Jacinda Ardern

CHAPTER ONE

PUBLIC SCHOOL GIRLS

AT MY PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL in rural New Zealand, there was a rule for skirt lengths: they must be no shorter than 12 centimetres above the knee when kneeling. This might sound like quite a high hemline, but once you’re standing up it’s really not too far above the kneecaps. And, in the mid-nineties—an era which gave us Ginger Spice and Gwen Stefani—it was not high enough.

My English teacher, Miss Taylor, was an absolute stickler for this rule. She would launch skirt-length spot checks every few weeks, where all we girls had to line up in the middle of the classroom, holding our breath as she moved down the row with a ruler.

There was a trick to getting around these audits. If you knew Miss Taylor was likely to do a check that day—say, it had been a couple of weeks since the last one, or she got a certain glint in her eye during a lesson—you could sneakily unzip your skirt and pull it down so it sat at regulation length during the inspection. If you missed the warning signs, though, or couldn’t inch the fabric down before she made it to your place in the line, there would be hell to pay. Punishment could include a trip to sit outside the principal’s office, a detention or a note home to insist the offending item be lengthened.

In the hierarchy of our school, the length of a girl’s skirt provided crucial social information. It was critical to get the length of your own skirt just right. Girls with super-short skirts—‘what is she wearing, a belt?’—were the sluts. Girls with skirts that were too long were kind of geeky, or overtly religious. Those with skirts at regulation length were the high-achievers, the swots who played it safe. The ‘right’ length—which signalled you were risqué enough to flaunt the rules (such an individual) but not too much of a hussy—was somewhere in the middle.

In the fifth form, when I was about 15, my parents sent me away for a brief sabbatical at an all-girls high school in New Plymouth. Mum bought me the school uniform, which included a skirt that fell to mid-calf. I still remember the embarrassment of wearing it to school on the first day and discovering that no one wore it that length. This was not a good way to establish street cred. I was a social pariah. Any chance I might have had of getting an invite to smoke on the tennis courts with Abby from Stratford and the other cool girls was immediately and forever decimated.

The message was: if a boy is thrown into paroxysms of lust over a glimpse of your bare thigh, then it is hardly his fault if he thought you were up for it.

As a teenage girl in a Western country like New Zealand, you receive a series of often-conflicting messages about your sexuality. It’s very rarely treated as positive, as something that might be precious and exciting in and of itself, something worthy of self-exploration. I wish I’d known as a young woman to be proud of my sexuality, and that pleasure wasn’t just something I should give. Instead, schoolgirl sexuality is treated as though it is dangerous, and must be controlled. The focus is on managing the harm you might cause to yourself and to others (read: the opposite sex). Don’t get pregnant. Don’t drink too much. Be sexy, but not too sexy. When I was a teen, the importance of using contraception (and of this being primarily my responsibility) was drilled into me and my female friends over and over again, while at the same time Cosmopolitan told us ‘How to Give Great Blow Jobs’ or ‘10 Ways to Drive Your Boyfriend Wild in Bed’.

The message was: if a boy is thrown into paroxysms of lust over a glimpse of your bare thigh, then it is hardly his fault if he thought you were up for it. Thank god, then, that there was a regulation length for our school skirts, lest boys be overcome with mad, primal urges and male teachers driven to distraction. No wonder it was thought necessary to regularly check we weren’t flaunting the rules, then ensure we missed out on education if we pushed back, even in the smallest way, by refusing to conform with the arbitrary uniform regulations that were policing our bodies.

Sure, boys got in trouble for wearing the wrong shoes. But the boys didn’t have to get down on their knees. The boys didn’t need to worry about how much of their leg was showing, or what the length of their trousers said about them, or what they were wearing underneath. We used to wear shiny satin boxers under our skirts, the ones that love to ride up between your legs, because a pair of underwear alone would have been unthinkable—and as for bending over: completely out of the question. And the boys never had to sit through classes in a state of mild panic every time they had their periods, worrying their light blue skirt would resemble a Rorschach test when they stood up.

