Former prime minister Jacinda Ardern gives her final speech after 15 years as a member of parliament, with five in the top job, ahead of her official departure on April 14.
Retiring or resigning MPs make a valedictory statement. It's often used to reflect on what they have achieved, get some previously unshared comments on the formal record, and shore up their legacy.
The MP for Mount Albert may reflect on her leadership during times of crisis, namely the Christchurch terror attack in 2019 and the Covid-19 pandemic the following year.
Ardern made history in both her terms as Prime Minister. During her first term, she became the second head of government to give birth in office and won the first ever parliamentary majority since MMP was introduced in her second term.
When asked in a Newshub exit interview, Ardern said her final message to NZ will be a “thank you.”
Once out of parliament, she will continue to serve as New Zealand’s Special Envoy for the Christchurch Call, an international network she set up to combat online extremism, in a voluntary capacity.
She will also join the board of Prince William’s climate charity, Earthshot Prize, which awards grants to innovative ideas to fight climate change.
Watch the speech here:
88 Comments
Agreed. Over promised and under delivered.
Tilting your head to the side and putting a concerned face on and promising to be kind is one thing, making hard political decisions to fix underlying issues (which have existed for decades) is another.
I wish her well for the future.
NZH 7.07 pm, “the email that went out just two minutes after she had concluded her speech included two links to the Labour Party donation page.” Fair enough, but here hasty pecuniary opportunity would seem to outweigh dignity as the image fades into the sunset. Has a sort of moneylenders in the temple feel to it.
Well,you need some balance,there is a big possibility that there is a Nat/ACT government,they shouldn't be given a free ride based on 'anyone but Labour'...thats what gets us into trouble every time...everyone sitting around in here p*ssing on JA doesn't actually achieve much...
So far the Nats have said they will remove the top tax bracket(since redacted) and remove the the taxation tightening around investment properties...so in reality,they want to rinse & repeat.
That's the rub though - how does the 'Anyone but X' mindset come about? For Clark, it was sitting on the sidelines as houses rose and rose, only headed off by the GFC, and offering scant tax relief. That gave us Key, ultimately turfed out for... well probably the same thing. And now we have Labour in their second term who are on the hook for... housing costs and tax.
I'm spotting a theme here, and perhaps it is more to do with the insulated reality of Wellington vs. the rest of the country. Pretty hard to justify so much of the country's wages ending up in Wellington to deliver fewer and fewer services, while the same people who fund the state are copping it in every which direction. It seems like no major party is interested in making that work for anyone outside the bubble, and policy quickly gives way to patch protection, no matter which party you vote for.
I hope she has the sense and good grace to decline a knighthood. It was as ridiculous as it was egotistical for PM Key to re-introduce them. The founding Labour PMs disdained them and so too Lange & Clark. The exception being Sir Walter Nash knighted in a much different day, by the Holyoake National government and deservedly and understandably so, after over thirty years of parliamentary service, the war cabinet and three years a Prime Minister. It would place her in the lesser category of Rowling and Palmer who could only have had some sort of personal reasons to go against the trend.
I never voted for her, and I'm sure other commenters will be queuing up to lament her lack of achievements, so I'll focus on a few positives.
She led an excellent response to the pandemic that enabled us to spend most of the last three years living in relative normality whilst the rest of the world endured rolling restrictions, loss of life and poorer economic outcomes.
She's been good for our image overseas, not unimportant given our reliance on skilled immigration now and in the future.
She's provided an inspiring example, especially to young women and girls, of how to lead without resorting to masculine tropes to convey strength and authority. As a bloke, I hope our future politics features more Jacinda-style empathy and less of the confrontational bluster we get from the likes of Nash, Mallard, Winnie etc. We will get more talent into parliament that way.
Agreed and well said. I preferred Andrew Little but I've never met anyone who agrees with me (I must meet his mother someday). Being PM does have a PR component and she did that well. Hopefully she will stay as inconspicuous as Angela Merkel has been since she lost power.
The initial response was excellent. I don’t think the mid and latter stages of the response were.
She and her government failed to deliver on the majority of their policy priorities. On some, their delivery was truly pathetic.
Their rhetoric - yet more lies - has been about openness and transparency. Again, there has been a gulf between rhetoric and reality.
They talk a good game about public participation. Yet they have pushed through a number of things with very little public participation.
There’s many more issues….
good things? Very few, but some of the property tax changes?
I give her a bare pass as a PM - a C+ - and her government a D.
Good summary HM. Your rating is probably in line with many past PMs.
The difference with Ardern is that, in an ever more connected global world, her natural advantages and adept performance on the international stage, made her standout an a way that was way beyond what her performance in New Zealand justified.
Largely agreed.
I think in the early days (i.e. first term) she did a good job at elevating NZ's profile on the world stage and was quite adept at responding empathetically to disasters, albeit perhaps interjecting herself a bit too much - although maybe that is just how the media covered her so I'll give that a pass. I do believe she had some good intentions as well with respect to issues such as child poverdee but as we all know the delivery has been disastrous.
She faced some unfair criticism on a sexist/misogynist, and also age basis. At the same time, she was defended by a legion of 'white knights' who would do anything for their Queen.
Apart from locking Kiwis out of the country (which I'll never agree with as being acceptable - more should have been done to secure additional MiQ facilities) the rest of the first phase of the Covid response did buy NZ some time and allow us a period of relative normality.
For me, it largely fell apart from the re-election. It's almost like the electoral success + media adulation got to her head. She needed one of those people who used to walk beside the Roman Emperors of old whispering in the ear 'remember Caesar, you too are only human'. She seemed to "go off the rails" at that point.
