Ardern Urges Leaders to Restore Trust Through Economic Security at Sydney Forum

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, now a Sydney resident, addressed Australian politicians from the stage of the Sydney Opera House on Sunday. Speaking at a forum with author Anna Funder, Ardern warned that politicians are deepening societal polarization and must do better.

“We have a responsibility not to engage in binary thinking, not to engage in the language of violence, [but] to rebuild trust by building financial security in a time of deep insecurity,” Ardern said. “There are things we could be doing but, right now, we’re making it worse, not better.”

Ardern traced the current climate to decades of growing insecurity fueled by globalization, which sparked backlash against institutions like the World Trade Organization. Politicians responded with proposals like Brexit, offering scapegoats rather than solutions, a dynamic that paved the way for figures like Donald Trump, she argued.

Ardern, 46, relocated to Australia this year, purchasing a home on Sydney’s northern beaches in September and recently announcing a lecturing and mentoring role at the University of Sydney. The event, billed as a conversation between “two of the world’s leading thinkers,” explored whether society can disagree without becoming divided.

“It’s not just that you hold a different opinion, it’s that you hold it so deeply that you have this view you’ve got moral clarity that is not being held by the other person,” Ardern said of the growing polarization in public discourse. “Therefore, you couldn’t possibly engage with them anymore. It’s made it much more difficult to create the discourse that we need to problem solve.”

The discussion came two weeks after the alleged attack on independent MP Helen Haines. While Ardern did not reference the incident directly, she emphasized that leaders must be mindful of the tone they set. Social media, she noted, has made it harder for people to change their minds.

“Your opinions are recorded and held in time, and when so much of a healthy democracy is your ability to have debate and shift your views based on new evidence of information … that environment makes it more difficult,” Ardern said.

When Ardern entered parliament in 2008 as its youngest member, she was also the first MP with an existing social media presence. Initially, Ardern and many colleagues embraced social media as a direct line to voters. “I was so naive not to think about the fact that that meant the manipulation of information,” she said.

Her perspective shifted irrevocably on March 15, 2019, the day of the Christchurch mosque shootings. “A domestic terror attack came to our shores by someone who was radicalised on YouTube and who broadcast that mania in order to incite violence amongst other white supremacists using Facebook,” she said on Sunday. “That’s when I fully understood the weaponisation.”

Years of accumulating mistrust now manifest as voter grievance and insularity, a crisis Ardern said politicians have failed to address. “At every point where you see this spike in mistrust, you see this disruption in what people are feeling and experiencing, and a failure of a political response to it,” she said. “We’ve not fixed the core of the problem; in fact, we’ve then weaponised it with blame and distrust of others. We have not just a crisis of trust; we have a crisis of leadership.”

Ardern argued that empathy is essential to the solution. “What empathy brings to politics is a thing that we’re missing now. It brings humility, it brings curiosity,” she said. “If we had more humility in politics – what a difference that would make.”

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