Back in those days, I knew nothing about feminism—at least, not consciously. The Spice Girls’ ‘Wannabe’ was on my playlist (when I say playlist, I mean I taped it off the local radio station’s Top 9 at 9) and I had a huge crush on Courtney Love. Both those acts and their promotion of ‘girl power’ was in turn mischievous and ferocious, and, when I look back, likely more influential than I thought. They caused havoc, and they were proud of it. (In a 2019 article, The New York Times quotes screenwriter Jamie Curtis as telling The Telegraph that the Spice Girls ‘were terrifying. Particularly if you were a man. If you walked into a room and it was just the five of them you would literally turn around and try and get out as quickly as possible.’) But generally speaking, I was about as motivated to take action on equality as I was climate change—that is, I was blind to the premises of either. My days were spent trying to doctor my ID to make it look like I was 16, which was old enough to buy a pack of Pall Mall 10s from the dairy for $3.30. Our soundtrack was Nirvana and The Cranberries, Tupac and Dr Dre. One of my best friends was Jacinda Ardern’s cousin—not that I knew that at the time—and we whiled away hours in a fog of incense smoke, listening to CDs, talking about boys, and drinking cheap bourbon by the light of an army of wrought-iron candlesticks.

MEANWHILE, A FEW HUNDRED KILOMETRES away in another small town, Ardern was leading one of her first successful campaigns: to change the Morrinsville College school rules so that girls could wear shorts instead of the regulation skirts. The fight went right to the top, with Ardern arguing the merits of gender-neutral uniforms to the school’s governance board. Her fierce debating and speech-making skills—on display nationally when she led the college debating team to a win over posh Auckland private school King’s College—set her in good stead for this contest.

In her teens, Ardern was already more engaged with the politics of social inequality than most people are in a lifetime. ‘She’s always been very socially aware,’ Morrinsville College principal John Inger told me when I visited him at the school Ardern attended from 1994 to 1998. Bordered by an athletics track and a slash of tennis courts, Morrinsville College looks like most New Zealand public schools built last century—low wooden buildings, linoleum hallways, bird-poo-splattered benches clustered outside classrooms. The chirping of crickets rises over the dry fields, which are quietly waiting to be repopulated when the kids return from the summer holidays.

‘Back in those days it was just a given that girls wore skirts,’ Inger said. ‘Well, it just wasn’t right, was it? Why couldn’t they wear shorts? [Jacinda] was already campaigning to change some of the laws she saw as unfair.’

‘She always thought everyone should get a fair deal … She’s an extremely able young woman who is very charismatic—in many ways she’s a younger John Key,’ said Inger.

The rule change was ratified in 1998, Ardern’s last year of school, and also resulted in all students being allowed to wear their shirts untucked. ‘That was momentous for a school which had been very traditional in terms of our uniform expectations,’ Inger said. ‘She always thought everyone should get a fair deal. In my view, she is a genuine person with a genuine concern for people. She’s an extremely able young woman who is very charismatic—in many ways she’s a younger John Key.’

A framed photograph of Ardern now hangs in the office foyer, sandwiched between the winners of a Year 9 Anzac Day colouring competition and a university advertisement poster. From above the reception, a row of portraits of the school’s past principals casts a formidable gaze. They are all Pākehā men. When I arrived, my gaze slid down these pictures into the faces of the real women behind the counter, the backbone of the administration. I wondered for a moment what their predecessors looked like, and then I was following a pair of clacking sandals to Inger’s office.

Inger has been at Morrinsville College since 1992. He reeled off the news organisations which have dispatched reporters to come and sift through Ardern’s background. ‘TIME magazine!’ he said, almost disbelieving. ‘There was someone else … from The New York Times? And a British guy. I mean, they’ve had a female prime minister, but never someone so young. That was always the angle—and the baby. The fact they came all the way out here to interview me and have a look around, we felt pretty bloody proud.

‘I mean, she’s the second woman to have a baby in that role. The fact she and Clarke are coping so well, I think that’s inspirational for all women, and I think that’s been recognised over the world. I think Clarke is doing a good job of being a good role model as well, in respect of being a stay-at-home parent.’

I hadn’t yet asked a question, and Inger was already dismantling potential criticism of his former student, including any suggestion she might not be able to do her job because of her gender. Inger’s defensiveness is not misplaced. In her first week as Labour leader, breakfast-show host Mark Richardson asked her live on air whether she was going to have children, arguing that employers deserve to know if their employees are going to procreate because parental leave plans affect their business. Ardern had given Richardson short shrift, telling him the question was ‘totally unacceptable’.

