Watch full speech
Jacinda Ardern, former prime minister, former Labour leader - and soon to be former MP, spoke her final words in Parliament’s debating chamber yesterday.
Her speech dabbled in the ironies of her political life.
As one of the most private, media-sceptical prime ministers of recent times, she is probably the leader New Zealanders have seen the most of - the one they think they know the best; the one they spent weeks of their lives locked up with and heard more from than their own families.
She used her final half-hour in Parliament to try to put her own stamp on how people may think of her, to wrest back her story from the sceptics and to try to convince people that what people might perceive as weakness, was in fact strength.
Her speech almost symbolically shed, in roughly reverse order, each "hat" she had once worn - Prime Minister, Labour leader, Labour MP, until as her half-hour drew to a close, Ms Ardern wrapped up as simply daughter, fiance and mum.
These were significant.
But no-one listening to the list could forget the list fell far short of the grand promises about housing and child poverty on which Ms Ardern was elected.
The word "Kiwibuild" got no mention - nor did the shadow that hung over Labour’s first term, Winston Peters.
The speech dallied with catastrophe in this first section. It might have been dull, defensive and unreflective.
But Ms Ardern found her legs when she was able to find context for some of these achievements, which are not always easy to see.
"We won’t ever know the long-term benefits of banning conversion therapy, especially for our young people.
"Or what it means to our Pacific communities that we finally apologised for the dawn raids.
"There will be no list of the lives saved because of the banning of military-style semi-automatic weapons.
"We won’t know how we left woman feeling about the ability to make their own choices when this Parliament decriminalised abortion, or when we improved pay equity, put period products into schools or reached 50% representation of women in Parliament, she said.
This was especially true of Covid, where Ms Ardern urged people to remember the lives saved because of the response, rather than the pain and division with which it ended.
Ms Ardern also thanked her team - as any valedictory must.
The speech excelled once Ms Ardern had finished the thank yous and put her legacy-securing to bed.
Here, she attempted to craft a new legacy - as a champion for the notion that anyone could give politics a go.
With trademark self-deprecation, she shrugged off insults about her sensitivity - not by disproving them, but by arguing that you could be sensitive and be prime minister.
Ms Ardern conceded she herself needed convincing on this point, and confessed she once consulted Trevor Mallard on how to "harden up".
Instead of hardening up, she described growing comfortable with this sensitivity - quite something when you consider Ms Ardern has attracted more vitriol than any politician in living memory.
"I didn’t change," she said.
"I leave this place as sensitive as I ever was. Prone to dwell on the negative. Hating Question Time so deeply that I would struggle most days to eat beforehand. And I am here to tell you, you can be that person, and be here," she said.
"I would rather be criticised for being a hugger than being heartless, and so hug I did. A lot," she said, to the laughter of the packed chamber and gallery - as full as it has ever been.
Ms Ardern, famously private, famously media-unfriendly, opened up on her unsuccessful attempt with IVF coming at the same time she became Labour leader.
"I thought I had found myself on a path that meant I wouldn’t be a mother. Rather than process that, I campaigned to become prime minister. A rather good distraction as far as they go," she said, noting she became a mother shortly afterwards.
She confidently said she had been a good mother too - a rebuke to the unsubtle and unfair criticism political mothers face.
"But I leave knowing I was the best mother I could be. You can be that person, and be here," she said.
Ms Ardern finished in a far different place to where she started. No longer defensive. No longer fighting questions of legacy and delivery, or whatever other label might have attached itself to her administration.
Instead, she finished by listing the many labels - some underhandedly pejorative - that had been attached to her, and defiantly said they had never stopped her from leading or governing.
"I cannot determine what will define my time in this place. But I do hope I have demonstrated something else entirely. That you can be anxious, sensitive, kind and wear your heart on your sleeve.
"You can be a mother, or not, an ex-Mormon, or not, a nerd, a crier, a hugger - you can be all of these things, and not only can you be here - you can lead.
"Just like me," she said, as her benchmate, Finance Minister Grant Robertson welled up.
Ms Ardern has never been able to extract her leadership discussions of her identity. Her former faith, her gender, her being a mother and even her sensitivity, have dogged her - often unfairly - from the second she took the Labour leadership.
It was a powerful decision, in her last seconds in Parliament, not to repudiate these identities, but to embrace them, and defiantly proclaim that if they had made a difference to her ability to govern, it was a positive one.
- By Thomas Coughlan
