When he asked her what the people of the US could do to help, Ardern answered: “Sympathy and love for all Muslim communities.”Jacinda Ardern stands as a living rebuke to the US president. And this is central to her appeal to the world beyond New Zealand.The president who imposed the so-called “Muslim ban” on immigration to the US was later asked by a reporter about the Christchurch massacre. And the Australian white supremacist who’d taken his assault rifles into the two mosques to kill as many Muslims as possible. Did Trump think the rise of white supremacists was a problem? “I don’t really.”Ardern was asked some hours later whether she agreed with him: “No.”Jacinda Ardern stands as a living rebuke to the US president. And this is central to her appeal to the world beyond New Zealand.Three catastrophes that have defined Ardern’s first term: from left, Brenton Tarrant’s massacre of Muslim worshippers in Christchurch – she’s vowed never to say his name; the White Island eruption, and the COVID-19 pandemic.Credit:AAP; White Island Flights; Getty ImagesThere are few moments as dramatic as the three great crises that have arisen to challenge her as prime minister, and three times she has responded calmly, compassionately, effectively. She may not get everything right. Some of her signature policies have failed utterly. But in a crisis she steps up to the occasion. When challenged, she responds.Ardern was en route to visit a school on NZ’s North Island when she got word on the afternoon of March 15 last year that a shooting was under way at a mosque in Christchurch on the South Island. She diverted to the nearest police station to take stock, and two hours later, with the injured still arriving at a Christchurch hospital, made her first comments: “This is, and will be, one of New Zealand’s darkest days.”From the outset, she extended support to the victims and their families. Many may be immigrants and refugees, she said: “They have chosen to make New Zealand their home, and it is their home.”Later that afternoon an air force plane took her to the capital, Wellington, and she wrote the celebrated catchphrase: “They are us.” Ardern singled out only one person as the “other”, nominated only one as unworthy of NZ – the Australian perpetrator. “You may have chosen us – we utterly reject and condemn you.” She described his murder of 51 unarmed people as a terrorist act. She would later say of him: “He may have sought notoriety, but we in New Zealand will give him nothing. Not even his name.” To this day she has not uttered it in public.LoadingYet even here, even in rejecting a foreign terrorist, she chose not to accentuate his foreignness. She put no blame on his country of birth and citizenship, Australia. The dominant theme of her responses was love and kindness, not anger and vengeance. It was about the unity of humanity and not differences.Ardern wore a headscarf to visit the victims’ families, hugged them unreservedly and asked all New Zealand to observe a nationwide Muslim call to prayer on the first Friday after the massacre. She told survivors she had three jobs: “to bring the message of love and support and grief of the people of New Zealand”, to “ensure your safety, your freedom to worship safely”, and to take care of longer-term practical problems that might arise with visas, loss of family breadwinners, child support.Her main speech on the terrorist attack she wrote herself: “She doesn’t need apparatchiks to put words in her mouth,” says Colin James, who’s writing a book on the last 50 years of NZ politics. “In all my time, I can’t think of anyone else who could have done that. The closest might have been Norman Kirk,” Labour prime minister from 1972, an orator and analogue to his Australian Labor contemporary, Gough Whitlam. “But even he would have struggled.”Ardern didn’t try to squeeze the opposition out of the occasion. She brought all the political party leaders along with her. Literally, on her air force flight from Wellington to Christchurch, to mourn with the survivors. But when she visited the injured in hospital, she brought no one. No other politicians, no TV.Other politicians took note. Penny Wong says that, shortly after the terrorist attack, “I went to a mosque and I tried to frame how I might respond in similar circumstances.” It had been “an appalling, horrific attack and she and others tried to bring people together and engender unity and tolerance, not hatred and division. I was very moved by that.”What of the criticism levelled at her by the NZ Opposition Leader, Judith Collins? That Ardern is a better communicator than she is a leader? “Communication is intrinsic to leadership,” responds Wong, the leader of the opposition in Australia’s Senate. Ardern’s crisis responses have made her “a global icon of empathetic leadership”, in the words of one of her biographers, Madeleine Chapman.The police commissioner told her that the shooter had bought his guns legally in NZ. At that moment, she resolved to tighten the laws of gun ownership.But this is only half the story. Empathy, like good communication, can soften a hard message, engender identification and mobilise support around a common aim. As Theodore Roosevelt observed a century ago: “Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.” But what is the common aim?Much overlooked is the hard policy core of Jacinda Ardern. On the evening of the Christchurch massacre, the police commissioner told her that the shooter had bought his guns legally in NZ. At that moment, she resolved to tighten the laws of gun ownership.The nation has a long, strong culture of sports shooting and recreational firearms. It would not necessarily be an easy reform. Ardern didn’t wait for Labour to set up focus groups to tell her the people’s mood, didn’t wait for polls to tell her how to act or allow the gun lobby to marshal its arguments. She addressed the nation at 9am the following morning: “I can tell you one thing right now. Our gun laws will change.”It was 16 hours since the terrorist had picked up the first of his two assault rifles, put on his bulletproof vest and helmet and started his wanton murder of men, women and children at prayer. Six days later the parliament legislated a ban on assault rifles and semi-automatics. Further measures including a firearms register were added later.Ardern wasn’t finished. She went after the company that the terrorist had used to broadcast the vision from his helmet-mounted camera as he committed his butchery: Facebook. The so-called social media site had allowed the livestream broadcast and failed to remove it for an hour.Two months later, Ardern and French President Emmanuel Macron used a G20 summit to launch the Christchurch Call to Action, a voluntary partnership between government and Big Tech to deny “terrorist and violent extremist content” online. Big Tech is less accountable than the NZ parliament; the Call has made a difference but has not solved the problem entirely.“Ardern’s leadership has two dimensions,” says Colin James. “She only communicates well because she has something to say. She bothers about who she’s communicating to, and she cares about what she’s communicating.” Second, the source of policy resolve, is that “she has a solid moral and logical foundation. There’s a solid, sound personality in there. She’s not flighty. She can be very firm.”He attributes her moral clarity to her upbringing as a Mormon, a religion she followed regularly into her mid-20s. Ardern, aged 40, spent most of her life in a conservative church.She makes skilful use of social media to give the impression of an easy intimacy with her 1.3 million Facebook fans. For example, when she left hospital with her newborn daughter, Neve, in 2018, she turned it into a Facebook live event. In another video broadcast from her official residence in May while explaining the latest pandemic procedures, she remarked on the smell of the nappy bucket next to her, “not the freshest place to be”.In the most-watched of her Facebook Live clips, viewed more than five million times, Ardern appears in an old green jumper after putting Neve to bed in March. Her government is about to impose tight pandemic restrictions. She asks everyone to be kind: “Stay at home, break the chain and you’ll save lives.”Ardern’s partner Clarke Gayford at the UN in New York, with their daughter Neve. It was the first time Neve’s face was snapped in public – something Ardern was trying to avoid.Credit:Getty ImagesYet while opening her home and some aspects of her life to public view, coexisting with the carefree informality is a rigorous privacy. She had never allowed baby Neve’s face to be visible publicly, never allowed a single full-face photograph. The child’s privacy was paramount. The policy failed when her partner, Clarke Gayford, made an unplanned visit to the UN General Assembly chamber, carrying Neve in to see mum. In an unguarded moment, an agency photographer in the gallery snapped the baby’s face and the photo went out on the newswires.Likewise, there are aspects of her life that Ardern prefers to keep closed. Her Mormon faith and upbringing is one of them. In a rare remark on the subject in 2018, she acknowledged its influence on her: “I can’t separate out who I am from the things I was raised with. I took a departure from the theology, but otherwise I have only positive things to say about it.”The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as it’s formally known, is a 19th-century American invention, best known for earnest door-to-door proselytisers and once tolerating polygamy. It bases itself on the Christian Gospels but adds an extra one, the Book of Mormon.“It was such a massive part of her life for so long,” her younger sister, Louise, said three years ago, adding, “Even though she doesn’t go to church any more, she would still hold many of the values.”The youthful Ardern wore modest skirts, avoided Coke and caffeine in other forms, didn’t date and didn’t drink, all consistent with Mormon practice. She was always concerned for the rights of others, including their right to do things she didn’t. Such as the rights to wear less modest clothes and to drink. At high school, she campaigned successfully for girls to have the right to wear shorts if they chose. She never did. And in later years she organised safe transport for groups of her friends who went to parties and drank alcohol. She didn’t do that, either.Today she describes herself as agnostic and favours a single malt scotch. She says she broke with the church when she was in her mid-20s and housesharing with three gay friends.