Recalling that incident, Inger laughed. ‘That Richardson, he shot his gob off and he got shot down in flames, as he should have been. This belief that was espoused that she wasn’t going to be able to cope. You see these people write the stupid bloody comments below these stories—I can’t read them anymore. It makes me so angry that they underestimate her ability.’

Her classmates apparently saw her leadership potential, and named her most likely to be prime minister in the school yearbook.

Inger remembers Ardern as a forthright and confident student. One of her best friends was Virginia Dawson, who was the head prefect and is now the Head of Development Co-operation at the New Zealand Embassy in Myanmar. She’s worked for non-governmental organisations worldwide, including at Oxfam and UNICEF, and has been an advisor to the UN. As young women, Ardern and Dawson were not wasting time. (Ardern has described her high-school self as an ‘acceptable nerd’, although she still bears the telltale scar in her nose from a classic nineties nose piercing. Her classmates apparently saw her leadership potential, and named her in the school yearbook as most likely to be prime minister. She was also a member of the Students Against Driving Drunk group, organising shuttles home from the school ball.)

‘She’s obviously a highly impressive woman,’ Inger told me. ‘I don’t know how many rural schools like us can claim to have educated a prime minister.’ Although, when it comes to groundbreaking women, there’s another pupil Inger is particularly proud of: Nurul Shamsul, who became the first contestant to wear a hijab in the Miss Universe New Zealand competition in 2018. This made her a viral star in Malaysia, where she was born, but Shamsul said she just wanted to give Muslim women visibility. ‘A lot of Muslim girls are scared of wearing the hijab because of possible harassment. I hope that by wearing the hijab in this competition I’ll show some confidence. It’s okay to wear the hijab, you’ll still look beautiful in the hijab,’ she told Radio New Zealand.

In New Zealand, the Ministry of Education applies a ranking system to schools based on socioeconomic factors in the surrounding community, and uses this to determine whether a school should receive extra funding. Decile 1 is the lowest ranking, and decile 10 the highest. Morrinsville is a decile 6 school—around the middle of the scale—with Māori kids making up about a quarter of the roll. Decile is not a measure of a school’s success, but a lot of Kiwi parents tend to see it this way. In 2015, I wrote a story for the Sunday Star-Times about how middle-class (primarily Pākehā) parents were shunning their local schools and instead sending their children to higher decile schools with fewer Māori and Pasifika kids. The result has been that, in the two decades since the decile system was introduced, schools have become more segregated by class and race.

According to Inger, many Morrinsville parents choose to send their children to the boys’ or girls’ high schools (or either of the two private Catholic schools) in the nearby city of Hamilton instead of to the local college. ‘There’s no doubt there’s some latent racism in the community, and some people choose to send their kids to Hamilton schools,’ he told me, the issue clearly a bugbear for him. ‘Some parents think their child needs to be at a school like Hamilton Boys’ to become an All Black, which is everyone’s ideal, but that is not the case. We accept all comers, and we are inclusive in terms of kids with learning problems, with emotional or physical disabilities. We don’t kick kids out very easily. [Expelling kids] might take away the immediate problem for the school, but it doesn’t help society. We try and keep them in.’

As the student representative on the Board of Trustees’ suspension committee, Ardern had to help make some of these decisions while she was there. ‘It was tough,’ she said, in her maiden statement to Parliament on 16 December 2008. ‘I sat face to face with my peers who were facing removal from the education system. Although I had no qualms in handing down punishment to those students who were bullies, I also saw many come before us who quite clearly had no emotional or financial support from their families, from their caregivers, or from their community.’ Ardern’s sense of fairness was being honed even then.

Ardern has kept in close contact with her old high school, and with Inger, visiting every couple of years until she became prime minister. Then, when she was elected, her first official visit was a trip back to her hometown and to Morrinsville College. Inger was elated. He wrote a special newsletter commending the former pupil for her successes, and the one-page bulletin, featuring a half-page image of Ardern in front of a Labour flag, went home in 660 schoolbags that night. When penning the last line of the missive, Inger couldn’t resist throwing in a sentence about how the new government might finally supply some much-needed funding for the school. The emails of complaint came in almost immediately—how dare Inger bring politics into the classroom?

