by Dr Craig Heilmann
*Foreword: I had to fly back to Australian from New Zealand this week on an Air NZ jet and I decided to torture myself by watching the documentary Prime Minister—the story of Dame Jacinda Ardern. I had thought I’d be triggered and angry, having lived through her five year stint as NZ Prime Minister, but to be honest I felt a kind of horrified pity as I watched. Below are my reflections on Ardern’s form of leadership—or its lacklustre reality.
The last word of the documentary Prime Minister is “home,” spoken by the ex-P.M. herself, referring to New Zealand, of course, and it concludes with the musical accompaniment of the wonderful Crowded House song “Don’t Dream It’s Over.” Home—and the return to home, the Ancient Greek nostos—is one of the great themes of literature and drama. At the end of Homer’s Odyssey, the wanderer soldier and chameleon Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca. In Book 5, the flexible and long-suffering Odysseus expresses something of the same pathos Ardern gestures toward at the end of her documentary:
“Nevertheless I long—I pine, all my days—to travel home [to Ithaca] and see the dawn of my return.”
But what is ironic about Ardern’s leadership journey—and rare, I would suggest, for any political leader—is that she cannot really go home. Nostos is not possible for her. She now lives in exile in Sydney, Australia, and the documentary repeatedly cuts to scenes in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and at Harvard University, where Ardern has served as a visiting fellow, indeed an Angelopoulos Global Public Leaders Fellow. Unlike Odysseus, Ardern cannot return home because, I suggest, she ultimately failed as a leader.
Of her the Harvard Kennedy School of Government Dean said:
“Jacinda Ardern showed the world strong and empathetic political leadership” …“She earned respect far beyond the shores of her country, and she will bring important insights for our students and will generate vital conversations about the public policy choices facing leaders at all levels.”
The documentary is an insider’s account of her years as Prime Minister of New Zealand from 2017 to early 2023, surveying some of the most dramatic episodes in that nation’s recent history: the Christchurch mosque shootings, in which 51 Muslims were murdered in a terrorist attack; the eruption of White Island that killed numerous tourists; and, of course, the Covid era, which proved deeply divisive and ultimately precipitated Ardern’s political downfall.
Several subtexts run through the documentary. The first is the idea that Ardern rewrote the rules of leadership by privileging compassion, kindness, and empathy over power. I want to say more about this below, because many critics believe her form of progressivism was often disguised beneath what amounted to weaponised compassion.
A second subtext is the virtue of courage in leadership. This theme appears throughout the film in references and symbolic allusions to Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition of 1914 and his extraordinary perseverance as a leader who ultimately brought every member of his crew home alive. Ardern recounts Shackleton’s belief that courage was fundamentally connected to optimism, and she insists throughout the documentary that she remains an optimistic person.
That theme of courage gave me pause. As a virtue ethicist, I hold to the classical idea of the unity of the virtues: if you truly possess one virtue, you possess them all in integrated form. In the Nicomachean Ethics 6, Aristotle presses the claim that the virtues do not exist independently of each other (see Ethics 1144b32–1145a2). A person with one moral virtue must possess all others, for practical wisdom (phronesis) is a necessary and sufficient condition for moral virtue:
“it is impossible to be properly good without practical wisdom, or to be practically wise without (also having) moral virtue” (1144b30–2).
I am also conscious that virtues have simulacra—counterfeit forms that outwardly resemble virtue while lacking its substance. There is certainly a form of bravery in Ardern, but I remain unconvinced it constitutes the genuine virtue of courage. I say this chiefly because I question her wisdom, the one virtue every good human being—and certainly every successful political leader—requires.
One example from the documentary illustrates this problem clearly. Ardern insists that during the Covid period—which ultimately undid her premiership and plunged New Zealand into a ‘slough of despond’ from which even a new government has struggled fully to recover—she had two overriding objectives. The first was “to keep people alive” through vaccine rollouts, mandates, and lockdowns. The second was to keep people united, and she admits she failed at this second objective.
What she never acknowledges, however, is why she failed. Yet the reason seems obvious. I was leading a church in New Zealand during that same period and was directly navigating the government’s extreme mandates, bubbles, vaccine requirements, and lockdown structures. The problem was that Ardern’s two goals were fundamentally incompatible. Pursuing the first objective as aggressively and inflexibly as her government did inevitably fractured the second. It was always going to pit one Kiwi against another and divide the nation, as it certainly did churches.
This, to my mind, is where Ardern’s deep commitment to compassion—as she understands it—clouded her judgment. What presented itself rhetorically as kindness often functioned politically as a softer expression of otherwise coercive power. In that sense, compassion became detached from prudence and therefore from wisdom itself. The result was not merely political failure but a spectacular collapse of leadership judgment.
The truth is that Ardern now belongs more naturally in institutions like Harvard University, teaching a new generation of progressive elites her vision of compassionate leadership, precisely because she can no longer comfortably inhabit the political and cultural world of New Zealand itself. That exile is not simply the consequence of leadership failure, but of a profound rejection of prudence.
Structurally, the documentary falls into two halves: Ardern’s meteoric ascent to power and global celebrity through her election victories in 2017 and 2020, and then her decline, culminating in her resignation in 2023. If the first half is marked by triumphal and optimistic tones, the second increasingly descends into long stretches of self-pity as Ardern struggles to comprehend the public resentment building around her leadership.