“How could I subscribe to a religion that just didn’t account for them?” she said. “I could never reconcile what I saw as discrimination in a religion that was otherwise very focused on tolerance and kindness.” Tolerance and kindness. It would indeed seem she still holds many of the values she learnt at the temple.“I always noticed when things felt unfair. I just thought it was wrong that other kids didn’t have what I had.”Her parents remain devout Mormons. Her mother worked as an office administrator before leaving to raise her two daughters full time. Today she turns up at the prime minister’s residence to help with Neve and make pumpkin soup.In Ardern’s youngest years, her dad was a policeman in a small, poor, Maori-majority town that struggled to keep the local bikie gang in check. She evidently admired her father’s calling; she has said that she wanted to follow him into police work well into her 20s before realising the physical demands were too much. He’s now a diplomat. And politics beckoned to her.And in those earliest years she discovered a keen sense of what she’d later call social justice. “I always noticed when things felt unfair,” she has said. “I just thought it was wrong that other kids didn’t have what I had.” From primary school and into Young Labour years, she would raise funds, campaign for charities and organise groups to do good works for disadvantaged communities.Ardern may not have followed Bob Hawke’s advice to “make a life first”. But could it be that her formative family, social and religious experiences equipped her with enough of a life, enough to establish a firm foundation of values? And not only the values of kindness, tolerance and fairness, but also a dad who had to take a hard line to protect the community. Ardern combines empathy plus the resolve to act firmly.“The attack that she lacks substance has just collapsed,” observes Stephen Mills, the UMR pollster. “Every time there’s been a challenge, she’s absolutely stepped up.”When the mighty volcano on tiny White Island erupted last December, there were 47 tourists in mortal danger. The island sits some 50 kilometres from the NZ North Island. Many of the tourists were inside the quasi-collapsed crater, which was always hissing, rumbling and sulphur-stinking, when it suddenly vomited a violent gusher of rock and ash more than three kilometres into the air. Twenty-one died.Jacinda Ardern responded with active oversight of the rescue and recovery, firm support for the emergency responders, hugs for everyone involved and a $NZ5 million compensation fund for affected businesses. But she also issued a warning to the tour companies that had put people in harm’s way that they could be liable, with possible jail terms and fines, as she announced an inquiry into the disaster.Scott Morrison travelled to NZ to offer thanks to the authorities and condolences to the bereaved: 14 of the 21 dead were Australian citizens. But he was simultaneously under attack for his inertia in the face of the fierce fires ravaging Australia at that very time.The COVID-19 pandemic is another of the moments when Ardern stepped up to a challenge. She counselled Kiwis: “Be strong, but be kind. We will be okay.” She consistently described the country as “our team of five million”. Government ads repeated the twin imperatives of kindness and unity. One variant: “Be kind. Unite against COVID-19.”And she made specific suggestions from the outset: “Go home tonight and check on your neighbours, start a phone tree with your street, plan how you’ll stay in touch with one another.”So there was kindness and empathy aplenty. But, again, empathy and kindness alone do not a policy make. They accompanied tough policy action. The government ordered the borders shut and everyone to stay home under one of the strictest lockdowns in the world. In this, too, Ardern was the anti-Trump.New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was praised internationally for her leadership after the Christchurch terrorist attack.Credit:David WalkerAnd she volunteered to share some of the sacrifice that she was imposing on her people, announcing a 20 per cent pay cut for herself and her ministers and top public officials for six months. It represented a loss of some $NZ47,000 to Ardern’s personal bank account. As fiscal policy it was trivial. As an act of leadership it was powerful.“If there was ever a time to close the gap between groups of people across New Zealand in different positions, it is now,” she said. Scott Morrison had imposed a pay freeze on the public sector. Asked whether he’d consider doing the same, he declined: “I’ll just keep doing a good job.”