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In her last speech as New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern was asked why she wanted to be remembered.
She responded with a single line: “As someone who always tried to be nice.”
For more than two years, New Zealanders were locked out of their own country as Ardern imposed some of the world’s toughest Covid restrictions.
Like many New Zealanders living abroad, I won’t look back on this moment as a display of his trademark kindness and empathy.
Jacinda Ardern choked back tears as she announced her resignation as New Zealand Prime Minister.
I moved to Sydney with the understanding that it was always a three-hour flight from my family in Wellington, but like the vast majority of expats, I was unable to return home for more than two years.
This really hit home when my mother, a mental health nurse, was kicked down the stairs by a patient and suffered a devastating concussion, and Ardern’s draconian border closures meant I couldn’t be there for her when she needed me most.
In a staggering violation of human rights, New Zealand citizens abroad had to apply to enter their own country, with a small number of places available only through an online lottery system.
More than 50,000 Kiwis applied each month, but only 5,000 were admitted.
In a staggering violation of human rights, New Zealand citizens abroad had to apply to enter their own country, writes Cameron Carpenter.
And then, once you won a spot, you’d have to pay more than $3,100 to stay in a government-run quarantine hotel for 14 days, where the Army guarded the entrances to make sure no one left.
Detainees were only allowed out of their rooms for one hour a day, usually for a walk in the hotel car park.
But those rules, which we were told were absolutely necessary to stop the spread of Covid and save lives, didn’t apply if you were rich or a sports star.
A loophole allowed the wealthy and political elite to avoid hotel quarantine altogether by flying to New Zealand on private planes and then isolating at home.
New Zealand citizen Paul Mullally was forced to say his last goodbye to his dying mother via video link due to Jacinda Ardern’s draconian Covid rules.
International sports stars were able to skip the quarantine queue to play in New Zealand, with the government paying for their stays in controlled isolation. They were also granted training waivers that allowed them to leave the facility.
But ordinary Kiwis were shut out of the country, with countless stories of New Zealanders abroad missing out on births, funerals, weddings and other events.
New Zealand citizen Paul Mullally was forced to say goodbye to his dying mother via video link, because his application for the return of the family, submitted nine days earlier, was still pending when she passed away.
Stranded in Afghanistan, pregnant New Zealand journalist Charlotte Bellis was forced to turn to the Taliban for help after being unable to return to New Zealand to give birth due to rules.
Charlotte Bellis, 35, a journalist from New Zealand who had been working in the Middle East, had been struggling to return home to give birth due to Jacinda Ardern’s strict Covid rules.
Only after her story sparked international outrage did New Zealand officials back down, offering her a place to quarantine.
She agreed, as pregnancy can be a death sentence in Afghanistan due to the poor state of maternity care.
During the early stages of the pandemic, most New Zealanders accepted Ardern’s decision to limit entry, as we still knew so little about covid-19.
But Kiwis were still banned from entering until February 2022, despite the fact that most of the nation was vaccinated and the Omicron variant proved to have a much lower mortality rate.
This put New Zealand completely out of step with the rest of the world, which was already learning to live with the virus.
For international tourists hoping to travel to New Zealand, the wait was even longer as Ardern refused to open the borders until October.
Ardern tried to justify the tough checks by saying that “not everyone could come home when they wanted to, but COVID couldn’t come in when it wanted to either.”
But despite their flimsy justifications, many New Zealanders will always associate their decision to prevent them from entering their own country with angst.
At the end of his resignation speech, Ardern declared: ‘I hope to put behind me the belief that you can be nice. Empathic, but decisive. Optimistic, but focused.
For New Zealanders like me, it leaves an indelible memory of the cruelty of his pandemic policies.
And to add insult to injury, his surprise resignation because he “doesn’t have enough in the tank” leaves the country in limbo, with no obvious successor, a struggling economy and out-of-control inflation.
What’s good about that?