Former New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern: 'Door-knocking for politics is easier than door-knocking for God'

Jacinda Ardern was prime minister of New Zealand from 2017-2023 – following a rapid rise through the political ranks within the Labour Party. She was born in 1980 and raised within an LDS Church community.

After joining the Labour Party aged 17 and gaining a degree in politics and public relations, she worked for former prime minister Helen Clark, before becoming a senior policy adviser to the UK government in the mid-2000s. During her term as president of the International Union of Socialist Youth, she became the youngest MP in the New Zealand parliament in 2008 and was soon promoted to the front bench.

A new film, Prime Minister, co-produced by her husband Clarke Gayford, follows Ardern’s time in office. From her bold, lifesaving move to close New Zealand’s borders when the Covid crisis began, to her humane and decisive response to the Christchurch mosque shootings in 2019, and becoming only the second elected head of government to give birth while in office, it offers an intimate portrait of leadership in a time of great political and personal change. 

In her Letter to My Younger Self, Jacinda Ardern looks back on her early life and meteoric rise to the heart of global politics.

I was very earnest as a teenager. I’d like to think that wasn’t at the expense of joy, but I felt a huge burden of responsibility. I was a member of a faith community, raised in the LDS church, what people know as Mormons, and was very committed. I was often the only Mormon my friendship group knew, so I felt the burden of representing my faith. I was the sober driver.

I feel I had a typical New Zealand upbringing. I grew up in a small town, we lived in a little orchard, I had a pet lamb! I learned to drive a tractor before a car and had a motorbike I would zip around on. So it felt like I had lots of freedom.

I always hated injustice. It might be small or large things, but if I saw injustice, just knowing about it created an obligation. I was part of a group that belonged to Amnesty International. We would write letters about prisoners of conscience. When I was a kid, I did the 40 Hour Famine. And my church was involved in service activities. I felt that drive early on.

In the 1980s, we were living in a town going through severe economic disruption. I remember seeing the impact of poverty on kids. We left when I was eight, but it absolutely politicised me, although at the time it’s not how I would have identified it. I saw it through the lens of injustice. I also became aware of the impact decision-makers had. Seeing Labour politicians on TV, I would just feel that they were my team.

As a teenager in Morrinsville [North Island], I grew up listening to Metallica, Rage Against the Machine, Sepultura, Tool, Smashing Pumpkins and Violent Femmes. But Portishead was my first concert. And in terms of heroes, the enduring ones were closer to home. I had huge admiration for politicians leaning the way I did but I’d also identify my history teacher and my mum and dad as role models. Then there was the curveball of Antarctic explorers like Ernest Shackleton! I was 14 when I latched onto him as someone who never lost sight of what was important in leadership, which was how you carry a team with you.

Me and my sister were the first in our family to go to university and it was so expensive. So you’re thinking, I have to make this worthwhile. After he worked in the mines, my dad was a policeman his whole working life. I felt the pressure to find something I could do that could help me support myself and that my family would be proud of – I went from wanting to be a psychologist to a police youth aid officer. I loved politics, but it didn’t fit with the idea of getting a job.

I would tell my younger self don’t let anyone trivialise how you feel. Things feel really big in those teenage years and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. I have so much sympathy for our young people. We should tell them it feels hard because it is hard – and things get better. No teenager ever had it easy, but it is exponentially harder now. I’d say to any adult of the 1980s and 1990s, think about the cruelty of the note passed around the classroom, now put that on the internet. That is the reality for young people today. There is a duty of care on us to think about how to make their lives easier and bring them into decision making.

Imposter syndrome is very common – we just don’t talk about it. Because the moment we confess to it, we think people will lack faith that we can do a job. I’ve got nothing to lose by talking about it now. So I talk about what it brings you. Because it brings you traits that are valuable in leadership. If you think you might not have what it takes, you’re going to research, prepare and bring humility to the role. You’ll bring in experts and advisers. And you will listen. Once you’ve gone through that process, you become decisive because you know the issue. And aren’t those things that we want in leadership? So I would tell my younger self that things you see as weaknesses may just be your strengths. Early on in politics, I thought empathy and sensitivity, overthinking, crying, hugging, worrying were things to be overcome rather than embraced. That’s why my book [A Different Kind of Power, published by Pan Macmillan in June this year] was dedicated to the criers, the worriers and the huggers.

My early life prepared me for politics. I started door-knocking for God at a young age in the Mormon church – and door-knocking for politics is a lot easier! Also, in my church, you would give talks from a young age, so I got used to public speaking. I did debating in school, learned persistence and resilience from my parents, and worked different jobs – from delivering flyers to working at a chip shop, where I observed small business owners and the graft of trying to make it work.

My younger self really valued values. Many of those were based around my faith and over time I had to grapple with where those butted up against other values I held dear. So that was challenging. But I haven’t given up on how important is to be guided by a moral compass that you believe in. I did an exercise where we asked politicians to think about what they’d want to tell their younger self. And they said it’s actually what your younger self could tell you. Because so often in politics, we have this idea of compromise. Instead, we should think about consensus. You don’t have to compromise on your values, but you do have to try and bring people with you. So that’s where I hope I landed.

Read more:

• Rory Stewart: ‘I assumed I’d die a heroic death in my early 30s’
• Lib Dem leader Ed Davey: ‘My first political meeting was being dragged to a Tory disco’
• Nadhim Zahawi: ‘The line between being on the street and being chancellor is very, very slim’

I wanted to bring kindness to politics. When I suddenly found myself leader of the Labour Party, after nine years in opposition, I didn’t want to be negative any more. I said, we’re not going to attack any other politician personally. If someone has a misstep in their lives, that’s for their party to commentate on. We’re going to lift the bar of expectation. Political culture is hard to shift. But why is kindness not a value we should expect politicians to have? It’s a core value.