“Go hard, go early,” said Ardern in announcing the NZ pandemic eradication policy. Indeed, at its tightest point the NZ lockdown was the most stringent of any developed country: 96 points of a possible 100, according to the Oxford University COVID government response tracker. Australia’s conditions, by comparison, never exceeded a strictness measure above 80 on the same index. So which country was smarter?Perhaps the best overall Oxford tracker measure is the total number of days each country has spent with its restrictions above 70 points. By early September, NZ had recorded around 50 such days. In Australia it was more than 70.If you consider saving lives the primary goal, NZ’s policy is superior again. The number of dead per million stood at five in NZ by late September. In Australia it was 34 per million, the same mortality rate reported in Greece. So the harder lockdown did save lives.The anti-Ardern tried to discredit it. Trump said in August that NZ had suffered a huge resurgence. This from the man presiding over a country suffering more than 600 deaths per million by early September. “Big surge in New Zealand, you know it’s terrible, we don’t want that,” Trump said. Asked to respond, Ardern said it was “patently wrong”.And the economic cost? Yes it seems to have been more costly. While Australia’s economy shrank by 7 per cent in the June quarter this year, the USeconomy contracted by 9 per cent and NZ’s contracted by more than 12 per cent. The government’s fiscal support is commensurately big, which helps tide the country over the worst but it involves debt and must be serviced until it’s repaid. Will NZ’s economy ultimately recover faster than others because of its successful containment of the virus? The jury is out.Ardern’s COVID policy certainly saved lives. It also propelled her government to a decisive lead in the polls. International media coverage of the New Zealand leader has been so one-dimensional that foreignersare surprised to learn that, until the pandemic, Ardern’s Labour had never enjoyed a sustained lead in the opinion polls.The world’s impression of New Zealand is otherworldly. A far-flung place of unearthly beauty, adopted as Middle Earth for The Lord of the Rings movies, a fact that NZ played to by decorating Auckland airport with Hobbitesque sets for years afterwards. Its international tourism campaign is tagged “100% Pure New Zealand”, a pristine place apparently untainted by the gritty realities of this world.It’s the haven so removed from everywhere else that billionaire American preppers build their end-of-civilisation boltholes there, such as PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who became a NZ citizen in 2011, calling the country “already utopia”. It’s the country that refused to allow US warships to dock when they carried nuclear weapons, even at the cost of bringing an effective end to its US alliance.But it’s not a magical kingdom. Ardern promised to lead a “government of transformation” and 2019 was to be “the year of delivery”. In fact, she committed a distinctly unmagical act: “She’s overpromised and undelivered,” says James. Mills, Labour’s pollster, agrees that this is fair. Asked which line of criticism of Ardern is most valid, he replied, “Delivery.”She took power promising to solve real-world problems. A signature promise – housing affordability – has become a signal failure. NZ home prices are among the world’s least affordable compared to income. Auckland prices aren’t as outlandish as Sydney or Melbourne but they’re more out of reach than London or New York measured against average incomes, according to the 2019 annual Demographia survey.Labour proposed a government program called KiwiBuild to construct 100,000 affordable new homes over 10 years to help middle- and low-income people buy their first homes. Ardern abandoned the scheme after two years in office. It was not building homes fast enough. In the initial 18 months, 141 were finished, against a target of 1000, and the ones that were built were often unwanted. The minister in charge was removed, the government announcing $NZ5 billion to build 8000 homes over five years.“The government has done pretty much nothing about tax reform. The previous government didn’t do much, either.”Another measure proposed to help with home affordability was a capital gains tax (CGT) on real estate, designed to curb speculation and runaway price rises. Much as Australia, and many other countries, already impose. First she delayed and then dumped the proposal. “While I have believed in a CGT, it’s clear many New Zealanders do not. That is why I am also ruling out a capital gains tax under my leadership in the future,” she said last year. Even though, as she said, “I believe it would have made a difference.”This was not just retreat but surrender. Ardern’s coalition partner, Winston Peters, vetoed the capital gains tax. So it was not feasible in this term of parliament. But the political constellation after election day could be quite different. There is a reasonable prospect Ardern could hold power alone. And won’t need Peters and his New Zealand First party to form government. But she’s ruled out returning to the idea under any circumstance.“The government has done pretty much nothing about tax reform,” says Arthur Grimes, former chair of the NZ Reserve Bank. “The previous government didn’t do much, either. This government and the previous [National Party] government are similar: they look at doing something, then they don’t do it.