‘It went down like a cup of cold sick,’ he said to me, almost gleefully, tapping on his computer keyboard to try to locate a copy of the newsletter. ‘You could say it was like a red flag to a bull.’

TO UNDERSTAND WHY PARENTS WOULD have bothered to complain about the principal of a school praising a high-achieving former student, it’s necessary to understand the complicated relationship between Ardern and her hometown.

‘I have to say, we’re a blue, blue district,’ Matamata-Piako District Council Mayor Jan Barnes told me, referring to the colour of the country’s popular, conservative-leaning National party. In a general election in New Zealand, people get two votes: a party vote, and an electorate vote. In 2017, National’s Tim van de Molen won the Waikato electorate by a landslide, more than doubling the votes of the next closest candidate, Labour’s Brooke Loader. Around 60 per cent of Ardern’s home district voted National, with Labour gaining just over 24 per cent.

Sure, when Ardern won the election, she made the front page of local rag the Piako Post. Her grandparents, living in nearby Te Aroha, would have been able to proudly show their friends. And there is no doubt support exists for her in Waikato.

‘As a mother, I am in awe of what she’s achieved,’ said Barnes. ‘She’s just so relaxed. I don’t think I was like that when I was a breastfeeding mother. For me, she’s very down to earth, she’s from a rural, provincial family, she’s grown up here and she understands us. She’s a great example of being a mother and a leader.’

According to Barnes, admiration for leadership can transcend political tribalism. ‘You know, Helen Clark’s sister is a much-loved teacher in Te Poi. A lot of people don’t disclose who they vote for. We can celebrate success and achievement, and it’s not all about what side of the divide you fall on.’

But, while Ardern was claimed as a hometown girl on the front page of the Piako Post, the rest of the edition was dedicated to how the local community planned to ride the fallout of the election. ‘Anxiety and elation in PM’s hometown’, one headline read, tempered slightly from the blunt sentiment in the previous edition: ‘Community leaders back National’.

Morrinsville is smack bang in the middle of cow country. There is literally a cow wherever you look, because someone decided the township needed dozens of giant, garish cow sculptures.

In this country, farmers—and, in particular, dairy farmers—often lean conservative. Many of them see National as backing their industry and prioritising a strong economy, which equates to more money for their milk product. They want their property rights protected, their taxes to stay unchanged, and for their children to succeed. Under a National government, all of these things appear to be prioritised. Under a Labour government—with talk of capital gains tax, environmental regulations, redistribution of wealth, and spending on health and education for all—it starts looking a bit more tenuous.

Morrinsville is smack bang in the middle of cow country. There is literally a cow wherever you look, because (as if there weren’t already enough cows) someone decided the township needed dozens of giant, garish cow sculptures. When I checked in to my accommodation, the host pointed me towards a brochure. It was a map of cow statues. ‘There’s one outside the RSA with a gun on its back,’ another guest informed me later, apropos of nothing. He was chuckling as he lay back on a pool lounger, stroking his naked chest.

This man—we’ll call him Gary—worked a blue-collar job in factory management that often brought him to Morrinsville. He voted National, too. Gary didn’t have time for unions. Or certain professions. ‘I’ve always been sceptical of teachers,’ he told me, somewhat mystifyingly. ‘I like Jacinda, yeah. I wish her well. I just don’t trust that elite kind of liberal, idealistic stuff—people always telling us what we should do. That’s not real life, man.’

Gary said he used to shoot the breeze with Ardern’s partner, Clarke Gayford, at flat parties in Auckland. Gayford was a television presenter in those days, heavily involved in Gisborne dance festival Rhythm and Vines. (I have vague recollections of him emceeing when I attended the event in the late 2000s. ‘Pace is ace, people!’ had been his afternoon’s refrain, as the great sweaty beast that is a summer festival crowd geared up for their night. ‘Pace is ace.’ He seemed kind of a try-hard.)

‘Great suekshw!’ Gary said to me, through a series of guffaws. He was still on the topic of parties.

What?

‘Great swhfyuu!’ he repeated, giving me a wink.

Is this a new code word for ecstasy?

Gary took his durrie out of his mouth. ‘Great seafood.’

Seafood. Oh.

Anyway, the dislike of Labour among some in the farming community—and this is true nationally—is so intense that, ahead of the election, Federated Farmers organised a 500-strong protest in Ardern’s