King’s Birthday Grumpiness: ‘Dame’ Jacinda Ardern
Today is New Zealand’s first King’s Birthday since 1951. It’s not Charlie’s actual birthday, any more than Queen’s Birthday was Liz’s, but it’s a public holiday nonetheless. Until the creation of Matariki, the monarch’s observed birthday marked the start of a black hole in New Zealand’s holiday calendar, stretching until Labour Day in late October. And along with New Years, it’s one of the two big occasions for the Government to dole out Honours.
Hence, we suddenly have Dame Jacinda Ardern.
I have no fundamental objection to acknowledging Ardern’s service to the country, though it might have been more respectable to wait until after the next election – it’d look less overtly incestuous, in the sense that she’s literally receiving this from her own cabinet colleagues. Moreover, Ardern was elected to public service by the people of Mount Albert (and in a moral sense, by the people of New Zealand) in 2020. So far as anyone knew at the time, she was going to serve the three year term, not resign after two years and collect an Honour after two and a half. Again, giving her the Honour in January or June 2024 would have felt more appropriate. In my opinion anyway.
No, my real bugbear is that Ardern decided to take the (female) knighthood at all.
Knighthoods in New Zealand were abolished by the Helen Clark Government in 2000, only to be restored by John Key a decade later (primarily so he could get one himself). But even before then, multiple Prime Ministers were refusing the knighthood for themselves. David Lange, Jim Bolger, and Helen Clark all refused one. From Muldoon (1984) to Key (2017), only Geoffrey Palmer and Jenny Shipley, Prime Ministerial nonentities at the fag-end of their respective regimes, opted to accept. The reason was simple enough: New Zealand was moving away from its colonial past, towards a more independent future, and having our leaders tie themselves to the British awards system ran against that.
(More traditionally, there’s also the optics of Labour and Leftist Prime Ministers endorsing an Honours system rooted in social privilege. Walter Nash did accept a knighthood in 1965, but it took him two years to decide for this very reason. New Zealand’s longest serving Prime Minister, Richard Seddon (1893-1906), refused a knighthood on the basis that he wanted to be a man of the people. Seddon was as ardent an Imperialist as to ever serve New Zealand, but he was also, at heart, a West Coast publican. Seddon’s vision was of ‘God’s Own Country’, where the proverbial Jack was as good as his master).
In the case of Ardern, while she took no steps to further New Zealand republicanism during her time in office, she did see the transition as inevitable, and stated she personally supported it. Not undoing Key’s knighthood restoration is one thing – there were, after all, bigger fish to fry politically. But implicitly endorsing knighthoods via accepting one herself? That runs counter to her supposed beliefs, quite apart from the symbolic faux pas noted earlier. Throwing around the term ‘Aotearoa’ is all well and good (though to my South Island ear, it comes across as gratuitous), but not when you’re also running off with that most colonial of awarded titles. I would have expected better of Ardern, to be honest.
A Phuulish Fellow 