Watch: How does Jacinda Ardern see her time as leader?

Jacinda Ardern’s father thought she didn’t have thick enough skin to get into politics, the former New Zealand Prime Minister recalls.

“Dad really worried … ‘Politics? Not for Jacinda she’s too thin-skinned’ and he was right,” Ardern tells RNZ’s Jesse Mulligan, sitting in the JFK School of Government at Harvard University where she is leading a fellowship on empathetic leadership.

Ardern, whose memoir A Different Kind of Power hit shelves this week, recalls in the book the time she was accosted in an airport bathroom and thanked for "ruining the country".

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“I put it into the book not to give a singular personal experience but to speak to what I’ve noticed is an exchange in a political environment generally, and I don’t mean just in New Zealand.

“The conversations I have with leaders past and present, they’ve noticed a shift in the last five years in particular.”

But Ardern, who juggled first time motherhood while in power (becoming just the second woman in history to have a baby in office), says the skin her father feared would let her down, defined the kind of leader she became.

“I think the lesson for me was maybe we need thin-skinned people in politics because usually that is emblematic that you are empathetic that you’re motivated to do the right thing by people and it really deeply offends you if you’re critiqued for not doing your job well.”

During her time at the helm of New Zealand, Ardern led the country during the March 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks, then the Whakaari White Island tragedy soon after.

During these “darker moments” Ardern describes herself as agnostic, but acknowledges her religious background did shape her take on things.

“I think it also gave me a respect for people who do have faith in their lives, and an understanding of faith communities,” she says.

And unpacking all of that during writing the book was one of the hardest parts of the experience, which she says someone described as “therapy with a deadline”.

“Because it’s an unusual career path people are often interested in where your motivation and your values come from, and when you write a memoir you’re digging back a little bit and giving a bit of an explanation of how you came to be on the path that you were.

“The thing that I ended up finding the trickiest was going back and talking about the role that faith had for me. Not because I hadn’t disclosed it, it was very much on the record that I had been raised on the LDS church. The thing I found difficult was, after I left, I put that away in a box and didn’t reflect on that again.

“When I came to write I had to pull it all back out again.”

Ardern’s tumultuous term was then hit with the Covid-19 pandemic and criticism that came with the decisions she was forced to make. A recent Royal Commission concluded that the government was too harsh with mandates and lockdowns at the time, Mulligan points out.

“The one thing I would say … is my goal from the outside of this horrific experience was save people’s lives and keep people together,” Ardern says.

“I think we did one, and the other we didn’t. But when I look around the world, we weren’t the only ones that struggled with the second part. Places who had very different strategies are having the same experience in the aftermath.

“We were operating on certain information in a certain environment but with now the ability to reflect back, and I wouldn’t’ argue with that.”

To those who say Ardern’s government did not get enough done during that tenure: “I would strongly disagree with you. Did Covid dominate internationally? Of course it did … it’s hard for a pandemic not to … The idea that we haven’t had an impact, I disagree”.

She lists their work improving the lives of New Zealander’s living in poverty, easing the burden on families during cost of living struggles, changes made to benefit rates, school lunches and climate change framework amongst some wins.

And always circling back to the importance of kindness: “I wouldn’t underestimate the difference it makes when you demonstrate that the way you do government can be different as well,” Ardern adds.

“We set out to do things differently … we set out to be an empathetic government, a kind government, one that didn’t make personal attacks. I hope we raised expectations that you can do things differently.”