New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Ms. Jacinda Ardern has just won a landslide in New Zealand’s latest election. Ms. Ardern won some 49.1 percent of the votes cast and has 64 seats in the 120-seat parliament. It is, as the BBC reported, one of the rare occasions when a New Zealand Government has an outright majority.
What makes Ms. Ardern’s victory so incredible is the fact that,
on the scale of things, a “newbie” politician who had not held any ministerial
posts prior to her elevation to the premiership. Ms. Ardern had been a
researcher prior to being elected as a Member of Parliament on the Party List
in 2008 and only faced her first election in 2017, when she became a Member of
Parliament for the Mount Albert Constituency in 2017, the year she became Leader
of the Opposition and then Prime Minister. Within three years of taking the top
job in politics, Ms. Ardern has gone from a relative unknown leader of a small
country tucked at the edge of the world to being a global figure that has defined
an ideal of leadership.
How did Ms. Ardern do it? The first part of the answer is
what former British Prime Minister, Harold McMillian called “events.” Mr.
McMillian argued that careers in politics were defined by events. Winston
Churchill for example, was defined by World War II. How a politician reacted to
a significant enough event would have the ability to define his or her legacy.
In Ms. Ardern’s case, history decided to give her not one
but two major events, namely the March 2019 Christchurch Mosque shooting and
the 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic. Both these events defined Ms. Ardern as someone
that could be relied when the proverbial crap hit the fan.
The second part of the answer as to what turned her into an
international superstar is the fact that she simply did her job as a leader.
She showed she had the ability to communicate clearly and to provide real
information when it was needed. She showed that she could be tough and
empathetic at the same time and more importantly, she had the ability to get things
done during the down times.
Copyright – theweek.in
In the Christchurch mosque incident, Ms. Ardern was quick to
done a headscarf to show solidarity with the victimized community and refused
to speak the name of the gunman, thus denying a terrorist publicity he hopped
to gain. New Zealanders stayed united by the tragedy as the following Maori
Hakka by a biker gang showed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIcfVTP43Yk
More importantly, Ms. Ardern used thus momentum to get gun
control legislation passed through parliament.
If the Christchurch Shooting put Ms. Ardern on the world
map, her handling on theCovid-19 pandemic further enhanced her status as an
icon of great leadership. New Zealand
does have the advantage of being relatively small and geographically isolated
but this should not detract from the fact that Ms. Ardern once again provided
text book leadership. New Zealand went into lockdown mode early and Ms. Ardern
was quick to communicate to New Zealanders that they would face economic hardship
but it was necessary to get the pandemic under control. The results speak for themselves.
At the time of writing, New Zealand has less than 2,000 cases.
The most important part of her leadership was the fact that she
showed that she was willing to enforce the rules with no exceptions. She
demoted her health minister, Dr. David Clark who took his family on a beach
vacation during the first week of the lockdown. The message was clear, nobody
was above the rules.
New Zealand has come as close as has been possible to beating
the virus. It did have certain advantages like geographical isolation. Yet, that
alone would not have been enough to make New Zealand one of the key success
stories in the Covid-19 pandemic. Ms. Ardern’s leadership shown that it’s not so
much a case of size but what you do with it that counts.
Let’s start with the obvious. Ms. Ardern has recognized the
seriousness of the situation and communicated facts quickly, clearly and most
importantly factually. Unlike her American counterpart, she’s avoided “downplaying”
the virus and unlike her Brazilian counterpart understood that the virus is serious.
Ms. Ardern has led by example and stayed healthy and not turned the seat of
government into a hotbed of infection.
Unlike her Indian counterpart, she’s also done things that
have been possible to execute and hence you don’t have the congestion of
infrastructure that was seen in India as people were forced to stagger back to far
away villages at the last minute.
Ms. Ardern has also done what her Singapore counterpart
could not do, which was to remember ALL New Zealanders. While Singapore has a
similar death rate from Covid-19 to New Zealand (and similar population), its
case load was significantly higher. Why was that? The answer is simple – Ms.
Ardern focused on doing her job at hand and remembered ALL living in New
Zealand. While Singapore’s statistics remain comparatively good on the global
scale, it was too focused on headlines that it forgot about a certain segment
of society that was living in conditions designed to spread the virus.
Her insistence that her ministers followed the same rules as
everyone else also made it easier for ordinary New Zealanders to go through the
economic hardship caused by the lockdown.
She turned down a salary increase and ensured that the ordinary person
understood that the rules were for everyone for a reason.
Covid-19 has been tough on everyone. However, like all good
crisis, it has helped to show up real leaders that the world needs and thanks
to Ms. Ardern, New Zealand has shown that a small nation can show the rest of
the world how things are done by doing her job.
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