Why Ardern’s early exit is bad news for Albanese

On resigning the prime ministership of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern said she wanted to be remembered as “someone who always tried to be kind”. She tried, no doubt. But her brand of kindness has many victims.

In Australia, the most prominent individual victim of Jacinda’s kindness will be her good pal Anthony Albanese. He is spruiking a similar set of empathetic progressive promises to the ones that were made to New Zealanders and for which our Kiwi neighbours look set to boot out NZ Labour come October. Once ardent Ardernists now feel, to quote the ABC’s 7.30 program, “visceral apathy” towards Ardern’s party. In Kiwi idiom, they’ve had a gutful.

Jacinda Ardern and “good pal” Anthony Albanese.Credit:NCA NewsWire/POOL

It really is inconvenient timing. This is Albanese’s year to put all his political capital on the line and deliver what he believes in. He’s got a swag of big programs and October is around when he’s hoping we’ll vote Yes in a referendum to enshrine an Indigenous Voice to parliament. But Jacinda, whose kind and empathetic demeanour has presided over policy failures in almost every area Albanese is tackling, is packing up her halo and leaving her trail of failure open to comparison across the ditch.

Take social housing policy. This one is key to the prime minister’s identity and purpose. A decade before his prime ministership was a glimmer in Scott Morrison’s eye, I heard him outline his vision for a national housing scheme in The Workers Bar of the Unity Hall Hotel (an icon of Labor history, from well before the Sydney suburb of Balmain became home to the best-paid workers in finance and insurance, and transformed into a bastion of wealthy Greens). The intention to provide shelter and stability for those who need it is laudable. The question is whether his $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund – which aims to deliver 30,000 new homes over five years – will suffer the same fate as Jacinda Ardern’s similar KiwiBuild program.

KiwiBuild, launched in 2017, was to deliver 100,000 homes to those who needed them by 2028. By 2022, it had built just over 1 per cent of that, with another 1 per cent under development. Those that had been built were out of reach of the genuinely needy.

Albanese and Ardern share a mistrust of the private sector, so it’s likely the way the Australian government attempts to deliver on this commitment will invite parallels to the NZ scheme delivery. And as Albanese is getting industry superannuation funds to invest in his plan, the return on investment – or lack of it – will affect the retirement of fund members. So, if Albanese’s low-income housing kindness is anything like Ardern’s, it could come with a lower income sting in the tail for retirees.

Illustration: Reg LynchCredit:

Then there is the “wellbeing budget”. Ardern’s deputy – the equally kind but less photogenic minister of finance Grant Robertson – introduced wellbeing budgeting to New Zealand in 2019. Obviously budgets have always been about wellbeing, in whatever form the governing party conceives it. But it’s not a lousy idea to state explicitly what the government believes national wellbeing looks like and seek to measure progress on that. So Albanese’s treasurer, Jim Chalmers, is planning one too. Unfortunately, the NZ example has proven to be mostly spin. Former Reserve Bank of NZ governor Arthur Grimes calls it “a bit of a marketing gimmick”.

Certainly, the government has not delivered on its wellbeing objectives. Education standards are slipping in New Zealand, with 40 per cent of 15-year-olds not achieving the most basic level of reading, with Maori and Pasifika students declining significantly since 2000.

The Salvation Army says child poverty remains unchanged, despite the government’s claims that rates are decreasing. Here again, the wellbeing of Maori and Pasifika kids is even worse, with estimates that they are 10 per cent more likely to live in poverty than other children.

In 2019, the NZ government committed NZ$1.9 billion to addressing mental health. Mental health continues to decline (and yes, it’s worse for Maori and Pasifika). The number of acute mental health facility beds is the same as in 2017, when Ardern came to power.

Robertson, the architect of NZ’s wellbeing budget, was widely seen as Ardern’s successor. The fact that he has chosen not to contest for the position of Labour Party leader ahead of the 2023 election shows that he’s very aware that NZ voters have found the delivery of the wellbeing budget wanting. Turns out that, in politics at least, it’s not the thought that counts.

Albanese will also confront comparisons between the Indigenous Voice and the interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi – the historic and enviably successful treaty between the Maori and British settlers – under Ardern’s government. After years of successful co-governance, the Labour Party stands accused by conservative parties of creating a system in which Maori have more rights than other New Zealanders. Separately, the NZ Greens are concerned that co-governance arrangements lead to a defacto privatisation of assets they believe should be in public hands. The complexity of the debate across the ditch may add a layer of complexity to a Yes campaign, which is based on a strategy of radical simplicity.

All in all, Ardern has done a disservice to the credibility of “kindness”. She has mastered the semiotics of empathy, but her kindness is careless of real-world outcomes. Ardern’s empathy has proven as unhelpful as that of the humanitarian tourists whose good intentions end up doing the countries they inflict them on actual harm.

If this is what a modern liberal icon looks like, Albanese had better hope he’s never accused of being one. But as the NZ election revs up, the comparisons will become irresistible. If little New Zealand has been the test market for Albanese’s plans, it’s time to take them back into research.

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