Hey Australia, you can have Jacinda, we don’t want her

So it is official. Jacinda Ardern is now based in Australia, at least for the moment. We are told it is about work, family logistics and convenience. We are told she will still spend time back home. Cut the bullshit.

The reality is that she walked away from the job before voters could pass their own verdict, and now she has walked away from the country she once claimed to love so fiercely. For a leader who preached kindness and solidarity, the exit was cowardly.

Her lefty lovers still talk about “world-leading” pandemic management. Many New Zealanders remember something else entirely. They remember some of the harshest lockdowns in the democratic world. They remember businesses destroyed while politicians held press conferences about being a “team of five million”. They remember being told when they could leave their homes, who they could see, and whether they were essential enough to earn a living.

They remember mandates that left workers with an impossible choice. Take a newly developed vaccine or lose your job. Call it public health policy if you like. For thousands of families it felt like state-backed coercion. The social damage lingers. Friendships fractured. Families split. Trust in institutions cratered.

Then there was the money.

Under her government, tens of millions of dollars were channelled into media through schemes such as the Public Interest Journalism Fund. Officially it was to support struggling outlets and promote quality reporting. Myself and many others saw something far uglier. They saw a media class financially dependent on the very government it was meant to scrutinise. They saw hard questions replaced with soft interviews and applause lines. Whether you call it funding or influence, it eroded confidence in both politics and journalism.

Ardern built a global brand on empathy and progressive virtue. International magazines swooned. Foreign universities handed out fellowships. Overseas audiences saw glossy headlines and carefully curated narratives. Back home, many saw rising crime, worsening cost of living pressures, a housing market out of reach, and a country increasingly divided along cultural and political lines.

She is easily the most hated prime minister in our history. She left office with deep reservoirs of anger directed at her leadership. You do not get that level of backlash from nowhere. It grows from decisions that hurt people and a style of politics that dismissed critics as fringe, selfish or dangerous.

Now she is across the Tasman. Fitting, really. Australia has always been the escape valve for disillusioned Kiwis. This time, the flow goes both ways.

If Australians want the global celebrity version of Jacinda, they are welcome to it. Just understand that behind the carefully crafted image sits a legacy that many New Zealanders are still living with. Lockdowns that scarred communities. Mandates that cost livelihoods. Media arrangements that raised serious questions about independence. A politics of moral superiority that left half the country feeling lectured and sidelined.

We are told she represents the best of us. For a large and growing number of Kiwis, she represents a period they would rather never repeat.

Australia, she is yours.