There was a moment during one of Jacinda Ardern’s kaleidoscopic campaign walkabouts in South Auckland on Saturday that hinted the whole, heaving crowd and media phenomenon that is Jacindamania might have started to consume itself.
She was inching through the Mangere Town Centre concourse, surrounded by Labour supporters with security behind her, shoppers, passersby and racks of sale clothing on either side, and a media scrum of video, still cameras and microphones walking backwards directly ahead.
Then, as the hubbub swirled around her, Ardern began narrating her thoughts and campaign messages directly into the camera for her own retreating, personal lensman travelling with her party. It was the kind of ‘live’ reporting we often see from a Tova O’Brien or Jessica Mutch McKay walking in front of politicians at high octane news moments.
Ardern kept on slow-walking and looked down the barrel, zen in the middle of a pulsing moshpit, to deliver her messages, ending with a ‘Let’s Keep Moving’… that in context seemed almost absurd.
The politician campaigning among the people for the benefit of the media has become a medium herself. To mis-state Canadian communications expert Marshal McLuhan’s famous dictum about the media, Jacinda is the message.
Some on the right believe Ardern is all that Labour has – that without her personal popularity and presence, the governing party is of modest talent, limited achievement and muted electoral appeal.
There might be something to that. But understanding that her persona and brand is the cornerstone of Labour’s hopes doesn’t make the task of matching or challenging that any easier.
In Mangere, and earlier at Otara, Ardern was in some of the most fervent Labour territory in the country, so the actual crowd chant of “We love Jacinda, We love Jacinda” when she finished speaking from a makeshift stage at the Otara market has to be seen in that context. (The man who started the chant, Zahoor Rahman of Flat Bush, says it is because she and her party respect the people of New Zealand, the jobless, the homeless, the Muslims.)
Both events were pretty transparently Labour Party rallies mixed with walks to meet the public and offer that most sought-after of political trophies, a selfie with the PM.
Ardern’s familiarity with this campaigning genre is acute. She spots a mobile phone in an instant, invites the holder towards her and even grabs the device, pushes the right buttons to reverse or selfie the image and sets up the shot. One man in Otara, who’d trailed beside her in a throng down one lane of the market holding his vegetables, caught her eye. “You’ve been walking around with the box of veggies, sir, did you want a photo?’ The man’s answer: “Yes, with the vegetables” and he had his wish – him, his veggie box and the PM.
She’s what they want. Not her words necessarily. But her smile, fame and presence. Safely into their iPhone or Samsung photos folder and onto their social media feeds.
There are those who want more. Dr Mazher Iqbal, helping at a stand promoting Discover Islam, thanked Ardern personally for supporting the Muslim community since March 15, 2019, “and I told her most of us are going to party vote and candidate vote Labour”.
A woman wearing a headscarf stopped the PM in the crowd and confided something that had Ardern leaning in with concern. The Manukau MP, Jenny Salesa, gave the woman her card and asked her to call her office.
These throngs of people would, just weeks ago, have been impossible. Even today at Level 1 they seem too much, too close. At one point, it is Ardern, herself, who has a brief moment of alarm as she has to stifle a cough, twice, into her elbow with people all around her. She waves into the air to a staff member signalling smoke from a nearby barbeque had caught her the wrong way. Someone fetches a water bottle from further back in the crowd.
When she stops at Otara to speak, the first thing she does is use a liberal helping of hand sanitiser and swig further on a bottle. During her talk, which is part reminder to the southside of Labour’s delivering of cheaper health services and ‘public housing places’ and part exhortation to vote, Ardern stops to drink again, apologising for the strain on her voice.
At Mangere, there are a couple of small hiccups. A woman in a jewellers’ shop – which Ardern and her posse had entered to view a cake – mutters within the PM’s hearing that she had already voted and not for Labour. (She explains later she is a Vision NZ party voter, against abortion and euthanasia and unimpressed Ardern wouldn’t say which way she would vote on cannabis reform. “But she’s a beautiful lady.”)
A politician-meets-toddler campaign moment went sideways, too, when the infant bawled for the duration of her selfies with the PM at Mangere. With any other political leader that is par for the course. For Ardern, a charmer with the kids, making a baby cry is almost unthinkable.
The standard rockstar reception, which at Mangere resembled something between a royal tour walkabout for a Diana or a Kate crossed with a David Tua or Joseph Parker entrance to a stadium for a heavyweight fight, registered with Reverend Thomas Kauie, who welcomed her on the stage.
He reminded the crowd that Jesus was mobbed by crowds as he and his disciples visited towns. “When the crowds pressed in on him, he stayed to hear them. He fed them…. We are called to serve, to be servants.
“Many blessings for the coming election,” he said to Ardern. “We know that the people trust you.”
The word Messiah is not appropriate. But Ardern is the Message.
