Jacinda Ardern’s Case for Human-Centred Leadership
Scroll
Jacinda Ardern at the 2026 Melbourne Writers Festival. Photo by Kamilla Musland.
Article Summary
- Speaking at the 2026 Melbourne Writers Festival, Jacinda Ardern argued that empathy, humility and emotional openness are strengths in leadership rather than weaknesses.
- In conversation with journalist Jamila Rizvi, the discussion highlighted Ardern’s broader legacy of human-centred leadership, with the former New Zealand PM emphasising authenticity, integrity and making politics feel more connected to ordinary people.
- Ardern reflected on leading New Zealand through crises including the Christchurch mosque attacks and COVID-19, saying effective leadership requires “proximity” to people experiencing pain and uncertainty.
By Alexi Freeman
It’s the mid-1990s in Morrinsville, a small town on New Zealand’s North Island.
A cabbage sits on a sheet of newspaper on the living room floor. A young Jacinda Ardern is rehearsing for her first job at The Golden Kiwi — a local fish and chip shop.
In her memoir, A Different Kind of Power, Ardern writes: “Wrap, unwrap, repeat. Wrap, unwrap, repeat.”
She practises the movement over and over again, pausing occasionally to acknowledge the absurdity of spending the evening before her fourteenth birthday wrapping a cabbage in a newspaper.
Long before parliament, press conferences and overlapping national emergencies, the habit of preparation had already taken hold.
Wrap. Unwrap. Repeat.
Learning how to remain calm under pressure would prove pivotal to Ardern’s unexpected rise to the highest political office in the land of the long white cloud.
And pressure would come. A lot of it, all at once.
Over six years as New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Ardern led her country through a terrorist attack, a volcanic eruption, floods, fires, a global pandemic and the resulting economic fallout.
Throughout it all, Ardern maintained something increasingly rare in public life: emotional accessibility.
She cried publicly. She spoke plainly. She appeared on livestreams in a casual jumper after putting her daughter to bed.
In politics, softness is often dismissed as weakness. Ardern turned it into a powerful form of discipline.
In conversation with journalist Jamila Rizvi at the recent Melbourne Writers Festival 2026 (which Local Peoples attended), Ardern reflected on the persistent assumptions that empathy and leadership exist in opposition.
“I did question whether or not you could be a complete softie who tends to cry,” she told the Melbourne Town Hall audience.
“I did question that, but I didn’t question whether I could be a woman — and that was a gift.”
Ardern’s politics reframed leadership not as domination, but as presence — staying connected at community level while making seemingly impossible decisions at a national scale. Striking this balance became a hallmark of her time in office.
In an era of AI-generated noise, doomscrolling and leaders who often sound more like corporate mouthpieces than actual people, Ardern’s political legacy feels oddly radical: she insisted on behaving like a human being.
Jacinda Ardern at the 2026 Melbourne Writers Festival. Photo by Kamilla Musland.
Leadership as Interruption
Ardern’s rise to power never carried the polished inevitability political mythology usually demands.
In October 2017, eight days after a deadlocked New Zealand election, Ardern sat on the closed toilet seat in a friend’s bathroom, staring at a pregnancy test.
Coalition negotiations were still unfolding. The country’s next government hung in the balance.
“I saw the lines on that test thinking, ‘You could not write this.’ And so I did.”
Leadership, in Ardern’s telling, doesn’t arrive with a polite knock on the door. Sometimes it barges in during a private moment in the bathroom.
Ardern repeatedly returned to the idea that politics is often overperformed — that certainty is mistaken for capability, and emotional restraint for competence.
When Rizvi asked about imposter syndrome, Ardern replied: “I do often get asked, ‘At what point did you overcome it?’ And the answer is: I never have.”
That reluctance to mythologise herself may be central to why so many people trusted her.
Ardern never tried to appear invulnerable. Instead, she allowed the public to witness her leadership in real time: exhausted, uncertain, and grieving.
Proximity in Crisis
Nowhere was her emotional availability more visible than in the wake of the Christchurch mosque shootings.
In the days following the white supremacist attack that saw 51 people lose their lives, photographs of Ardern embracing members of Christchurch’s Muslim community circulated globally.
The images became emblematic not only of compassion but of political presence.
“In crisis, I think you need proximity,” Ardern said. “You need to go where the people are hurting.”
Mural of Jacinda Ardern embracing a woman after the Christchurch mosque attacks in 2019. Artist Loretta Lizzio. Location: Brunswick, Melbourne. Photo by Alexi Freeman.
Her response to Christchurch revealed something deeper about her governing philosophy: empathy was not ornamental to leadership. It was infrastructural.
That instinct carried into the COVID-19 pandemic, when Ardern delivered livestream updates from home during lockdowns — part crisis briefing, part domestic life unfolding in real time.
While many global leaders communicated through abstraction and wartime rhetoric, Ardern’s informality was disarming: a head of government operating on an intensely human scale.
The same philosophy informed Ardern’s first Wellbeing Budget, which prioritised mental health, child poverty reduction, Māori development and environmental protection alongside traditional economic indicators.
Not everyone agreed with her politics. Nor should they.
But even critics often recognised the coherence between Ardern’s values and behaviour — a consistency that has become increasingly rare in public life.
After Power
When Ardern resigned in 2023 at only 42 years of age, telling reporters she no longer had “enough in the tank”, the announcement came as a shock.
Yet in the context of her leadership, it feels entirely consistent.
In political systems that reward endurance at all costs, stepping away on her own terms was an act of integrity.
“I wasn’t done. I wasn’t done trying to help people,” she writes in her memoir. “I just wasn’t going to do it as prime minister anymore.”
Since leaving office, Ardern has transitioned into a different kind of public role: establishing the Field Fellowship for empathetic leadership, fellowships at Harvard University and the University of Oxford, climate advocacy through the Earthshot Prize, the 2025 documentary Prime Minister, and now her memoir.
At MWF, the sold-out crowd snaked along a chilly Swanston Street for blocks to hear more than a former prime minister reminisce about politics — they came seeking orientation, real-life evidence that humane leadership may still be possible.
“Imagine what humility would do in political leadership right now,” Ardern said. “Imagine.”
Jacinda Ardern at the 2026 Melbourne Writers Festival. Photo by Kamilla Musland.
Remaining Human
Perhaps Ardern’s most compelling political achievement is not that she governed perfectly, transcended ideology or escaped criticism.
It’s that she demonstrated empathy need not disappear upon entering and maintaining power.
At a moment in history when leadership is increasingly performed through spectacle, aggression and division, Ardern revealed another path — one grounded in presence, emotional intelligence and care.
When asked at MWF about Julia Gillard, Ardern reflected on the significance of seeing women already occupying political leadership.
“I was the third female Prime Minister. What a difference that made. I had two women before me who carved a path.
“And it meant that I didn’t question whether or not I could be a woman in politics or a leader in politics.”
Ardern continued, in reference to former NZ Prime Minister Helen Clark: “She carved a path. She carved a path for other women. The key is not to let it grow over.”
The remarks were met with sustained applause from the MWF audience.
Ardern’s political path leaves a similar imprint. Not because she rejected power, but because she exercised it differently.
In her memoir, Ardern writes: “No matter what, I always found a way to discuss, debate, disagree. To be human first, and a leader second.”
Maybe that’s the different kind of power Ardern was talking about all along.
Not power without toughness or compromise, but leadership that doesn’t ask you to stop being recognisably human.
