A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern - Penguin Books AustraliaA Different Kind of Power
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Published: 3 June 2025
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Memoirs
A Different Kind of Power
A memoir
From the former prime minister of New Zealand, then the world’s youngest female head of government and just the second to give birth in office, comes a deeply personal memoir chronicling her extraordinary rise and offering inspiration to a new generation of leaders.
What if we could redefine leadership? What if kindness came first? Jacinda Ardern grew up the daughter of a police officer, a Mormon girl plagued by self-doubt. But as prime minister she commanded worldwide respect for her empathetic leadership, made political history, and changed our assumptions about what a global leader can be.
When Jacinda Ardern became prime minister at age thirty-seven, the world took notice. But it was her compassionate, powerful response to the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks, resulting in swift gun-control reforms, that exemplified a new kind of leadership—one that is caring and effective. She guided New Zealand through unprecedented challenges—a volcanic eruption, a major biosecurity breach, and a global pandemic—and advanced visionary new policies to address climate change, reduce child poverty, and secure historic international trade deals. She did this all while juggling first-time motherhood in the public eye.
She is a global icon, and now in this remarkable book she shares her story, from the struggles to the surprises, including the full details of her decision to step down during her sixth year as prime minister.
Jacinda Ardern is a model for anyone who has ever doubted themselves or has aspired to lead with compassion, conviction, and courage. A Different Kind of Power is more than a political memoir; it’s an insight into how it feels to lead, ultimately asking: What if you, too, are capable of more than you ever imagined?
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About the author
Jacinda Ardern
Jacinda Ardern was elected prime minister of New Zealand in 2017 at the age of thirty-seven and became the country’s youngest prime minister in more than 150 years. In 2018, she gave birth to her daughter, Neve, and became the first leader of a country in thirty years to give birth while in office. In 2023, she was awarded the accolade Dame Grand Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. She now spends her time writing, speaking, learning, and being a mum. You can follow Jacinda Ardern
on Instagram and X @JacindaArdern.
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portrait photo of Jacinda Ardern
Also by Jacinda Ardern
Mum's Busy Work
Praise for A Different Kind of Power
A Different Kind of Power is the story of the forces that have shaped Jacinda Ardern and the intentional effort she has put into creating a new template for the next generation of leaders to follow. Ardern’s insightful and inspiring memoir challenges old definitions of strength and power by emphasizing the urgency of compassion and kindness. World leaders have a lot to learn from her timely and important perspective.
Melinda Gates, author of The Moment of Lift
It is rare enough to find someone who lives an inspiring life of genuine service to humanity; it is even rarer to find that they’ve written a beautiful book that will inspire others. Jacinda Ardern’s A Different Kind of Power is just such a book. I could not put down this deeply personal memoir by an icon who insists on being a real person. Like the memoirs of Barack Obama and Gloria Steinem, this book has the power to inspire a new generation of passionate leaders and readers. You don’t have to be interested in politics to devour this book; you might be interested in how women dare to mother and lead at the same time; you might be interested in bravery, and a life well-lived.
Sarah Ruhl, author of Smile
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A Different Kind of Power
by Jacinda Ardern
'Will this book change the minds of the crazies?'
By Philip MatthewsJune 8, 2025
To understand the adult, look at the child. Jacinda Ardern grew up in the most ordinary of New Zealand circumstances: in a simple house in a small town, with decent, modest, hard-working parents, an older sister and a grey rescue cat named Norm. Her father was a cop; her mother was smart enough to go to university but never did. They were Mormons. They drove a beige Toyota Corona. They weren’t rich: almost all of Ardern’s clothes were home-made or hand-me-downs.
This was in Murupara, a small forestry town in the Bay of Plenty that was in decline by the time the Ardern family moved there, and that is where Ardern sets the first chapters of her memoir, A Different Kind of Power. And by the way, she really can write. This is how it starts:
You could drive for fifty kilometres in the Kāingaroa Forest and wonder if there’s anything left on Earth besides trees. That’s the view: radiata pines, each standing thirty metres tall, in tidy gridlines that extend as far as the eye can see. The forest is as vast as it is dense: tree upon tree, row upon row, kilometre upon kilometre.
Murupara was a small clearing in those vast, dense forests. It was also a gang town, and it had been hit hard by the fourth Labour Government’s economic reforms. Years later, when a journalist asked Ardern how she was politicised, she said it came from her time in Murupara, even though she was only primary school-aged then. The idea that she witnessed or at least sensed the kind of deprivation that was unleashed when Rogernomics made forestry workers unemployed and led to closed-up shops on the main street is a pretty easy conclusion to reach, but there is a different kind of politics.
