Jacinda Ardern’s documentary, Prime Minister, is a baffling attempt to rewrite her tenure as New Zealand’s leader from 2017 to 2023. Directed by Lindsay Utz and Michelle Walshe, it uses home videos from her partner Clarke Gayford to paint her as a kind, emotional trailblazer who navigated crises like the Christchurch attacks and COVID-19 while raising a baby.
The film constantly switches between Ardern being emotional, being incompetent, and at times, exposing tyrant-like tendencies.
Banning oil and gas crushed energy affordability for everyday Kiwis. Her post-Christchurch gun laws were a push to live in a police-state. Her push to censor the internet, via the Disinformation Project and Christchurch, brought a wave of global censorship and cancel culture.
The documentary’s revisionism is blatant from selective documenting.
Ardern reflects on her leadership with a blurry mess of self-justification. Her 2023 resignation wasn’t burnout—it was bailing as polls tanked. She should’ve eased lockdowns and mandates earlier, but she continued to double down, declare that we live in a two-tier society, and pushed for her Government to be the single source of truth.
Her COVID strategy was no Churchillian stand. Unlike Churchill, who took hits to save democracy, Ardern chose control disguised as kindness—lockdowns, 40,000 sacked workers, borders shut for years, all for saving lives. Wikipedia’s claim of “80,000 lives saved” (from a 2020 model) is debunked; she now says 24,000, but the film ignores the cost and consequences of those actions—thousands of lives and livelihoods destroyed.
She criticised Boris Johnson for taking a Churchill-like approach to tackle COVID-19 (referring to Churchill’s approach to WW2). So if she was faced with defeating a tyrant like Hitler, she would prioritise saving all lives, at the cost of freedom.
The doc’s intentional Trump jabs—selecting a video from his UN speech where leaders laugh at him, talking to reporters about Trump, appearing on Stephen Colbert (a show now cancelled) to mock Trump, playing clips of Wellington protestors carrying Trump flags—is a cheap anti-Trump flex, given that Trump’s leadership style of leading with strength is yielding better long-term results for the world.
Kindness is a great thing, but too much of it leads to suicidal kindness.
There is an easy way to sum up her time as Prime Minister of New Zealand. Look no further than the tagline of the film— “To rule is easy. To lead is hard.”
She chose the easy path.