Jacinda Ardern, page 5
Nikki Kaye tried hard. She was an athlete, an Auckland middle-distance running champion and an ultramarathon competitor. She took part in the 2008 Coast to Coast marathon, a 3-kilometre beach run, 70-kilometre cycle, 33-kilometre mountain climb and 67-kilometre kayak. It should have been the perfect side story, since so few politicians are athletic. But nobody likes hearing about how much work and training you had to do to complete an event 99 per cent of people would never think about attempting. Nobody likes a tryhard.
Kaye did have the advantage of being a local, though. Her background was that of an Auckland Central resident. Leafy suburbs and private schooling, followed by science and law degrees, her upbringing was in contrast to Ardern’s in Morrinsville. But despite different beginnings, the two women’s CVs had striking parallels. They both worked in party leaders’ offices in the early 2000s – Ardern with Prime Minister Helen Clark and Kaye with Leader of the Opposition Bill English. Kaye worked in Europe in 2003 on government policy projects. Ardern arrived two years later, working under Sir Ronnie Flanagan in policing. While Ardern was working her way to becoming president of the International Union of Socialist Youth, Kaye served as the vice-chairperson of the International Youth Democratic Union, who describe themselves as a ‘global alliance of centre right political youth organisations united by a common desire for greater freedom and less government.’
Both women returned to New Zealand in order to run in the 2008 general election, though Kaye moved home in 2007 to put up a serious, and eventually successful, bid for the Auckland Central seat, while Ardern arrived a month before the election simply to make a showing in Waikato.
Both women were frequently described in the media as ‘earnest’.
Cursed by their own similarities, the two women never got close; admittedly, the nature of campaigning made actual interactions rare. It was as if they both knew that they’d be compared to each other for the rest of their careers and were destined for a lifelong rivalry.
Kaye tried hard, and so did Ardern. But Ardern alone succeeded in making her campaigning feel natural. Kaye was vocal, presenting her ideas around public transport and small businesses whenever possible. Ardern simply went to events and had a chat to people. And oh by the way, vote Labour.
Of course only female politicians are ‘tryhards’. Male politicians try hard all the time; their failed attempts to be relatable or funny are met with a grimace and then shrugged off. Women in politics are rarely afforded such a luxury. Kaye was competent, knowledgeable, pleasant and earnest. But by virtue of being less personable than Ardern, she was marked as the underdog in an electorate she had already won once before.
Ardern was a familiar face. From a crop of promising new MPs in 2008, she emerged victorious in claiming the Young Guns spot on Breakfast, the nationally broadcast morning show. Young Guns was a regular political segment featuring a young MP from Labour and National debating the issues of the week.
Ardern represented Labour and Simon Bridges National. Kaye made a few appearances, particularly early in 2009, but the chemistry was noticeably different. While Bridges and Ardern, and later Jami-Lee Ross and Ardern, appeared happy to sit beside each other and share a joke, when Kaye appeared on the segment there was a 30-centimetre gap between the two MPs and a distinct lack of humour. It felt bitter rather than collegially competitive. To put it plainly, the chemistry between Ardern and Bridges made for better television.
Getting face time on national television once a week all year round was a coup for Ardern and Bridges as backbenchers, where half the job is trying to get voters to remember your name. While Bridges fared better than Kaye on Young Guns, Ardern was the clear star. Being in opposition worked in her favour. She was able to criticise the government’s latest decisions without having to defend her own party’s actions. And no matter how serious the topic, Ardern made sure to get in the last laugh. Literally. Almost every interview ended with Ardern laughing and, more often than not, Bridges looking slightly hard done by.
Whether intentionally or not, Ardern was building her profile in a way rarely seen in politics. She was becoming a celebrity first. People in their twenties today remember hearing Ardern in the background as they got ready for school in the morning. They wouldn’t have been able to tell you her role in parliament or her policy interests, but they knew Jacinda Ardern was a politician. That’s a significant achievement for a first-term list MP in opposition. Being known personally more than politically would become a sticking point for Ardern years later when she campaigned to be prime minister, but in 2010 it served her well.