The young Ardern was anxious and watchful. Her father was a good cop but she witnessed a tense scene between him and some gang members that never left her. Her older sister was bullied and the young Ardern became her defender. Her mother suffered from poor mental health and Ardern noticed. There is a sense of a small, decent family surrounded by danger (gangs, school bullies, mental health crises, even the dark forest beyond the clearing) with the young Ardern trying to protect them. She wanted to help; that was her politics. It wasn’t about doctrines or books – not until she started volunteering for the Labour Party at university – but it was always about wanting to keep people safe and perhaps caring too much. When she started using the word ‘kindness’ in politics, she immediately thought of Murupara.
You can trace the line from the kid who worried about everyone else to the prime minister who wanted to embrace the Muslim community, who wanted to bring kids out of poverty and give them warm homes, who wanted to keep all of New Zealand safe from a rampant virus and was finally defeated because some people simply resisted being cared for, or saw mandates and QR codes as a form of fascism. That is the clearest reading of the Jacinda Ardern story. It is why the book is dedicated to ‘the criers, worriers and huggers’, the other people like her.
The story is easy to mock because it only works if you believe politics can sometimes be motivated by an innate sense of goodness, rather than cynicism or self-interest. The idea of kindness as the basis of politics was and still is ridiculed; some are unable to trust well-meaning expressions of sensitivity and concern. That meant Ardern’s politics were characterised instead as childish, shallow, naive, all about rainbows and unicorns and hugs and tears, which is not just patronising and probably misogynistic, but ignores the reality that Ardern was also a thinker who put in the hard work and the long hours – partly because she was terrified of getting things wrong and being found out (‘My whole short life I had grappled with the idea that I was never quite good enough’). She wasn’t a show pony or an airhead.
As you read A Different Kind of Power, you warm to this person, to her empathy, her nervousness, her doubt, her idealism, her ‘grinding sense of responsibility’, her thoughtfulness, her self-deprecation. We all know people like this; some of us are people like this. Her father worried she was too thin-skinned for politics, and maybe he was right. There is a touching moment when a very nice high-school teacher, Mr Fountain, tells her about something called ‘impostor syndrome’. A self-diagnosis followed.
After Murupara, the family moved to Morrinsville, ‘the dairy farming town I will forever call home’. They live on an orchard, with a forest on one side and a golf course on the other, and it sounds idyllic but Ardern has a knack for describing the way tragedy can suddenly intrude into family life. Of course, she noticed everything, and remembered it all, and she experienced stress in childhood as persistent stomach-aches (‘I wasn’t sick, it turned out. I was worried.’). As a teenager, the suicide of a friend’s brother had her asking hard questions about her faith, but she remained in the Mormon church, and hours of door-knocking prepared her for a life in the Labour Party:
While I might have struggled with starting conversations about God and sometimes even politics, I would learn that if I was there to ask someone about their lives, what would make a difference to them – well, that I could do. That I wanted to do.
There were other, greater emotional burdens later. Her sections on the Christchurch mosque shootings are as powerful as you would expect. She writes about feeling ‘a sorrow so immense that even now, years later, there are still no words to describe it’.
The book is skilfully written and even suspenseful. Ardern is good at describing people in quick sketches. Grant Robertson is friendly and dishevelled. Helen Clark is an intimidating superhuman with a dry sense of humour who has the same lunch every day (an egg sandwich and a cup of tea). Andrew Little is a quiet man whose office was always too cold. Simon Bridges is easy and affable. Scott Morrison is dozy and indifferent. Only Winston Peters remains enigmatic. No surprise.
And then there is David Cunliffe. The politician who led Labour to a catastrophic defeat in 2014 comes across as self-absorbed, grandiose and ridiculous. That includes his famous apology for being a man, which seems to have been experienced as a seismic shock by other Labour MPs on the campaign trail (‘He did what?’). Ardern’s basic goodness makes the passages about Cunliffe even more devastating.
From 2017 on, the beats are familiar. There was her defining takedown of TV host Mark Richardson, whom she calls ‘the man who read the sports news’, soon after she became leader. Outraged by his commentary about employers deserving to know if women plan to have babies, she was ‘a hot ball of anger’ by the time she sat across from him in the studio. That moment was anticipated by an earlier and less successful one, when she angrily confronted some rude Victoria University students who were heckling Helen Clark. ‘Control your woman,’ one of them shouted at MP Steve Maharey, who was with Ardern.
Some other foreshadowing may seem a little clunky to some readers. When she writes about the success of the government’s M. bovis eradication strategy, she is also preparing readers for why we needed to eliminate rather than live with Covid-19. An early encounter with a conspiracy theorist while working in Phil Goff’s office anticipates a future world in which all the lonely, distressed, angry people could find each other and be manipulated by people who ‘played on their distress for their own gain’. Imagine that.
