Sam Sachdeva
Wellington, December 14, 2020
Jacinda Ardern: The fear of failure is daunting (Photo by Lynn Grieveson)
Standfirst: As a part of a Year In Review series, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern spoke to Newsroom about the toughest parts of 2020, handling self-doubt, and the state of the housing market.
After twin tragedies at home in 2019, a global pandemic brought a different challenge for Jacinda Ardern this year.
“I was going to say that I am on my second wind – but probably I am on my sixth one.”
Ms Ardern likely speaks for much of the country when asked how she is feeling at the end of an interminably long year.
Shaky sense of time
After two cracks at an election campaign, a month in nationwide lockdown and countless other bursts of bad news, the Prime Minister’s sense of time is as shaky as the rest of us.
“Someone just asked me, ‘What was your lowest point of the year?’, and I had to track back and try to think about the different…really difficult things that we have experienced and which of them tipped into 2020, because they are just a blur of hard moments.”
Unsurprisingly, the hard moments that spring most easily to her mind relate to the Covid-19 pandemic and the unprecedented decisions made by the Government, from shutting the country’s borders to entering a domestic lockdown.
The toughest decision
Making the initial calls was not the toughest part, she quickly clarifies; “The evidence has been clear about what we need to do…going in was not as difficult as almost just making sure that we safely got out.”
The sacrifices made by New Zealand’s ‘Team of Five Million” have weighed heavily on her mind, even after Kiwis began to adjust to the new normal.
“It certainly has not got easier, but it is not quite as it was in the beginning when there was nothing to tell us how to do it. I just did not want to make a wrong move; people had shut down their lives for a month, people had lost their businesses, I just did not want all of it to be nothing because we got it wrong,” Ms Ardern said.
(Photo by Lynn Grieveson)
High stakes and uncertainty
The stakes at play could inspire uncertainty in even the most self-assured person, and Ms Ardern has been open about the personal pressure that comes with a career in politics.
Receiving the 2020 Gleitsman International Activist Award from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership at the start of the month, she spoke to students about suffering from Imposter Syndrome, while in 2017, before taking on the Labour leadership, she was even more candid in an interview with Next magazine.
“I am constantly anxious about making mistakes. Everything in politics feels so fragile…I do live in constant fear of what might be,” she said.
Now, she is not only Labour Leader but the Prime Minister, an elevation which would seem to risk that fear becoming intolerable.
Sense of invisibility
Ms Ardern believes that any anxiety or self-doubt she goes through is “probably at normal levels for the job that I do,’ but makes a point of sharing her own experiences to counter the sense of invincibility that can rise up around leaders.
“There are many leaders that you would observe and think that they would never feel those normal human emotions that you experience because they are there doing what they are doing, and that must make them somehow superhuman, when no one is superhuman.
“You just do not often hear leaders talking about that, so that is why I do it, because then, someone who thinks, ‘Oh, I could not do that job, because I would worry too much’ – everyone worries.”
What limited public sympathy there is for politicians was further tested in 2020, with Andrew Falloon, Hamish Walker, and Iain Lees-Galloway among the MPs to depart Parliament following varying levels of indiscretion.
Demand for houses because they are an investment asset (Photo by Lynn Grieveson
Improving standards
Ms Ardern believes that standards are improving, with stronger expectations around appropriate behaviour compared to previous Parliaments but is clear there’s more to be done.
“We need to make sure that we are modelling our expectations about healthy workplaces and people being safe at work, and just very basic things like treating others well… Even though it is a Westminster-style (system), and you know, the Debating Chamber will be combative, there is always to do it and there’s still room for improvement,” she said.
‘Room for improvement’ would also serve as an understated assessment of the Government’s approach to the housing market.
Thanks to the pandemic, the high-profile failure of KiwiBuild did not have the relevance it might otherwise have enjoyed during the election campaign, but a marked spike in house prices even as Covid-19 endures and the economy suffers has put housing back on top of the agenda.
Housing prices
Ms Ardern said that there is a difference between ‘modest’ but sustainable growth in prices, such as 2018, when wage growth was outstripping that of the housing market, and the surge we are seeing now.
There are both supply-side and demand-side problems in New Zealand, she said but wondered whether there is something particular to the pandemic, and the country’s psyche, which explains the current state of the market.
“We already, I think, had an ingrained view that investment in assets like housing was the safe thing to do. We have got a generation that grew up, you know, having lost money on the share-market who are a bit more cautious in what they do.
“So it was probably already ingrained in us. Is a pandemic making that worse? My instinct is yes…because actually, there isn’t really a time where you look in New Zealand history and say, ‘well, that collapsed and everyone lost the money’. So I think there’s something psychological going on.”
National Party attacks
National’s attacks on Ms Ardern over the issue seem to have struck a nerve.
The Prime Minister said that it was “galling” for Leader Judith Collins to criticise the government, given that her Party’s own track record in power, while she told the AM Show that rising prices were “something we are concerned about – and that is a different view to the previous government.”
But some of Ms Ardern’s critics on the left have themselves found it galling that ‘concern’ may be enough; Danyl Mclauchlan offered up a scathing satirical piece for The Spinoff last month, titled ‘Ardern pledges to care 9% more by 2030‘.
Has the Prime Minister read it?
“I saw the headline, I decided I should not read beyond that…I got the feeling that it was not nine tips on self-care.”
Mantra of Transformation
She understands the critique but (unsurprisingly) takes a different view, holding to her pre-election mantra that transformation is change which sticks.
“If we do not manage to bake in what we do for the long term, then this new intake of Labour MPs will sometime down the track sit as I did in opposition and watch it all be undone, then how are we as a nation better off?”
The criticism does frustrate her, “but at the same time, I would rather an environment where people are asking us to do more in that space and asking us to do this, because that is a much better place to be given that we have ambition in those spaces,” she said.
Sam Sachdeva is Political Editor at Newsroom. He covers Foreign Affairs, Trade, Defence and Security Issues. The above article and pictures have been reproduced under a Special Arrangement. The above story has been sponsored by
