Jacinda Ardern
speaker
169 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard 13 Apr
Jacinda Ardern’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah. Yeah. I thought everyone ran through that in their mind from time to time.
Or perhaps in some cases they feel a responsibility to stay. And that is real. I know that to be true because when I talk to a very small group, because I could only talk to a small group, about the fact I was considering stepping down, one of the things that was raised, well, we have an election. There are people that are relying on you. And I felt that weight of responsibility so, so acutely.
But actually that was also the thing that... that helped me make the decision. If I knew that perhaps I didn't have in reserve what was required for crisis and I'd seen enough of them to know what you required, and if I felt that I was becoming more defensive and maybe that my curiosity wasn't what it used to be, those were signs that it would be irresponsible to stay.
And as soon as I gave myself... The permission to think about it like that, that was when I made the call. Yeah.
Yeah.
And I tried to write about the decision and you can see it's a very iterative thing. And that's because I think that's reality.
Yeah, yeah. Thank you. I don't know. Actually, you know, it was therapy with a deadline. So it ended up helping in lots of ways. But writing about the act of leaving. You know, it was, it was a series of conversations. It was a series of thoughts and moments that culminated in the decision. And once I made the decision, then it just came, it was then just about telling people.
And I was, I was... You were ready. I was ready, but I was also afraid.
Yeah, I think when you're in politics, you're trained. You spend years being acutely aware of what everyone thinks. And it's part of your job. I didn't want to let people down. I didn't want to disappoint people. And so walking away, yeah, it felt like it was a lonely decision and it was a hard decision, but I've never regretted it and I've never felt like it was the wrong one.
That has always been my least favorite part. I mean, that sounds so silly. My least favorite part of politics is politics. You know, I was always attracted to it because of what you could do. Yeah, of the service. If you're one of those idealistic young people who wants to change the world, what better place than politics? It's incredible what you can do with it.
And I still believe in it now more so than even when I went in. But the day-to-day of it is difficult because that's what you have to do in spite of why you're motivated to be there. And I know I'm not alone in that. There are people who love the sport. And there are people who just love what you can do.
Well, two things. Full speed to slow speed. The great thing about, you know, running a country like New Zealand is that it's small and so you do get to maintain lots of normal things. You know, you're supermarket shopping and you're from time to time a drop off for Neve. I could still do that from time to time. But you're right, the pace, the pace of life suddenly turns off like a tap.
But even though the expectation wasn't there anymore, it didn't really change the way I behaved. And so I probably now have an issue now that the book is finished because for a while that was... That was what you were doing. At nighttime, I would write, you know, a spare waking moment, I would write. And it's only now after two years that I'm sitting still for a bit.
And I can tell you, my husband doesn't like it. No, I don't think he thinks it suits my personality particularly.
He did a good... I think only he could have, really. He's a broadcaster. And so when suddenly I become leader of my party, he just picked up his phone and started filming me. And you can... You can see in the film, I'm not always happy about that.
And, you know, not with a great plan in mind. He just thought it was a moment in history to capture. And for me, it was a chance to humanize leadership in a moment in time when I think we could all benefit from humanizing one another.
We've got a hyper-partisanship now that I think can be really damaging. It means we don't work together as much. It means we don't listen and engage in a respectful debate that we need. And if we are to get back to doing all of those things, because we won't solve the climate crisis unless we do, we won't solve the conflict in the Middle East unless we do, we have to re-humanize one another again.
After the attack in New Zealand on March 15, one of the things I became really interested in was how do we get to a place where individuals are radicalized to harm and to violence? I wanted to understand how that could happen in our world. And one of the precursors to that, certainly in the academic writing, is this idea of binary thinking. Mm-hmm. putting people into groups of good and evil.
And the moment that you can put people into those classifications and the moment you dehumanize them, that's when you see acts of terrorism. That's when you see acts of violence. Absolutely. And so I do. I think it's incredibly important that we find ways to remember our shared humanity. And if anything that March 15 taught me was that we have that in us.
We have that in us, but there are so many things that make that more difficult in this modern age. Now, I cannot determine what will define my time in this place, but I do hope I've demonstrated something else entirely, that you can be anxious, sensitive, kind, and wear your heart on your sleeve. You can be a mother or not. You can be all of these things. And not only can you be here,
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