“This is very short-term thinking. The long-term fiscal position isn’t sustainable; it’s not going to be feasible to tax income very much. People with money are increasingly able to switch income and residency around the world. We need major tax reform.”The election campaign offers only tinkering. Labor would raise the top income tax bracket from 33 per cent to 39, moving it closer to Australia’s 45, excluding the Medicare levy. The Nationals promise tax cuts of $NZ50 a week for the average Kiwi, but bungled their accounting in a classic opposition act of self-harm. And the Nationals’ cuts would be temporary, cancelled after 16 months.What of Ardern’s famous budget reform, the introduction of a national “well-being” budget? “We are establishing a living standard framework,” she told me when announcing the plan in 2018. “We are looking beyond economic markers.” It wasn’t that the government was junking the traditional economic measures – debt and budget targets, for instance, remained. But, Ardern said: “If we are increasing GDP and increasingly seeing environmental degradation and social suffering, it’s hard to say we’ve succeeded”.A well-being budget would measure national progress on all three fronts: raising income, yes, but also improving environmental and social goods.The idea was lauded by Lord Richard Layard of the London School of Economics. Happiness should be a greater focus for government policy, said Britain’s so-called “happiness tsar”. It was mocked by Australia’s radio 2GB. Host Steve Price said Ardern was trying to legislate empathy, and his guest Rita Panahi described it as “kooky”.So far it’s made no discernible difference to New Zealand’s ambient levels of well-being. Or kookiness. “It was really just rhetoric,” says Arthur Grimes, professor of well-being and public policy at Victoria University in Wellington. “It was an indicator framework rather than an allocation framework,” measuring what was happening but not directing money to problem areas. “I’m supportive of it but I don’t think this is the way to do it.”He points out that other countries were doing this long ago. They include France and Australia, where the Treasury developed the framework in 2004 but dumped it in 2015. Even the harshly repressive United Arab Emirates, a country with high regard for marketing itself but no regard for human rights, has a wellbeing budget.The prime minister surrounded by adoring fans in an Auckland schoolyard.Credit:Getty ImagesArdern has said her initial impulse to go into politics was to help get kids out of poverty. As Prime Minister, she took portfolio responsibility for it herself. How’s that going? She inherited a country with one child in six living in poverty. Pre-COVID, at least, it seemed to have improved to one in eight, mainly because of a range of measures her government took to lift incomes at the lower end: raising the minimum wage from $NZ15.25 per hour to $NZ17.70, then to $NZ18.90 in April, extending paid parental leave and creating the Best Start payment of $60 a week for the first year of every newborn’s life.And, until COVID struck, these same measures will have narrowed the overall gap between rich and poor, too.“You wouldn’t see Tony Abbott standing up next to a sign saying ‘Ditch the witch’ here. I don’t think political leaders here accept that.”But her promise of a “transformative” government was more advertising than achievement. “She’s really running a repair shop rather than building a new enterprise,” says journalist Colin James. Whether it’s her programs to hire more nurses or teachers or to address climate change, “it’s just not in her nature to take really big strides – it’s really a step-by-step government”.He once asked her why she was so cautious in increasing government spending: “Because we need a social licence to operate,” was the reply. No radical moves. Would you prefer Holden or Ford?What about the female factor? How much of her political and policy success stems from the fact that she’s a woman? The first point is that NZpolitics seems to be less sexist than Australian. Kiwi observers are aghast at some of the conduct in Australia: “I think Julia Gillard faced a lot tougher stuff than Helen Clark, Jenny Shipley or Jacinda Ardern,” says Professor Jennifer Curtin of Auckland University, who specialises in women in politics, referring to NZ’s three female prime ministers.“You wouldn’t see a Tony Abbott standing up next to a sign saying ‘Ditch the witch’ here. I don’t think political leaders here implicitly accept that sort of thing as okay. And you have some really strange people in your Senate. For example, calling Gillard ‘deliberately barren’ ”, the reason cited by the then Liberal senator Bill Heffernan as a disqualification for leadership. “I don’t think you’d see that in our parliament.” NZ is a single-chamber legislature. It has no Senate equivalent.“And we have 41 per cent women in Parliament now, so the environment is different.” The Australian federal parliament’s equivalent is 37 per cent. By chamber, the Senate today has more women (39) than men (37), the first time since its creation. Women make up 30.5 per cent of the House of Representatives.New Zealand, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Germany and Taiwan are all led by women and cited as countries that have enjoyed superior outcomes in the pandemic.