Reviewed by Ruth Latta
A Different Kind of Power
by Jacinda Ardern
Penguin
June 2025, Hardcover, 352 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1776951277
In April 2023, Canadian journalist Rick Salutin published a column on “The Leaving Syndrome in Politics” in rabble.ca, a leftist online magazine. After mentioning three male Canadian politicians who had recently quit politics, he noted New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s announcement that she was leaving because she didn’t have “enough [fuel] in the tank.” Then, Scottish Prime Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced that while she still had “plenty in the tank,” she was leaving because it was “time.” Salutin wrote: “If they’re intimidated by the explosion of threats, especially at women, then name it. At least that’d spotlight a problem that requires attention.”
In fact, the problem had already been spot-lighted, but certainly not solved. In 1921, over a hundred years ago, when a young schoolteacher Agnes Macphail, became the first woman ever elected to the Canadian Parliament, the newspapers had a field day writing about her wearing apparel and speculating about her personal life. In 1968, former Canadian cabinet member Judy Lamarsh, published her memoir, Bird in a Gilded Cage, which told bluntly what it was like to be a woman in the public sphere. As recently as 2021, Canadian Liberal cabinet member, Catherine McKenna publicly stated that she was leaving politics because the misogynistic abuse she’d been receiving on social media had progressed to in-person harassment at her home and on the street. An example: the “C” word was splashed on the window of her constituency office.
Political women in other supposedly progressive countries have encountered similar problems. In December 2021, Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin, a Social Democrat, left one of her two work phones at home while going out to a Helsinki night club. While out, she got a message on that phone that one of her cabinet ministers “might” have Covid and that Marin, who had been in contact, should be self-isolating. When the headlines hit, Marin apologized to the Finnish people, and received worldwide praise for daring to have a life apart from work.
Marin’s five-party coalition government had already gained international attention because each party was headed by a woman, and because twelve out of nineteen of her cabinet ministers were women, many in their twenties and thirties. In 2023, when a right-wing coalition won Finland’s election, Marin quit politics. She writes in her 2025 memoir, Hope in Action, “I had coped with all the political difficulties and all the bullshit,” and was exhausted.
In A Different Kind of Power Jacinta Ardern gives some space to the ad hominem criticism she received while trying to bring about a fairer and more humane society in which no one was left behind. After first becoming a Member of Parliament in New Zealand, in 2008, she rose to the Prime Ministership, serving from 2017 to 2023. Her reader-friendly book is humorous in places, frank about her experiences as a woman and a mother, and a good introduction to present-day New Zealand.
Growing up in the remote forestry town of Murupara was an early education in the issues she would tackle in public life. “I became political because I lived in Murupara,” she writes. Her police sergeant father was one of three law officers in a town beset by poverty, racial tension and gang violence. When the local timber company was sold to a larger corporation, lay-offs and out-migration shrank the town and led to hard times. Ardern became aware of the historical mistrust between the indigenous Maori people and those of European origin. Since New Zealand cops don’t carry guns, Jacinda’s father had to calm potentially dangerous gatherings several times, using reason and diplomacy as his only weapons.
When Sgt. Ardern moved to a position in Morrinsville, a farm community of 5,000 people, Jacinda was old enough to find paying jobs – delivering flyers, then working in a chip shop. She participated in the service activities of her Mormon Church, and met Mormon missionaries who went door-to-door explaining their faith and asking the residents if they needed practical help with anything. This “cold calling,” she notes, was similar to what a good political candidate did. In high school, she learned about Maori resistance against the white settlers who took their ancestral land.
As a Canadian reading Ardern’s memoir, I was struck by the similarities between my own country and New Zealand, even though they are so different in size and climate. Like New Zealand, Canada is a settler society that has harmed our indigenous people. New Zealand’s system of government, like Canada’s, is based on the British one, with some differences. While Canada’s electoral system is “first past the post,” New Zealand has had “mixed member proportional representation” since 1996, a system which some Canadians would prefer.
Many women readers will relate to Ardern’s feeling that she was “not quite good enough.” Her church expected her to be a good wife and mother. Her family was not upper class nor political. She feared:“that at any moment I would be cut short and that no matter what I was doing I had no business doing it…I wasn’t tough enough to become an actual politician…I was too idealistic and sensitive.”
Despite her self-doubts, Ardern got into politics. She was a Communications student at the University of Waikato when a Labour Member of Parliament asked her to help in his re-election campaign. After graduation, she became a researcher for another Labour cabinet minister. Gradually, she realized that issues she believed in (such as the right of LGBTQ+ couples to have civil unions) were at odds with Mormon teaching. While retaining friendships in the Mormon community, she eased away from her childhood faith and let her political work fill her life, eventually becoming junior political adviser to Prime Minister Helen Clark.