By standing Ardern in Auckland Central, Labour were fighting fire with fire in more ways than one. Kaye and Ardern agreed on a lot of things. When the National government proposed mining on Great Barrier Island – which fell in the Auckland Central electorate – Kaye took a stand against her own party. It didn’t win her any favours: National supporters called her a traitor, while opponents accused her of grandstanding in order to curry favour with her socially liberal constituents.
In 2012, the Barbara Lee Family Foundation published a report titled Pitch Perfect: Winning Strategies for Women Candidates. In it, they refer to their own 2010 research which found that ‘voters were perfectly willing to vote for a male executive they thought was qualified but did not particularly like. However, we found that they would not vote for a woman they found unlikeable even if she were qualified.’ Women candidates must be both qualified and likeable, and each affects the other. Men candidates are not affected by that correlation. The report found that ‘because qualifications and likeability are so closely linked, there are dual negative consequences for women when they make mistakes on the campaign trail’.
It’s a double bind for women: being competent won’t make you likeable, but being incompetent will certainly make you unlikeable. Ardern and Kaye were both competent but Ardern was the more likeable. Why? It’s hard to say. Perhaps she simply had more of a sense of humour. Kaye was liked, and her stance on the Great Barrier Island mining proposal would later be regarded as honourable, but at the time it was framed by media commentators as a woman attempting to undercut her own party.
The Auckland Central contest was distinctively urban and liberal. Ardern and Kaye were running in the electorate most populated with young professionals and small business. They were also by far the two youngest serious candidates in the election. Auckland Central in 2011 was the perfect contest to showcase social media as a campaign tool, and the two young women were the perfect politicians to test drive it.
Ardern was first, creating her Twitter profile in March 2010, with Kaye following suit soon after, in June. The two quickly found their respective strengths: Kaye posted policy-heavy updates with the occasional personal aside, usually a self-deprecating joke. Meanwhile, policy came in second for Ardern, who regularly posted jokes about her parents and herself. Where Kaye sought to campaign as a National party member, promoting both herself and the party’s policies as a whole, Ardern seemed to be campaigning alone. She rarely used party lines and, to an uninformed viewer, might have been mistaken for running as an independent. According to their Twitter updates, a vote for Nikki Kaye was a vote for National while a vote for Jacinda Ardern was a vote for Jacinda Ardern.
On election night in November 2011, the live updates showed a tightly fought contest. Kaye took an early lead as the votes came in, but with 22 per cent of votes counted she held a lead of only seventy-seven.
At 10.40 pm, after a campaign vocalising tangible policy far more than her opponent, Nikki Kaye delivered a victory speech to her supporters. She retained her Auckland Central seat with a majority of 717 votes. National stayed in power and Ardern returned to parliament as an opposition list MP.
Three years later Ardern would again challenge Kaye in the Auckland Central seat, and once again the Battle of the Babes moniker was wheeled out. With nobody replacing them as the young stars of New Zealand politics, the two women remained the exciting, liberal contest to watch.
In the three years since her first defeat, Ardern had worked hard to boost her profile in the business and arts scenes. She was prolific, not only appearing regularly around the Auckland music and comedy scenes, but seemingly becoming friends with everyone in those communities. She attended cultural festivals, held frequent coffee shop meetings, and represented the Labour Party at the annual Auckland Pride Parade. She’d succeeded in gathering support, or at least everyone seemed to like her. But everyone liked her in 2011 and Kaye still won that contest. Ardern needed to show she had the policy conviction to back up her interpersonal skills. Evidently, her party thought she did. By January 2014, Ardern had been promoted to Labour’s front bench.
