Opinion: When journalist Michelle Duff wrote a biography of Jacinda Ardern in 2019, the term 'Jacindamania' had been coined but Covid 19 was unheard of. Over the next two years the world – and New Zealand – would change drastically and the young prime minister would be deified, then demonised. Duff, who last week released an updated version of her book, writes on how she believes imported culture wars helped to distort our political landscape – at the expense of women.
Remember when New Zealand used to have its own thing going? We twisted number 8 wire into cool shapes to keep animals in. We were scrappy little underdogs, uppercutting nuclear power, trailblazing away, giving women the vote before the rest of the world even clicked on to the fact they had their own brains.The little country down under, wild and free. So friendly, those Kiwis. Give you a barbequed sausage and the shirt off their own back.
At some point, we were all in this together, even if some of us had different ideas about how to get there. For at least the past twenty years – as long as pollsters have been counting – no matter the Government, New Zealanders have largely agreed the country is heading in the right direction. The centre-left, centre-right metronome (9 years Labour, 9 years National) ticked along, like background music at a rowdy family dinner.
When the swell of right-wing populism began to build from Europe to the United States, and caveman-type figures — gosh, sorry, I mean strongmen — like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson swept to power on platforms of fear and half-truth, it seemed like New Zealand was standing against the tide. This is part of the reason the world’s media were so interested in Jacinda Ardern — a young, left-wing, "relentlessly positive" Prime Minister, preaching empathy, inclusivity and kindness. Throw in the most diverse government in our history, with the most women and LGBTIQ+ members ever, movement on climate change, indigenous rights, decriminalising abortion, increasing paid parental leave, addressing child poverty, and you’ve got a real triumph-over-adversity sort of a narrative.
It’s kind of cute that we thought the waves wouldn’t crash here. As if geographical distance might really have made a difference. As if divisive rhetoric around abortion, gun control, education, sexuality, gender identity and race wouldn’t get the same cut-through, because we had either resolved these issues politically or were on the way to doing so, or because we were somehow smarter, or less religious, or closer-knit as a nation, or more progressive.
And then came October 2021
The swing to the right and today’s Chris-David-Winston Government didn’t come out of the blue; if you track it carefully, as I’ve done for the recent update of my 2019 book Jacinda Ardern, it can be pinned to this point in time. It is also when we begin to see the country shift further towards a post-truth environment, with the splintering of families and communities along ideological lines, and a rise of distrust in public health experts, media, and the government.
It gave rise to the beginning of a sustained campaign of targeted abuse against Ardern and other public-facing women, including academics and journalists — which leads us to where we are today, when a young wāhine Māori candidate is subject to a home invasion, and where women on both sides of the political divide report more abuse and the need for increased security.
If you want to go further back, you could say the beginning of the end for Ardern was when she began to front the 1pm press conferences, leading what the New York Times would later dub a “masterclass in crisis management” that saved thousands of lives and left New Zealand one of the few countries in the world with negative excess mortality during a global pandemic. Massey University political scientist Richard Shaw told me this entire 2020 year — the 61 per cent approval rating for Ardern, the out-the-gate polling for Labour, the refusal of the public for a time to hear any criticism of the pandemic response — should be considered a statistical anomaly. In doing what a good leader should do, she won the heart of the people. But it could not last.
So let’s go with October, 2021. This saw the confluence of several things. The Delta variant arrived in August, spelling the end of the country’s elimination dream. This led to a hard two-week lockdown in late August, stretching out to three months for Aucklanders. Businesses were suffering, and people were tired and anxious. There were rumblings of discontent with MIQ, issues with the speed of the vaccination programme; and then, vaccine passports and mandates were introduced.
If there is a moment that gave rise to division and discontent, fuelled by conspiracy theories and disinformation imported straight from the United States, this is it. Those who closely monitor social media networks – and to a lesser degree, anyone with an internet connection – watched as Ardern morphed into “Jabcinda”, a cipher for increasingly misogynistic hate, eventually accused of everything from killing full-term babies, to deliberately harming children with vaccines, to orchestrating a ring of paedophiles, to being a snake-person and a c***.
During this time, while reporting for Stuff, I was sent a confidential report outlining the extent of this by Sanjana Hattotuwa from The Disinformation Project. In the middle of reading it, I pushed my chair away from my desk, walked to the bathroom, closed the door, and placed my forehead against the cool wall of the cubicle, where I stayed for several long breaths. I splashed my face with water from the sink before walking back into the newsroom. The content was extreme, and the images were the worst. Ardern, with a blackened, hollowed-out face and glowing eyes, rendered as a witch. Then Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta, her features horribly twisted and distorted. The c-word, comparisons to animals or insects, and expressions of desired punishment that don’t bear repeating here. It was anti-feminist backlash, at its worst.
'The misogyny bump'
By November 2021, there is evidence of a shift. Labour has its worst poll showing in a year. From this point, both the party fortunes and Ardern’s personal popularity begin to fall. Though her popularity still remains relatively high at the time of her resignation, the fact the party gets an immediate bump just by appointing a male leader in Chris Hipkins — with no policy changes — shows how far her stocks have fallen. One friend deems it the “misogyny bump.” Also at this time, we also see a movement in government confidence polls, and by early 2022 the majority think the country is heading the wrong way. The parliament protest begins on February 9.
You could argue the Ardern government didn’t live up to its promises. There are many, like Dame Naida Glavish, who feel Ardern let down Māori in the pandemic response and communication around Three Waters (now the Water Services Reform Programme), and Muslim community leaders and others have criticised the response to the March 15 white supremacist terrorist attacks. There’s been no dent in the housing or cost of living crisis. But how much of the kickback is due to Ardern’s failure to deliver, and how much is the inevitable wave of anti-government sentiment, the one eternal populist Winston Peters rode right back into power?
As to where we are at now, here are a few questions. How much did issues affecting women specifically arise in any of the campaigning or policies for the recent election? How were Māori spoken about or to by the three men now jostling for their slice of power? How many women are going to be in this new government? What is the accepted level of discourse going to be, now that those who want a referendum on the treaty (David Seymour) and reckon Māori are not indigenous (Winston Peters) will be lawmakers?
The ‘them and us,’ the ‘treat all races the same’, the anti-trans rhetoric, the twisting of the truth, the attempts to erase people of colour, the promises to punish people due to their class, the encouraging of abuse based on some aspect of a person’s identity; these are all straight from the Republican playbook. It’s not like New Zealand has been immune to these politics before. But we’ve seen them step up in this campaign and be used with impunity. Last month Peters railed against Ardern for “knowing” about the terrorist attack before it happened, making it sound like a conspiracy, when the fact the terrorist sent his manifesto to Ardern’s office nine minutes before the attack was widely reported at the time.
We will end 2023 with a government that is likely to be, according to a Spinoff analysis, just over a third women, down from more than half. There will be no Pasifika representation. The leader of the centre-right coalition is a conservative Christian who has said he believes abortion is tantamount to murder. For my book, Professor Joanna Kidman, head of He Whenua Taurikura, the National Centre of Research Excellence for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism, told me the biggest threat to national security internally comes from white identity extremism and from misogyny.
Progressive? No. Let’s see us bend our way out of this one.
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