When Labour lost the next election, Ardern visited New York, then moved to London because, in the U.K., she was allowed to work. There, she joined the International Union of Socialist Youth and began organizing New Zealanders in Britain to vote in the next New Zealand election. While thus engaged, the New Zealand Labour Party telephoned and asked her to be on the party list of potential candidates.
Ardern explains clearly and simply how mixed member proportional representation works. New Zealanders have two votes, one for their favourite candidate in their electoral district and another vote for the party they hope will form the government. Depending on how much of the popular vote a party receives, it can appoint a certain number of members of parliament to join those of their party who are elected in the constituencies.
Back home, Ardern was placed on the Labour Party list and also ran in her home town constituency. She lost this traditionally conservative riding but was appointed as a member of Parliament by the Labour Party. (Later, she ran in a by-election in the Mount Albert district and won by a landslide.)
In 2007, New Zealand’s National Party, headed by John Key, won the largest share of votes and seats, ending nine years of government by the social-democratic Labour Party. In Opposition, Ardern hadn’t much of a voice in the legislature, so she used the media to promote Labour policies. To raise the party’s profile, she said “Yes” to every interview and event, and at one occasion, met the film-maker Clarke Gayford, who became her life-partner.
Ardern had been “earnestly building solutions that were ready and waiting to be implemented,” but her opponents tried to dismiss her as just a pretty face. When she was made deputy leader of Labour, her detractors said she was chosen because she looked good in photo-ops. Interviewers kept asking if she felt she had to make a decision between children and career, and was it a decision she had already made? On one occasion, when she was waiting for a TV interview, a sportscaster opined on air that she should be open about her reproductive plans. When the interview began, Jacinda said that she had already talked openly about wanting to be a mother. “But,” she added, “it is totally unacceptable in 2017 to say that women should have to answer that question in the workplace.” She repeated, “That is unacceptable.” and her response became a meme.
The 2017 election campaign was underway when the Labour Party leader decided that Jacinda would stand a better chance than he would in bringing the party back into government. The party changed horses in midstream, and she began. She chose Kelvin Davis, a (Maori) Labour M.P., as her deputy leader, and adopted a new campaign slogan, “Let’s do this,” as in, “Better health care? Let’s do this.”
By August 2017 the National Party and Labour were neck and neck. After the election it took two weeks to count the votes from New Zealanders overseas. The results produced two more seats for Labour, so Jacinda put together a negotiating team to solicit the support of the Greens and the New Zealand First Party in forming a coalition government. At the same time, she discovered that she was pregnant.
In January 2018, shortly after she formed a government with New Zealand First, she announced to the media that she and Clarke Gayford were expecting a child. During the first months of her administration and pregnancy, she attended the Asia Pacific Economic Conference in Vietnam, made trade trips to other Pacific countries, and went to the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in London. Although she was suffering with nausea, she didn’t let it interfere with her work. She also attended a national holiday event at Waitangi which had, in the past, been marked by demonstrations, because it marked the signing of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi with the Maoris. She stayed in Waitangi for a week and visited Maori enterprises and projects.
In September 2018, when she came to New York to address the United Nations, she brought her three month old daughter into the General Assembly. During Neve’s infancy, Ardern, her partner, Clarke, her mother, and other family members formed a nurturing “village,” as in, “It takes a village to raise a child.” with Clarke taking the infant to the legislative building so that Ardern could nurse her.
In 2022, when Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin made a state visit to New Zealand, a journalist asked, “Are you two meeting just because you’re similar in age and got a lot of common stuff?” Ardern “wondered aloud” whether anyone had asked Barack Obama and the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, John Key, if they were meeting because they were of similar age. Afterwards, Marin joked to Ardern, “I wish I’d told him that instead of talking about trade, we were braiding each other’s hair.”
During Ardern’s years in office she brought in social legislation and led her country through three big crises. On March 15, 2019, an Australian man committed two consecutive terrorist mass shootings in Christchurch, at a mosque and an Islamic centre during Friday prayer. Fifty-one people were killed and 89 injured. At his trial, it emerged that he’d acted upon his white-supremacist, anti-immigrant beliefs.
Ardern met with the mourners, tried to comfort them, and promptly brought in anti-gun legislation that banned all military-style semi-automatic weapons. Then she initiated the Christchurch Call to Action, an international agency to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content on line.
On December 9, 2019, the Whacker/White Island volcano, a major tourist attraction, erupted and killed 22 people. The nearest mainland hospital, in Watatane, was filled to overflowing with burn victims. When Jacinda and her Civil Defence Minister flew to the scene, to arrange for resources and to show empathy, her critics accused her of making it a publicity stunt.