I also think she relied too much on division as a political strategy. Ardern and the government as a whole were very eager to leverage issues of 'us vs them' for political advantage. For example, gun owners were 'them' (I've never owned a gun, never will) ute owners were 'them' (never owned a ute, I ride a bike) and most notably anyone who showed any aspect of questioning/resistance to the Covid response was 'them' (this was the biggie)
In the end that division and polarisation came back to bite her in the behind, as the public grew increasingly tired of this plus her ever-more-condescending nature towards the same public. She lived by the sword and died by it, in that respect.
Regardless, I hope she can enjoy a nice family life, whatever that means and looks like for her, and that now she is out of her public role she can go about her business safely and in relative "peace and quiet".
She led an excellent response to the pandemic that enabled us to spend most of the last three years living in relative normality whilst the rest of the world endured rolling restrictions, loss of life and poorer economic outcomes.
Other countries do not have the privilege of being isolated islands at the end of the world.
No doubt about it she excelled at pathos. For White Island, the Terrorist attack, and Covid initially, that sufficed and the resultant status of an international celebrity carried the day much much longer than any degree of substance that was actually behind it. In that regard, of recent Labour Prime Ministers, she ranks well behind, Mike Moore, Norman Kirk, David Lange, Helen Clark and also if he should remain PM in October, Chris Hipkins who presently is doing his very best to extricate himself, and his party , from the barrow load of excrement that has been dumped on him from out of her prime ministership.
Good point, but I was thinking mainly of the Nash saga which percolated out of her PM’s office and that cannot be denied. And that is pretty damning because if there is one thing that New Zealanders deserve to be able to trust, out of all the multi government functions, it is in the integrity and capability of a Prime Minister and associated office.
Totally wrong. You lived the last 3 years in lockdown, people unable to come home, no jab, no job, to perform a hideous gene therapy experiment on Team NZ and the clinical trial continues with all cause deaths on the rise (loss of life). NZ had the rolling restrictions (MIQ, stay at home in fear and don't talk to your neighbors). Nothing normal there. NZ has a $34.8 account deficit with the rest of the world, is that not a poor economic outcome, not to mention the government spending that has driven inflation and put our fiat currency in downfall.
And I will not start on what the rest of the world think of Ardern, it is certainly not reported in the government sponsored media here in NZ.
the most genuine and belivable PM ever
Brought the country together
Fixed health
Fixed child poverty
Improvèd race relations
Crime down
Covid eliminated
Govt debt reduced
Reduced coal burning
Improved health and surgery outcomes/waitjng times
Better education outcomes
Road to zero trending downwards
Sorted housing
,,,,
Ardern and Muldoon both went about violently suppressing protests. There was broad public support to do so at the time and they acted within that support.
Then after the fact NZ public then changed its collective mind about how protests should be dealt with. So Ardern and Muldoon got reviled as two of our worst PMs.
Different PM's for different circumstances : if I wanted an entertaining guest at a dinner party , I'd call David Lange ... if I wanted a cure for insomnia , I'd listen to a Jim Bolger speech ... if I wanted an intellectual discussion , Helen Clark ... if I wanted a mate around the BBQ , John Key ... if I was feeling down & needed a hug , Jacinda Ardern ...
Or how to get a dodgy accomodation allowance for your own property get across the line...
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/2910957/Bill-English-buckles-…
Caving in to pressure, Bill English has paid back $32,000 and vowed to stop claiming a housing allowance.
The deputy prime minister admitted yesterday that the row over his housing allowance had taken his attention away from running the economy, while Prime Minister John Key said the row had become "an unfortunate distraction".
Mr English has come under fire over allowances he claimed for living in his $1.2 million Karori house, but has failed to shut down the controversy since it was revealed by The Dominion Post in July.
stop reading the headlines Obama was useless ,he promised everything and achieved nothing as I have lived in the USA for 20 years and Ardern kept actually safe from what, covid. see no one talks about it here now in the USA, it was just to control the masses, it worked for a while then everyone woke up. Ardern nearly turned NZ in a Chinese suburb. Wake up
She had a tough start and despite some scrambling mistakes by agencies around how to manage COVID at the start managed it very well IMO. Hindsight makes it easy to poke holes in the response, but at the time I though she did a very good job.
What turned me off though was the switch from team of 5 million to how the priminister and speaker of the house treated their citizens who came to their doorstep to be heard about their opposition to the vaccination mandate. It could have been handled so much better. Very hard to have managed it in a unifying way, but to go hard down the divisive line that they did was very disheartening to see.
And then to be given a majority second term government freed of the shackles of NZ First, her party seems to have ultimately squandered the majority mandate that could have used better.
Everyone has the right to refuse to undergo any medical treatment. But she and her government knew better.
Bureaucratic censorship, propaganda, character assassinations, and media control all had to be ramped up to 1950s East Germany levels to combat the resistance.
Unfortunately the medical treatment was counterproductive, lockdowns were ineffective, but the economic damage was real. Oopsy-daisy.
One of the most choreographed / stage managed premierships in history. Managed the media very well but achieved very little. Whilst the hate was abhorrent, it is evidence that she left a divided country where the ‘kindness’ was extended only to those that fitted in with the ideologically driven agenda. Ask property investors, farmers, small business people, immigrants whether they thought she was kind. Inadvertently made a lot of her ‘flock’ worse off. Renters a prime example. In retrospect, was the COVID era well managed? Whilst I’m not an anti vaxxer, that group were treated very unkindly and almost excluded from society by COVID rules.
Farewell Comrade. You'll go down as the best PM in New Zealand history. You left the country in a better place. Thanks for raising awareness about climate change, pronouns, and all sorts of wonderful ideologies. I'll invite you to my birthday party. We can eat bugs and ride unicycles and have a nap in the afternoon in a safe space.
Thanks again. Love NZ Citizen - he/ him/ tablecloth/ Professional Tuvan throat singer.
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