Jacinda Ardern must use her power to push New Zealand to more progressive politics
Jacinda Ardern was travelling in a taxi in July 2017, two months before the election that would make her prime minister, when arguably the most important message in her nine-year parliamentary career came through. Labour’s poll results were crashing, the message said, and the party leader – the austere Andrew Little – was considering stepping down. Would Ardern, the then deputy leader, consider stepping up?
In the following days calls went back and forth. The party activists (and MPs at risk of losing their seats) were in the pits, and Little told the country’s leading current affairs show resigning had crossed his mind. From that admission, the poll numbers could only fall further. The Greens were at 15% , sucking up votes to Labour’s left while the conservative National party was polling in the mid-to-high 40s, maintaining an iron grip on the centre right.
The caucus, in a last-minute bid to save the party from a fourth term in opposition, put it to Ardern again: will you step up?
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This time, just a week after receiving that urgent text message and poll result, the Auckland MP said yes, winning unanimous backing from her colleagues and promising a “relentlessly positive” campaign and a “transformative” government. Two months later, with backing from the centrist New Zealand First and the left-wing Greens, Ardern was prime minister.
But did she deliver that transformative government? Hardly.
In her campaign launch on the weekend, the Labour leader made a promise to implement a $300m “hiring subsidy”, a handout to businesses to help maintain employment numbers. The policy is fine as far as it goes – it’s a useful stop gap measure in the midst of a global pandemic – but the opposition were quick to note the irony.
The policy is a weaker version of what National were proposing – in 2012. For people to Ardern’s left – that includes the Greens as well as most of the Labour Party – the announcement confirms the most frustrating thing about Ardern as a politician and her cabinet as a government: despite commanding the country’s trust and respect, they aren’t willing to do anything with it.
Under Ardern’s leadership a capital gains tax, an adjustment the country desperately needs to steer investment away from the overheating property market and towards the productive economy, is out of the question. Her government’s mass house-building programme was a flop. In her first budget the ministry of Māori affair’s operational funding was cut.
Ardern is the most popular politician in living memory, a progressive with the opportunity to shift the centre to the left. Yet at almost every opportunity – from tax reform to universal payments – the PM opts to entrench the centre where it is.
In this respect she shares more in common with her neoliberal predecessor John Key, the second most popular prime minister in living memory, than her Labour Party predecessors.
It’s tempting here, as a leftist, to insert a dialectic into Ardern’s rise. If a conservative culture and soulless consumerism were responsible for flower power in the 60s, perhaps it was a neoliberal politic and a life-threatening capitalist mode that is responsible for Ardern’s singular and unique appeal. Someone who promises to care. But this is all together too grand, and thoroughly overdetermined. Ardern is, to use the Harold Innes quote, a “status quo seeker”, and she is popular because she is competent manager of it.
My election wish is that she turns that unique competence to progressive politics.
