Page 11 - My FlipBook

Years in political office: 2008–present

Position: prime minister of New Zealand, 2017–present; leader of the
Labour Party, 2017–present; deputy leader of the Labour Party, 2017;
member of the New Zealand Parliament, 2008–2017; president of the
International Union of Socialist Youth, 2008–2010

Party affiliation: Labour
Hometown: Hamilton, New Zealand

Top causes: Māori rights, climate change, and economic equality

LIfe STORy

Jacinda Ardern spent much of her own childhood in the rural, conservative town
of Morrinsville, New Zealand. Her mother was a school cafeteria worker, and her
father was a law enforcement officer who eventually became the island of Niue’s
high commissioner. They raised her in the Mormon faith, but repelled by the church’s
negative stance on homosexuality, she left it for good in her early twenties. Positive
from the get-go, she started a “happy club” at school as a little girl. She says seeing
the effects of economic inequality on New Zealand’s Māori people inspired her early
on to become a politician.
Ardern’s political career started when, at the age of nineteen, she volunteered
on a Labour Party Parliament member’s reelection campaign. Later, she would get
a job in the office of her eventual mentor, New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark,
the second woman to lead the country. Ardern worked for three years in the UK in
the office of Prime Minister Tony Blair on relations between small businesses and the
government before returning to her home country. She was twenty-eight when she
first became a member of the New Zealand Parliament, making her the youngest
representative in the country. When she became prime minister at thirty-seven, she
was the youngest woman in the world to be leading a nation.
This identity has made her somewhat of a magnet for people’s thoughts on the
relationship between womanhood and power. Take for example, the famous rugby
coach who called Ardern “a pretty little thing” during a talk show appearance—
while he was voicing his support for her as prime minister, no less.

15 Jacinda Ardern