Do we like Jacinda Ardern?
Our score: 8 out of 10. She delivered a conversion therapy ban and fast gun reform and has been kind in public for years, with real misses on promises and a contested Covid legacy.
Ardern is the former New Zealand prime minister who became a global name for how she handled the 2019 Christchurch attack. These days she is an author, with a memoir called A Different Kind of Power, and she gets booked for writers' festivals and the interview circuit. Her whole public pitch is that kindness and strength aren't opposites, and that's the thread to follow.
Her biggest scandal wasn't about her, it was about her party. In 2019 Reuters reported allegations that a Labour staffer assaulted a young woman in 2018, and that the party had decided on no further action. The man denied it. Ardern apologised to the complainant, took control of the process, accepted the party president's resignation and said she was never told the complaints were sexual in nature. Critics wanted more answers, and the independent review was still pending in that report.
On the harm test, she comes out well. In 2020 she pledged to ban conversion therapy and said of the film that moved her on it: “That film never left me.” Parliament passed the ban 112 to 8 in February 2022, which the government called delivery on its manifesto. After Christchurch she said “our gun laws needed to change”, and about 27 days later New Zealand had moved to ban semiautomatic and military-style weapons. We found no harmful words and no dodgy company.
The recent stoush is Adelaide. The festival board disinvited Randa Abdel-Fattah, citing the timing after the Bondi attack, and Ardern was among 114 writers who withdrew. The board and several politicians defended or criticised the call, and Ardern gave no public reason in the reports we read. Where you land depends on whether you read the withdrawal as solidarity with a censored author or as taking a side in a bitter fight.
Covid is her other contested chapter. The Royal Commission's final report in March 2026 found the response largely balanced and effective but late and poorly communicated, and said the Auckland lockdown ran longer than needed. Ardern and Robertson said: “We got a lot right. More than most.” They also said they accepted the findings. Fans and critics will keep arguing about the lockdowns, but that is a policy fight, not a harm one.
She isn't a flawless operator either. AAP FactCheck rated her 2020 debate claim on child poverty as misleading, saying the improvements weren't statistically significant. KiwiBuild, her flagship housing promise, missed its 16,000-home target and she admitted it had “not met our expectations”. That is a record of overpromising, not of anything nasty.