WELLINGTON-Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern bowed out of parliament on Wednesday, making an impassioned plea during her tearful final speech to “please take the politics out of climate change”.
Ardern shocked New Zealand earlier this year when she announced she was stepping down as prime minister and retiring from politics, saying she no longer had “enough in the tank”. Draped in a korowai -- a traditional Maori feather cloak -- Ardern recalled her humble beginnings in a working class family, and how she never expected to lead the country. “It was a cross between a sense of duty to steer a moving freight train... and being hit by one,” she quipped during her valedictory address.
“And that’s probably because my internal reluctance to lead was matched only by a huge sense of responsibility.” Ardern steered New Zealand through natural disasters, the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2019 Christchurch mosque massacre -- in which a white supremacist gunman killed 51 Muslim worshippers. But she singled out the climate crisis as the defining issue of her time in politics. “Climate change is a crisis. It is upon us,” she said.
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“And so one of the very few things I will ask of this house on my departure is that you please take the politics out of climate change.”
The 42-year-old, once the youngest woman leader in the world, choked up at several points during the speech, which she started and finished in the Maori language. Her voice was thick with emotion as she recalled the pain caused by the Christchurch attack, which she said had left her “bereft”. “Having sadly seen our nation in horrific moments of grief, I’ve concluded that countries don’t move on from tragedy, rather they become part of your psyche,” she said.