THE GESTURE POLITICS OF JACINDA ARDERN

Gesture politics conceal a routinely centrist Labour-led government.

Has Jacinda Ardern because the Prime Minister of  political gestures?

IN THE AFTERMATH of the Christchurch terrorist attack, there has been much discussion and debate about whether the Canterbury Crusaders should remain the Canterbury Crusaders. While it was obviously unintentional, the Crusaders unfortunate association with the anti-Muslim crusades of the Middles Ages means that for many, like the New Zealand Rugby Football Union, the name is no longer tenable. The symbolism is considered too confronting for a city where fifty Muslims were killed and many injured,at the hands of a white nationalist killer.

While this discussion will no doubt continue until the final and inevitable decision of a name change is announced, the issue is a reminder of the power of symbols and the potency of symbolic gestures.

Certainly Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her advisers seem well aware of that. But unfortunately there will be next to no discussion about the fact that the Prime Ministership of Jacinda Ardern is becoming less about significant and fundamental undertakings but more about increasingly contrived symbolic gestures. Are we seeing the substitution of empty symbolic gestures to conceal the lack of significant policy action? Has Jacinda Ardern become the 'compassionate' face of neoliberalism?

So in a week that it was announced that more than 250,000 children are living in poverty, Jacinda Ardern has grabbed the headlines, both domestically and internationally, because she paid for the groceries of a woman who had forgotten her purse. Her widely reported comment that she helped out because the woman 'was a mum' can only add to her mana as the caring and compassionate leader. This is despite the fact she has failed to live up to  her election campaign promise to 'really tackle poverty'. That has been stymied by her government's continued loyalty to neoliberalism and the primacy of 'the market'.

While Labour supporters never let the National Government of John Key forget that it presided over a society of growing inequality and poverty, Jacinda Ardern escapes similar criticism. Instead she gets applauded for showing up at at an Auckland food bank to help out at Xmas, even though the growing demand for food parcels are a direct result of her government's economic policies. Its a nice trick if you can pull it off; get all of the credit while taking none of the blame.

Now the urgency to deal to child poverty has become reduced to more relaxed schedule of halving the rate of child poverty within ten years. But these kind of less than glowing facts won't be ending up in the pages of The Daily Mail, glowingly referring to her as 'a leader like no other".

It would not be churlish to tell Jacinda Ardern that many mothers can't pay for groceries not because they have forgotten their purses but because, after the exorbitant rents and other bills are paid, the larder remains mostly devoid of food. Unlike Ardern they are not on $427,000 a year, which, incidentally, makes her the fifth highest paid political leader in the OECD.

 In a country where its representative democracy is neither democratic or representative and the parliamentary parties that claim to represent us are little more than conveyor belts for market-friendly polices, perhaps empty political gestures are all political leaders like Jacinda Arden have left. What we do know is the gesture politics of Ardern, whether its paying for someone's groceries or wearing a hijab, are subject to instant social media adulation by her largely middle class support base.

It doesn't matter that Jacinda Ardern leads a government pursuing neoliberal policies and it doesn't matter that her government has failed to tackle poverty or climate change in the way that Ardern promised during her election campaign. Nor does it matter that she leads a government that has not been 'transformative' like she claimed it would be but one that has remained routinely and doggedly centrist. None of that matters to Jacinda 's supporters because...Jacinda cares.