Ardern is imperfect and her government often struggles to implement its agenda – but they excel at crisis management

“If you want to know me, look at my surface”, Andy Warhol once said, or something along those lines. It’s an invitation to the obvious that should apply in politics, and yet the public regard politicians with – at best – a good deal of suspicion and, at worst, contempt. And who can blame them? In New Zealand the workers’ party (Labour) was responsible for introducing and administering neoliberalism in the 1980s, a dramatic break with their social democratic history that the Australian Labor party was also undertaking in the 1980s, the US Democrats in the 1990s, and UK Labour shortly after. As the old joke goes, capturing the distrust most people feel for left and right, “it doesn’t matter who you vote for, a politician always gets in”.

But what distinguishes prime minister Jacinda Ardern from the politicians who bite at her heels is that the Warholian doctrine is probably true. At least in her case. In New Zealand’s double disasters – the Christchurch massacre and the Whakaari eruption – Ardern met each tragedy with immediate action, crisp and clear communication, and an extraordinary human care almost entirely absent in modern politics. She met with victims, their families took her into their own homes and at every opportunity she made an invitation to act in solidarity – from the country’s successful gun reforms to the “Christchurch call”, an international bid to stamp out violent extremism online.