One revealing contradiction in the documentary is Ardern’s continual invocation of compassion, kindness, and empathy, despite the fact that many New Zealanders experienced her government as anything but compassionate. To those injured by the mRNA vaccines—of whom I personally know more than a handful—and to those who lost careers, livelihoods, and social standing because of the government’s aggressive mandates, Ardern will always remain a deeply troubling figure. Indeed, in spite of the appearance of bravery Ardern—who had insisted she was the one source of truth in New Zealand during her 1pm daily pulpit sessions—did the unspeakable and refused to testify publicly on her government’s decision-making in the Covid period during Part II of New Zealand’s Covid Royal Commission.
Again, I would argue that what she lacked was the old-fashioned moral virtue of prudence. Passion increasingly ruled in her. One particularly revealing moment occurs when a Beehive adviser informs her that a major media outlet wants to interview her about the “moral” dimensions of her Covid leadership. Ardern scoffs and replies: “It’s not morality, it’s science.”
That remark is more illuminating than she perhaps intended. It suggests that, for Ardern, science occupies the realm of rationality while morality is disconnected from reason altogether. But if morality is severed from rational judgment, then moral decisions can only arise from emotion and sentiment. In this respect, Ardern resembles what Alasdair MacIntyre called the “emotivist” character type of late modernity. Ardern does not so much reason morally as emote continually. There is no room in her universe for rational moral debate; there are only emotionally informed edicts from moral superiors.
I do not doubt Ardern’s sincerity. I think she genuinely is a compassionate and emotionally sensitive person. But compassion detached from prudence and wisdom inevitably becomes distorted. When moral judgments are governed primarily by feeling rather than reasoned practical judgment, they become malformed. And that, sadly, makes Jacinda Ardern a morally dangerous leader.
To be honest, I found the documentary unsettling. Because I lived through Ardern’s five years in power in New Zealand, and because I formed strong opinions about her leadership during that period—as I also did about the way she ran the country aground like a stranded naval frigate—I assumed I would simply feel anger while watching it. I expected to be triggered.
Instead, what I mostly felt was a kind of horrified pity.
Ardern appears throughout the documentary as profoundly well-intentioned, yet genuinely baffled and wounded when she no longer receives the public adulation she had grown accustomed to. Her combination of good intentions and lack of wisdom did immense damage to floundering New Zealand while simultaneously foreshortening her own political career.
Ardern is unquestionably a gifted politician. She is photogenic, empathetic, and an exceptionally effective communicator. She has been formed in the age of the selfie stick.
More than that, she appears instinctively aware of media optics and the power of imagery. She seems to know intuitively where the camera is and how symbolic gestures function in the modern imagination. Who can forget the images of Ardern masked during Covid? The documentary even shows entire rooms of bureaucratic mandarins in masks, supposedly labouring all day under those conditions. Likewise, after the Christchurch attacks, Ardern cosplayed in the dress and with the headscarf of Muslim women—a gesture that, in many progressive settings, would ordinarily be criticised as ‘cultural appropriation,’ yet for which she was universally celebrated.
Ardern is, in this sense, fundamentally a role-player.
Consider how much time, energy, and planning went into documenting her premiership from the inside across five years. That alone makes this documentary unusual. Most political documentaries are retrospective projects assembled from archival footage. This one was curated almost in real time. We are not watching the “real” Ardern so much as a carefully managed public performance of Ardern.
That fact also makes me suspect that both this documentary and her recent memoir are transitional acts in the construction of her next public role—perhaps eventually within the United Nations or another global institution supported by her international progressive patrons.
Yet despite all the careful curation, there remains something deeply tragic about the film. Ardern’s optimism—which she interprets as evidence of her courage—is repeatedly overwhelmed by her naivety. Early in the documentary we are introduced to her as someone perpetually haunted by “imposter syndrome.” In the end, however, that becomes the central note of pathos in the entire project.
The documentary presents itself as the story of a woman who fundamentally redrew the meaning of political leadership. But a more honest reading suggests something closer to the opposite: the story of a leader who ultimately was not equal to the demands of leadership itself. Ardern fell in love with public adulation. She believed her own mythology during the Covid years, imagining herself as a kind of New Zealand Joan of Arc, and consequently pushed the country far too hard through increasingly coercive Covid settings.
Covid Lockdown Protests, Beehive Wellington
That tragic dimension is especially visible in her final year in office. While a weeks-long protest unfolded on the lawns of Parliament in Wellington, Ardern—the self-described leader of kindness, compassion, and unity—refused even to speak with the protesters. In the latter stages of the documentary, we see her hunkered down in her office lamenting (indeed whining about) how offensive and “irrational” the protest movement was.
Earlier in the documentary, Ardern condemns the Christchurch terrorist, Brenton Tarrant, for “othering” Muslims and dividing New Zealanders. Yet by the end of her premiership, Ardern herself had become a divider-in-chief, increasingly “othering” her own critics. In one scene, her husband Clarke Gayford dismissively refers to protesters gathered near his parents’ beach house simply as “anti-vaccers.” That is the danger of constructing oneself as a quasi-messianic public figure.
If you are already a fan of Jacinda Ardern—as you can probably tell, I am not—you will likely enjoy this documentary. It will reassure you in your admiration for her and reinforce the belief that she embodied compassion, wisdom, and courage.
But as a virtue ethicist, I am compelled to judge leadership according to higher standards.