In February 2020, faced with the Covid-19 pandemic, Ardern’s administration decided to “go hard and go early,” to prevent the rapid spread of the virus so that hospitals would not be overwhelmed. Immediately, they closed New Zealand’s borders to non-citizens, and established a four-level alert system. Broadcasting live, Ardern announced that New Zealand would be entering at Level 2, which merely limited the size of group gatherings and required social distancing, but that, if necessary, the country would go to Level 4, lockdown. Her government increased welfare payments, created a wage subsidy for employers, opened international students’ quarters to the homeless, provided schools with equipment for distance learning, and funded two educational TV channels, one in English and one in Te Reo Maori. The government also did forensic contact tracing of every new Covid case.
By 31 December 2020, there were 2,162 cases; 2,082 recoveries, and 25 deaths in New Zealand. In other countries, people were dying by the hundreds of thousands. Labour won the 2020 election with over 50% of the vote, and no longer needed to form a coalition. Clearly, at that time, New Zealanders supported the Ardern government’s measures to curb Covid. Soon New Zealand returned to Level 2 or Level 1. Children returned to school; restaurants opened.
Ardern applauds the community spirit of the early pandemic. Then, in October 2021, came Delta, a more dangerous and more infectious flu variant, and the government had to call a Level 3 lockdown in Auckland and Northland. Vaccinations had begun, but, as Ardern writes, “New Zealand’s sense of togetherness had started to fracture.” New Zealand achieved vaccination rates of over 90%, but the immunization program brought forth fear and conspiracy theories.
As a Canadian living in Ottawa, I well remember the so-called “freedom convoy” that invaded and occupied our capital city’s downtown for over three weeks in February/March 2022. Over 500 heavy trucks, belching exhaust fumes, parked in dense residential areas and next to government buildings. The occupiers honked their horns at night, harassed mask-wearing pedestrians, brandished inflammatory signs about then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and attacked a mission for the homeless. Supposedly, they were protesting the regulation that truckers had to be vaccinated to cross the U.S. border, but it soon became apparent that it was a gathering of the far-Right, calling for the overthrow of the government. The city of Ottawa and the province of Ontario declared states of emergency and the federal government invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time. U.S. President Donald Trump praised the convoy, and Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre posed with the organizers for a photo op.
Similarly, in New Zealand, 3,000 people showed up at the New Zealand parliament buildings to object, in Ardern’s words, to “all vaccines, masks, the media, the UN and the government.” The crowd would not disperse, even when the Parliamentary sprinkling system was turned on and speakers on the legislature’s balconies played Barry Manilow songs and “Baby Shark” on repeat. Signs depicted Ardern with a Hitler moustache; a gallows was erected for her, and swastika, American and Trump flags were prominent.
Ardern did not meet with the protesters, nor did Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau As he said during a public inquiry, the occupiers “didn’t want to be heard, they wanted to be obeyed.” Worldwide, right wing forces were exploiting people’s frustration over Covid restrictions, egging them on to ignore the good of the community as a whole. “Something had been loosened worldwide,” Ardern writes. Social media attacks on her became more threatening. She was followed, accosted and harassed. The assassination of Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, whom she knew and liked, shocked her deeply.
“I had been running on adrenaline for so long,” she writes. “All those sleepless nights, all that cortisol, all that fight or flight, it wears a person out….When [the next challenge] came I would need a full tank, more than enough in reserves. And I wasn’t sure I had this anymore.” After fifteen years in politics she was tired, also concerned that she had become a political lightning rod and that the Labour Party would do better without her.
Knowing that she had done her best, Ardern left politics hoping that she will be remembered for “kindness.” Currently, she, Clarke and Neve live in Boston, where Jacinda is a senior fellow at Harvard University.
In spite of the challenges she faced, she encourages readers to pursue their hopes of doing good in the world. “All your flaws will come to be your strengths,” she insists. “The things you thought would cripple you will in fact make you stronger, make you better. They will give you a different power and make you a leader that this world, with all its turmoil, might just need.”
Though her memoir is upbeat and positive overall, it shows that women, particularly those of childbearing years and on the left of the political spectrum, are not going to have an easy time in the political arena. Ardern’s A Different Kind of Power, along with Sanna Marin’s Hope in Action, and Catherine McKenna’s, Run Like a Girl, are must-reads for anyone who wants women (and men) to participate, unthreatened, in public life.
About the reviewer: Ruth Latta’s novel, Forty Mermaids, to be published in 2026, is about the struggles of a Canadian modernist painter in the 1930s and ‘40s.