“I’m not saying that our culture is different,” Curtin adds. “You’ve had a woman ref a men’s match in the supercomp and I don’t think we’d see that here,” referring to an National Rugby League prime-time game last year. She’s suggesting that Australia isn’t any more sexist than NZ, just that its politics are. But then again, Kiwi politics seems to be a gentler business in general. Attack ads, standard fare in every Australian campaign, are much rarer in NZ.Second, “Ardern doesn’t play the gender card at all,” says Curtin. Indeed, she resists all invitations to use gender as a divisive factor. She sacked one of her ministers in July for conducting an affair with a staff member. In the same week, an opposition MP quit after allegedly sending unsolicited sexual pictures. Both offenders were men.A reporter asked Ardern whether men in Parliament “should do better”. She declined to define it as a problem with men: “I’m not going to start casting judgments on specific genders here. It’s been a culture, an environment,” and she’d do her bit to clean it up, she said.Observes Curtin: “The one thing she’s explicitly championed for women here was abortion reform,” to have it removed from the criminal code, which has now been done. “But the minister in charge was Andrew Little,” a former Labour leader. Who also happens to be a man. She presents change as a shared project, not exclusive by gender.Finally, are women leaders more successful generally? It’s often asserted so. New Zealand, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Germany and Taiwan are all led by women and all are cited as countries that have enjoyed superior outcomes in the coronavirus pandemic, so far, at least. You can question the evidence: Denmark and Germany have suffered more deaths per million population than Austria and Hungary, both led by men, for example. Singapore’s death rate is identical to NZ’s. It’s run by a man.You can also question the conclusion. “I love Jacinda,” says Penny Wong, who knows her personally as well as admiring her politically. It just happens that surveys of Australians find Ardern and Wong to be the leaders they most trust, ranked in that order.Wong nominates four elements of Ardern’s leadership that she thinks make her a standout success: empathy, authenticity, “she takes responsibility”, and “she brings people together”. Are these attributable to her gender? Wong doesn’t think it’s necessarily so: “It all comes back to the qualities of the leader.”Most political news in the world today is made by “leaders with a strand of macho nationalism”, as Wong describes them. She lists Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Vladimir Putin, Jair Bolsonaro. But news isn’t generated so much by success as by failure. “Ultimately, I think people want substance, not spin. Jacinda Ardern demonstrates that. Leaders who can do that are likely to do better. Bringing people together is a prerequisite for change, rather than dividing people to enable a political contest.”Julie Bishop agrees with Wong: “I have a great deal of admiration for Jacinda professionally,” says the former deputy Liberal leader, who always rated towards the top of the trust index while she was in parliament. Ardern’s success “comes from her personal characteristics”, rather than her gender. “She’s demonstrably an empathetic person. Perhaps she’s more comfortable expressing that publicly than a male leader would be, but I don’t want to over-stereotype that.”Besides, Ardern can’t simply trust her success to her gender. She faces a female opponent in the election. Judith “Crusher” Collins, as she’s affectionately known, wouldn’t seem to rate so well on the empathy scale. She’s called the prime minister “my little pony” and “poor wee thing” among other things. But she’s certainly a woman.LoadingIf indeed liberal democracy looks to Jacinda Ardern as its future, Colin James thinks the whole country can share the credit. While median incomes in Australia have been stagnant for the past few years and in the US for the past few decades, they’ve been rising consistently in NZ. Ardern has enjoyed the highest approval rating of any NZ leader for a century, but her immediate predecessor, the Nationals’ John Key, held the previous record. “Liberal democracy works here still,” says James. “The two main parties are still the main parties. It’s not just her. The whole system here is working.”In these, the final weeks of the campaign, the government has appeared headed for easy re-election. So easy that the question moved from whether Ardern will win to whether she’ll have a win big enough for Labour to shed its coalition partners and govern in its own right. If that happens, she’ll have latitude that no prime minister has enjoyed since NZ introduced its current electoral system 24 years ago.Heading to election day, “the New Zealand public will have their opportunity to vote on her style as well as her substance,” says Bishop. “Style and substance seem to converge around election time.”Jacinda Ardern is being tested again. She doesn’t seem to mind so much this time.To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.Have a Good Weekend all weekWe deliver the best of Good Weekend to your inbox so it’s there when you’re ready to read. Sign up for the Herald’s Good Weekend newsletter here and The Age’s here. Sent every Saturday.