Unfortunately, while Ardern’s profile was rising, the Labour party as a whole was crashing. Going into the 2014 election, Labour experienced some of their worst polling in party history, thanks to incessant infighting. The election was considered a hopeless fight, and MPs were desperate to win their electorates just to secure a seat in the House. Ardern had an uphill battle ahead of her, with the left-leaning suburb of Grey Lynn being moved out of the Auckland Central electorate that year.
Ardern’s campaign reflected the fracturing within the party. Billboards were put up with #AskJacinda in large font. They invited voters to write questions on the hoardings which would then be answered by Ardern. It wasn’t #AskLabour, it was #AskJacinda. A study of the two women’s campaigns in 2014 found that in the four weeks leading up to election night, as Labour struggled to communicate a concrete policy plan, Ardern tweeted only three times about Labour policy. Labour weren’t expected to put up any fight on election night, but maybe Ardern could pull off a minor victory.
The contest was even closer than in 2011. With two-thirds of the vote counted, Kaye was ahead: by just over 200 votes. By the end of the night, her lead had widened, though not by much. The party vote in Auckland Central was overwhelmingly National; unsurprising, given the state of the Labour party throughout the campaign. In the end, Kaye won her seat yet again, with a winning margin of 600 votes.
Ardern was 0–3.
Kaye defeated Ardern in two consecutive elections. She went on to become education minister in the National government. In 2016, Kaye stepped away from politics after a breast cancer diagnosis. But she recovered and retained Auckland Central in 2017. When the moment comes, it’ll be a brave soul who’d underestimate a general election with Ardern and Kaye as party leaders. It will almost certainly have a better tagline.
5
THE RISE BEGINS
Everyone in New Zealand knows someone who claims to have dated Jacinda Ardern. Notoriously private when it comes to her closest relationships, Ardern didn’t publicly appear with a partner until 2014, when she was thirty-four. Until then, the most Ardern would disclose was that she wasn’t in a serious relationship. That didn’t stop everyone around her from trying to set her up on dates though.
In September 2014, speculation emerged that she was in a relationship with Clarke Gayford, after they were seen together at the World Press Photo Exhibition launch, and then again at various bars and restaurants. But the couple didn’t make an official public appearance together until November, when they attended Lorde’s music awards afterparty.
Gayford was as well-known as Ardern, if not more so. He was a media celebrity and, on paper, the very opposite of Ardern. She was an earnest politician, 100 per cent committed to her work, who had, according to vague answers given to women’s magazines, been single for a while. He was a radio and television host, who’d recently separated from a Shortland Street star. He was known around town as a party boy and had had a number of high-profile relationships. Not what would be considered a safe option for a rising political star: more like fodder for the gossip magazines, or a distraction.
Which makes the story of how the two met all the more surprising. According to Gayford, in 2013 he had concerns about a proposed surveillance bill that he believed would erode the privacy of New Zealanders. Gayford described himself as having been, prior to this, politically ‘apathetic’. But now he took his concerns to Ardern, his local opposition MP, and she agreed to meet him for coffee to discuss them.
The two had met before, it turned out, though only briefly. At the 2012 Metro Restaurant of the Year Awards, Ardern was the plus one of model and friend Colin Mathura-Jeffree. Mathura-Jeffree had embarrassed Ardern all night by introducing her to everyone as ‘the future prime minister’. He introduced her to Gayford and the two chatted for a while. A year later they sat at a local cafe, discussing an amendment bill and realised they both liked the same local drum and bass band, Concord Dawn.
Gayford and Ardern became friends and eventually he asked her out on a date: fishing. Having grown up on the East Coast, Gayford’s one true passion was the ocean. And as he got older, he negotiated time slots on the radio that would allow him to go out on the water after work. Ardern had never fished before but proved good at it from the beginning. ‘It was a champagne day,’ Gayford later told a lifestyle magazine. ‘The sea was glass flat and we had a huge pod of dolphins join us. It was literally Jacinda’s first cast.’ Over the next six years, writers around the country and the world would exhaust every possible fishing allegory when remarking on the couple. But on that champagne day, Ardern had her first cast and first catch. She pulled in a 5.4-kilogram snapper and with it, Gayford’s heart.
