Even in a world that claims to be feminist, self-aware, and progressive, and even in some of the most developed countries in the world, there are still women forced to make very difficult choices. In the case of Jacinda Ardern, she also happened to be a head of state.
Ardern’s autobiography, A Different Kind of Power, opens with Arden sitting on a toilet, watching a pregnancy test in anxious anticipation. She’s recently found out that her party, Labor, hasn’t quite won the election and she needs the support of New Zealand First (NZF) in order to form a coalition and win government. Whilst waiting on the decision of NZF’s leader, Winston Peters, she also started having suspicious symptoms, so her friend Julia went out to buy a pregnancy test. Days before Ardern finds out that she will become the prime minister of New Zealand, she also finds out that she is pregnant.
It’s a hell of an opener: throughout her leadership, Arden strives to redefine our image of a leader, and she feels so much pressure to be visibly different from everyone who has come before her. Throughout the book, she tells us how she visits schools across New Zealand (NZ) and asks young children what they think of when they imagine a prime minister. The answers are predictable: old, male, white-haired, grumpy, arrogant. They say over and over again to the minted prime minister that their image of a leader is not her, and she becomes increasingly resolved to change this.
Ardern, unlike most people who become politicians, wasn’t really surrounded by politics from an early age — at least, not in the sense that her family were born and bred pollies. Her grandmother was a rusted-on New Zealand National Party (NZNP) voter, with political leanings that are significantly more conservative than Ardern’s. Even later on when Ardern is at a political debate against a conservative candidate, her grandmother gets starry-eyed about the other candidate and says that while she loves Ardern, she’s definitely not going to vote for her.
This conflict between the conservative politics of the people around Ardern compared to her own progressive politics follows her for decades. During Ardern’s time as an MP, she gets involved in a conflict over legalising same-sex unions, which she is in favour of, despite the fact that she is a Mormon and her religion says that homosexuality is immoral. And earlier on when Ardern first campaigns to become an MP in the conservative seat of Morrinsville, she only gets in because of a quirk in NZ’s democratic system whereby a voter can vote once for their local representative and once for their prime minister, and if the party leader gets enough votes to win then they secure a quota of seats. The parliamentary system definitely seems to be one of the most distinct differences between NZ and Australia: another quirk is that they call their equivalent of Parliament House the Beehive.
The book dwells closely on crises so overwhelming that the world remembers them: the Christchurch massacre, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the volcanic eruption at Whakaari (White Island). There are three spheres of attention that exist in the book: what Ardern herself perceives, what the NZ public perceives, and what the world perceives of the goings-on in NZ. Ardern largely focuses on the first and third, leaving many domestic issues in the background. This is one part of the book that doesn’t feel as thorough as the rest — perhaps because Ardern thinks the nitty-gritty parts of her job aren’t as interesting to readers. While she spends plenty of time on the more sensational events, there must be a great deal that she omits entirely.
To increase appeal to an international audience, she also peppers references to very recognisable world leaders, such as Prince William, who gives her baby daughter Neve a ‘Buzzy Bee’ for her first birthday.
At meetings with heads of state, Ardern shows the flip side of a ubiquitously male world. She writes about her first bilateral meeting with a female head of state, Angela Merkel, in a group of 58 world leaders where 5 are women. Her husband Clarke, meanwhile, gets to know “the wives” in a formal spousal program — the overwhelming number of world leaders’ partners are women, so an official program is constructed to organise garden tours and tea parties. It’s a funny but somewhat bitter reminder that even as Ardern is breaking new ground, she’s still stuck in a world where power is grossly concentrated in the hands of men, while women are often relegated to sideline positions.
Ardern often brings up her “sensitivity”, something that she struggles with on the path to her prime ministership. From the outset, she’s told that as much as she’s interested in politics, she’s just not cut out for the ruthless strategising, negotiating, and hardballing it entails. When she becomes PM, it’s by the skin of her teeth; throughout her tenure she faces a lot of criticism which is largely glossed over in the book, even as she dwells on a few moments like when a stranger confronts her in a public bathroom to tell Ardern that she hates her.
In comparison to other leaders Ardern faces many unique challenges, from her age to her gender to her pregnancy. Yet she strives at every turn to use these differences to her advantage, and to channel her sensitivity instead of suppressing it. It is no coincidence that one of the most famous images of Ardern is of her hugging a young woman who had been a victim of the Christchurch terrorist attack in 2019.
One of the standout successes of her term is that following that attack, it only took ten days for the NZ parliament to reform their gun laws. 10,000 weapons were handed into the police in the first month after the law introducing the buy-back program passed, which retrieved 56,000 weapons by the end of the year. When Ardern is confronting the pandemic, she shows a similar resolve: NZ gains one of the highest vaccination rates in the world (90 per cent plus) and the decisions that the government takes save an estimated 20,000 lives.
Ardern will be remembered as a leader who tried to imbue kindness and compassion into a profession where it is rarely evident. She isn’t perfect, but we would be hard-pressed to find a leader who is. Her biography is a moving record of someone who tried to reform not only her country, but also the image of leadership itself. Now when we think of a prime minister, it is not such a strange thing that she could be a woman.
A Different Kind of Power was published on 3rd June 2025 by Penguin Random House.
