Jacinda Ardern: No one will know what it feels like to be Kamala Harris

JA: We are in the hot seat. It is a real delight to be here, and just to witness what feels like a really historic moment in time for the United States. It feels a real privilege.
PG: When you’re at the arena what you’re going to be experiencing is a moment of reintroduction of Kamala Harris to the American people. Can you help us all understand how all of that came together for you?
It’s a big, big question. And you know, the one thing I’m really cautious about … is the fact that when you come and commentate or observe someone else’s politics, it is someone else’s politics, and it means there are so many intricacies that you’ll never understand.
No one will know what it feels like to be Kamala Harris right now, except her. But what I do know from my own relatively small experience from a country of 5 million people is that seven weeks out from an election in 2017, I was the deputy leader of the New Zealand Labour Party. We were in opposition, and my boss came to work one day, and he quit, and then he nominated me to run in the election seven weeks later.
And so to give you a little flavour, the billboards with his face on them were already out there with me dutifully standing next to him as his diligent deputy. And some people thought, there’s no way they’ll be able to reorganise their campaign. They just got a box-cutter out, and they cut him out and just left me there.
And I’ve been walking around the streets of Boston, where I live at the moment, and seeing old campaign signs just folded over the top, so you just see Harris. And I’ve been thinking a little bit about what it feels like in those moments.
And this is to your question, Patrick, there’s a lot of commentary around the historic moment in time, this period in history, the momentum that is out there. I can only imagine that what Kamala Harris is likely thinking each day is not, ‘this is a historic moment in time’, but ‘what can I do on behalf of people?’
And that’s the difference, I think, when you’re campaigning, because your focus is on people rather than power. You’re not lost and caught up in those moments. You are literally focused every single day on the job that you have in front of you, and you take one step at a time to get you closer to being in a position to help people. And so that’s where I think the personal and the policy intersects.
We have some real challenges in our country here, and in yours as well, in workforce penetration by women, because that’s how we’re going to sustain growth over time. It seems that the vice president has a special opportunity in how she brings together questions around the care economy?
You made specific mention of the work that needs to be done on behalf of, and alongside women. Our experience in New Zealand was that at the same time we were getting some of the fundamentals that had, for long periods of time for a number of reasons, been overlooked as too difficult, and making sure that we were focused on those, we also decriminalised abortion.
Many people would not look at New Zealand as a progressive nation and think that abortion was still in our Crimes Act. So for me, it still came down to the simple fundamental question, do women have enough choices in their lives when it comes, for instance, to work and care or both? Are the decisions I’m making based on financial insecurity or genuine choice? And the answer, unfortunately for far too many women in New Zealand, was financial insecurity was driving that decision-making.
One of the things we focused on very early, and this is where I think the real trick for us as progressives with constantly looking out, saying, how do I share a vision message, while also acknowledging that change takes time, takes investment, takes work? Nothing’s that quick in politics, and unfortunately, when you’ve got quite a disenfranchised and disillusioned voting public, trying to pitch a hope and optimism and vision while delivering at pace is very difficult in a country of 5 million, let alone a country of over 300 million.
So that’s why, when it came to women and financial security, we thought about, what could we do in our first 100 days? And in our first 100 days, we did things like increase paid parental leave, so that we would have six month paid parental leave. Straight off the bat, we started putting that in train. We introduced a tax credit for children when they born. We also wanted to ensure that there was greater financial support for those on low incomes.
And of course, acknowledging that study and the education of children is so influenced by the education of their mothers, we made the first year of university free. And those were all things that we moved on, in those first 100 days. We showed a direction of travel, acknowledging in the longer term, it would take time, but that was our destination.
I’m giving the short version! Just a little disclaimer.
Kamala Harris is in a similar sprint now, over the course of the next 77 days. This is a change election, but people are afraid of change, and I wonder in your campaign how you talked about these issues in ways that invited folks along on their journey and didn’t intimidate them.
Absolutely right. We know that as humans change is very closely linked to fear. And it’s very easy, if you’re a politician who wishes to capitalise on that emotion, to attach change and fear together.
And this is where I think it is a matter of looking for those issues where there is a moment to build consensus and not being afraid to reach across divides on those issues where we want long-term certainty about our destination.
Now, here I’m coming again from a very New Zealand perspective, and I acknowledge our situation is different. Climate change – we don’t have the same debate over whether it’s real, because we’re in the front line of it in the Pacific, and we see our Pacific neighbours being inundated, and some parts of the Pacific even considering, will they still be a nation state without land?
So for our major climate legislation, we drafted the legislation then we went to our opposition and asked them to support it. For our child poverty legislation, we took it to the opposition and asked them to support it. We made changes they requested, and why? Because we thought one way to diminish fear around change was to build consensus.
Not compromise, but consensus. And they’re two fundamentally different things.
But one thing I think we should also acknowledge, Patrick, is that there are some changes that people crave. And not just from one side of the political ledger.
I think people crave politics being done differently. So it’s not just about what we present and what our policy agenda is, but how we do it.
I remember when I found myself in that first press conference, not expecting that morning, necessarily, to be the leader of the New Zealand Labour Party, and launching into a political campaign. And going down and doing my first press conference and being asked about how we would campaign, and I was very explicit, we were going to run a positive campaign.
It’s a very New Zealand saying: we were going to play the ball, not the man. It’s very old-fashioned. It’s a rugby analogy. It means we’re going to play the game based on ideas, not based on personality and attacking one another. We wanted to do politics differently. And I think people are craving that kind of change. That’s a hard dial to shift, though.
In New Zealand, at least, someone else carved the path for women to lead in my country. You know, my daughter asked me last night, “Mummy, are boys allowed to be prime minister in New Zealand?” She knew that there was one, but she was just asking, how many have there been?
And I did the math and I’m like, ‘well, actually, you know, quite a number’. There’s been 42 prime ministers. Only three of them have been girls. She was shocked.
The point is, I was not the first. So I never questioned whether I could be a female and in a leadership position. What I did question was, could I be an empathetic leader? Could I be a sensitive leader? Could I be someone who was often moved by the encounters I would have with people publicly? Could I be a leader as a worrier, someone who overthinks and can get a bit on the anxious side? Could I be that kind of leader?
So I do think that there’s a place for empathetic leadership. I think we need it now more than ever. I think we need to support those leaders who have that ambition of doing politics differently, because I think people crave more of that kind of leadership.
And so the Field Fellowship is about creating a network, supporting empathetic leaders, building that network and giving them the tools that they need to not just survive, but to thrive.
I wonder if there are moments of hope and inspiration that you’re able to take up from that Field Fellows collective that you can convey to us now as we get on out on the trail to fight the good fight?
Politics can be a lonely place. It can. And sometimes it can feel no one knows exactly how it feels to be there in that position, except those who are in at that time.
The Field Fellowship reminded me that there are fantastic people who are motivated by all the right things. They’re motivated by the idea of just improving people’s lives. Now, unfortunately, over the years, some of the voting public have seen politicians who have not been motivated by that, and as a result, the expectations have changed.
Our job is to lift the sights and expectations of voters, again. Not just to be optimistic, but to expect better, and then in turn, [for] politicians to deliver better.
I have seen a countless number of politicians who want to do just that, and who are still out there leading the charge with a fantastic new generation of politicians as well.
We just have to make sure that they get enough of a platform that people see it, and I think that’s when we’ll create huge momentum for change.
And we’re seeing some of that hopefulness, that optimism, right here in Chicago and in the United States.