The pair were constantly in the public eye. With Ardern the spokesperson for arts and culture and Gayford a television personality, they attended numerous awards ceremonies, gigs and book launches. Despite that, the couple kept things fairly low-key at first – they rarely featured in each other’s social media feeds. And despite the unlikeliness on paper, the relationship worked.
Gayford maintained his own career, hosting and producing Catch of the Day, a fishing show filmed around the world. Their lifestyles matched. Ardern travelled regularly, flying to Wellington for parliament sitting days, and around the country when portfolio matters required it. Gayford filmed his material in all seasons, often making longer trips to the Pacific Islands and beyond. Among their busy schedules, they bought a house in Point Chevalier and renovated it together.
IN A SLIGHTLY DAMP FLAT in central Auckland, one month before the 2014 general election, a group of university students were disappointed by what Jacinda Ardern was saying to them. Ardern was standing in the kitchen, holding court and eating from a packet of salt and vinegar chips the flatmates had generously provided. Speaking candidly, or as candidly as a local MP on a house call can, Ardern was insisting, not for the first time, that she didn’t want to be prime minister. In fact, she didn’t want any sort of leadership position within the Labour Party. ‘I’ve seen how hard it is to raise a family in that role,’ she told them. ‘And that’s what I want to do.’ At this point, Ardern and Gayford had not been publicly confirmed as a couple but had been dating for several months.
The students were disappointed – not because they were anti-family, but because, well, they liked Ardern. Three of the friends, all women, had attended a ‘Locally Left’ discussion at a local Returned Services Club, to see her speak. They were the youngest in the modest crowd by a solid three decades. After the event, they had a drink with Ardern and complained that their flatmates were apathetic about the upcoming election and didn’t intend to vote. Without hesitation, Ardern offered to come round to their flat to see if she could stir up some interest in democracy. Two weeks later their dining room furniture was pushed to the side (they didn’t have a lounge: the Auckland rental market had forced them to convert it into an extra bedroom) and a dozen of their friends were listening to Ardern in the kitchen.
She spoke about policy and Labour’s plans for a new government, but even the most politically apathetic among the students knew Labour were doing terribly. So they asked her: do you want to be prime minister? And she said no.
It was disappointing to the students because although Labour had churned through several leaders in the last few years, it was Ardern a few rows back who appeared the most competent to them. And she was different. Well, at least somewhat: she wasn’t a middle-aged white man.
When Helen Clark retired after the 2008 election, the party leadership reverted to type: a middle-aged man, in the shape of Phil Goff, with Annette King, a three-decade veteran Labour MP, as deputy. King was only the second woman to be deputy leader, but Goff and King were hardly representative of a new generation within Labour, and in 2011 they suffered a convincing election loss. Goff stepped down and was replaced by David Shearer. At this point, Ardern leapfrogged from a ranking of nineteen to become the highest-ranked woman in the party – at number four – and one of only two women on Labour’s front bench. It was a big jump for Ardern, but not surprising given Labour’s distinct lack of female representation high on the list. There were still more men named David on the front bench than there were women – a grim statistic critics liked to cite.
Under Clark, Labour had worked towards gender balance, but although the number of women MPs had increased, few of them rose to the higher echelons of the party.
In 2012, now on the front bench and therefore the frontline, Ardern’s public profile lifted dramatically. Articles were written framing her as the next star of the Labour Party, but in interviews for these profiles Ardern emphasised her lack of ambition, at least as far as leadership went. ‘There’s something about politics where people always assume people’s motivations are very particular,’ she told one reporter. ‘We all obsess about leadership far less than everyone else assumes we do.’ Ardern must have only been speaking for herself, because the Labour Party was about to go through the worst period of leadership upheavals in its history, demonstrating just how much everyone in the Labour Party was obsessing about how they wanted to be leader.
