But a seven-minute battery of questions in Parliament on Tuesday from David Seymour, who leads the libertarian ACT party, prompted the out-of-character outburst.
Turning to her deputy, Grant Robertson, Ardern muttered under her breath — though not inaudibly enough to avoid detection by the in-house microphones, and entry into official parliamentary records — “he’s such an arrogant [expletive].”
Widely regarded globally as an effective, empathetic leader and an antidote to populist politicians elsewhere, Ardern has been criticized at home for her handling of the economy as it emerges from a long period of isolation during the pandemic. Ardern’s center-left Labour Party has been trailing in opinion polls lately ahead of national elections to be held next year.
The small, island nation is grappling with many of the pressures seen elsewhere: inflation, rising interest rates and housing affordability issues. It is also facing localized problems, such as a string of ram raids on jewelry stores and corner-store robberies — at least one of them deadly — that have led to perceptions among some voters that her administration is soft on crime.
“The government’s under a lot of pressure,” said Seymour, the recipient of Tuesday’s profane remark. “I was pretty astonished because I’ve known Jacinda for 11 years,” he said, describing the incident as “out of character.”
Seymour said the prime minister texted later to apologize, noting her mother’s wise advice: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, you shouldn’t say it.”
Seymour said he replied, wishing Ardern “a Merry Christmas,” signaling it was all water under the bridge. “That’s the Kiwi way.”
The prime minister’s office confirmed in an email that she had apologized to Seymour but did not offer further comment.
Ardern’s government is facing opposition to a number of hot-button policies on its legislative agenda for the coming year, including changes to the governance of water, a world-first plan to tax agricultural emissions, and revisions to hate-speech laws.
In an interview with national broadcaster Radio New Zealand on Monday, Ardern signaled that her administration would reflect on some of those policies over the summer — when Parliament is in recess, “and just [ask] ourselves whether or not either from a spending perspective, investment perspective, or just from a focus perspective, those are things we should be prioritizing at this point in time.”
As for Seymour, he joked that he might have an exaggerated sense of his own importance: Later that evening, when an unsuspecting aunt asked whether he would like to join her for dinner, he answered, “Why would you want to have dinner with an arrogant” — ending with the word Ardern used.
The joke bombed, he said. She hadn’t caught up on the news of the day.