Mark Carney [Canada] and Anthony Albanese [Australia] talked about kindness in their election night speeches, both of them. So it is still there. You just don’t see as many headlines on it. It’s not as attention grabbing, it’s not as inflammatory, it doesn’t incite reaction. But it is there. It just needs more of a spotlight.

We think of empathetic leadership as a way of being – but it’s actually a motivation to take decisive action. Gun law change was one example – we created the Christchurch Call to Action to try and address what contributed to the radicalisation of the person that was motivated to undertake the attack. That, in my mind, is what empathetic leadership is about.

There’s a globalisation of political culture. Regardless of whether you’re looking at Europe or the US, there is a tendency to see populist ideas as being on the rise but I don’t believe that is an accurate reflection of where people’s sentiment is. I think they want more civility, less violence and greater focus on the struggles in their daily lives. I don’t think what we’re seeing in politics writ large is what people want. There’s a disconnect. The incentives are wrong. The way to get headlines is to be on the extreme, which means we’re seeing a particular type of politics in the headlines. But that doesn’t mean it’s what people want.

I was an unwed, first-time mother who had only been prime minister a few months when I announced I was having a baby. You wouldn’t ideally plan to have a child at the same time as you are taking on this high-pressure job, but I feel so lucky I got to do both. I was expecting a bit of flak but the response was great. When look back at all the footage from that period, I feel a bit sorry for myself – because it’s gonna get worse. So I want to whisper in her ear, you are going to be all right.

There were so many hard things during my time as prime minister. 15 March [the terror attack at a Christchurch Mosque] was incredibly difficult. Covid was one of the very few times in leadership where you can draw a direct line between life and death in decision making, regardless of what other countries were doing. It felt as stark as: you are going to make the call now as to whether the direction you take will lead to the loss of lives. But I walked away feeling happy because I know I’d done my best. That seems simplistic, but when you’re your own worst critic, acknowledging you did your best is a big achievement.

My younger self would be especially proud of what we achieved on child poverty. When I think about my younger years, it was the thing that stood out to me. We bring so much complexity to public policy issues, because, for the most part, they are difficult. But when you look through the lens of a child, they’re simple – all kids should have a warm, dry house. They should have food to eat. And they should have a stable, loving home. These are all fundamentals that we did. And it should be hard to disagree with that in politics. My younger self would be proud that I hung on to that view and tried to do something about it.

A big thing for me is political leadership right now. We need strong, empathetic political leadership to help resolve the issues that require consensus. I can’t help but see the crisis and genocide in Gaza as being something that’s diminishing people’s belief that politics and global institutions can address issues that are so obviously wrong. It causes people to lose faith in political institutions.

I wouldn’t want to talk to my younger self about relationships. There’s lots about my ending up in the relationship and marriage I’m in now that would have surprised her. So I wouldn’t want to alert her, because the fact lots of it surprised me probably meant it takes the pressure off. Clarke and I got together when I was 34, so the only thing I would say is relax. What will be, will be.

Everything about my life now would surprise my teenage self. I remember sitting in my high school in my senior year looking up at the stage at a prize giving. An ex-student had come back to inspire us, and she was an accountant who’d worked in London. I thought that was the greatest thing. How exciting she’s gone and worked overseas, I hope one day I might have that chance. Maybe I’ll stay for a while. It seemed so thrilling.

The one thing about my life now that wouldn’t surprise my younger self – because I’ve always had it – is the consistent love from my family. I’m so lucky for that, because people don’t always have that when they leave religion. It was personally very hard, but my family were gracious and supportive. I wish the world had greater religious tolerance and I carry with me that sense of service, which was a big part of my upbringing.

There shouldn’t be politics in climate change. I would rather the discussion was what to do about it rather than whether we should do anything. The question should only be the scale and speed. We have an obligation to the next generation. There’s a principle of indigenous New Zealanders called kaitiakitanga, which means you’re guardians of the environment and the earth that others will inherit.

All my politics comes back to overcoming injustice and thinking about the long term. I was elected on a platform of inequality, child poverty, housing, climate change and environment. None of that can be achieved unless you’ve got a thriving economy, strong education system and good public healthcare – and all those things relate to what drove me to politics in the first place.

Where do I find hope? Young people. Because they’re not indifferent to what’s happening in the world around them. The moment we have indifference is the moment we worry, but I see young people being activists, in spite of the environment they’re in, seeking practical change, trying to address climate issues in their own way, calling on not just governments but the private sector to act. I don’t see indifference. So that’s where I get my hope.

You can miss the platform while not regretting the decision to leave frontline politics. When you are someone who cares deeply about issues and you have a platform, it is a gift. I see the escalation of political violence, the dehumanisation, and I care deeply. And I care deeply about what I’m seeing happening in Gaza. It’s a genocide. Everyone has a responsibility to do what they can. I’m now a citizen, I don’t have a specific role, so I look for other ways to be useful in the world.

Prime Minister is in cinemas from 5 December. Ardern will be in conversation at the Royal Albert Hall with Jacinda Ardern: A Different Kind of Power on 30 November.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. 

Change a vendor’s life this Christmas.

Buy from your local Big Issue vendor every week – or support online with a vendor support kit or a subscription – and help people work their way out of poverty with dignity.