It’s sad that it remains impossible to be neutral about Ardern two and a half years after she abruptly left New Zealand politics. The idea of a ‘derangement syndrome’ was coined for George W. Bush – and has been applied to John Key and Donald Trump – but it fits Ardern better than any world leader. Something about her does indeed derange people; they literally go mad. You only need to read some of the comments on reviews of this book in the days after it was published, or even some of the reviews themselves, to see that syndrome in action.
Positions on her cut to the core of character. Praise her and you are seen as a sap who is easily tricked by spin and the politics of kindness; on the other side, there is the mob who drew Hitler moustaches, swastikas and nooses on pictures of Ardern, and who were inspired to dig up Parliament’s lawn, throw paving stones at police and burn down trees and a children’s slide, having been liberated from any kind of decency and restraint by the example of the crowd who stormed the US Capitol a little over a year earlier.
Will this book change the minds of the crazies? If they dare to read it, they won’t find a tyrant here. They will find someone who tried to do the right thing, but doubted herself – and still doubts herself. They will find someone who is earnest, but not completely. They will find someone who is not pious, but funny about herself and others. Sometimes she is funny in a classically understated, Kiwi way, as in her description of Murupara before Rogernomics: ‘By 1980, Murupara’s downtown was bustling with not one but two fish-and-chip shops.’
She is not entirely saintly. She can also have a dig when it’s appropriate, as in this fine passage about the days after the mosque shootings:
Someone had called me ‘New Zealand’s chief mourner’. At the time I wasn’t sure how I felt about this. Was I the chief mourner? And was that a good thing? I’d been trying to focus on the grief of those who’d been most affected. But a journalist had recently asked me if I cried at night when I went home. Of course I cried at home. On the night of the attack, I returned to Premier House, long after Neve had gone to sleep, I’d found Clarke waiting for me at the end of the hall, and I’d cried into his shoulder for what felt like an eternity. But I wasn’t going to tell that to Barry Soper of Newstalk ZB.
Beautifully done. By the way, that ‘someone’ was probably Masha Gessen in the New Yorker, who thought Ardern had ‘staged a revolution’ in the way she responded to the mosque attacks. The sad truth is that Americans get her more than we do.
A Different Kind of Power: A Memoir
by Jacinda Ardern
Penguin
ISBN: 9780593728697
Published: June 2025
Format: Hardcover, 352 pages
Philip Matthews
Philip Matthews is a journalist who lives in Christchurch. He won Best Reviewer at the Voyager Media Awards in 2022 and is the author of The Quiet Hero (Allen & Unwin, 2023), about the life and death of New Zealand aid worker Andrew Bagshaw in Ukraine.
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A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern
When Vulnerability Becomes Leadership's Greatest Strength
Genre:
MemoirA Different Kind of Power succeeds as both personal memoir and political manifesto. Ardern has created a work that is simultaneously intimate and universal, specific to New Zealand's context yet relevant to anyone grappling with questions of moral leadership in challenging times.
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Bookclb9 min.read
In an era where
political memoirs often read like carefully orchestrated victory laps, Jacinda Ardern’s A Different Kind of Power emerges as something genuinely unexpected: a raw, introspective examination of what it means to lead with humanity intact. This isn’t the sanitized account of a former world leader protecting their legacy—it’s the honest confession of someone who discovered that their greatest perceived weakness might actually be their most powerful tool.
The Architecture of Empathy
Ardern’s narrative architecture mirrors her approach to leadership: methodical, thoughtful, and surprisingly vulnerable. “A Different Kind of Power” traces her journey from a car-sick four-year-old in the back of a Toyota Corona to becoming the world’s youngest female head of government at thirty-seven. But this isn’t a simple rags-to-riches political tale. Instead, Ardern constructs her story like a series of concentric circles, each chapter adding depth to our understanding of how a “thin-skinned” Mormon girl from small-town New Zealand came to embody a new paradigm of leadership.
The book’s strength lies in its willingness to linger in uncomfortable moments. Ardern doesn’t rush past her struggles with faith, her fertility challenges, or her moments of crushing self-doubt. She inhabits these experiences fully, allowing readers to understand how they shaped her approach to governance. When she describes leaving the Mormon church—something that “felt like home”—we witness the kind of moral courage that would later define her political career.
Small-Town Foundations, Global Implications
The early chapters set in Murupara are particularly compelling. Ardern paints this forestry town with the careful brushstrokes of someone who understood, even as a child, that she was witnessing something profound about inequality and community resilience. Her father’s approach to policing—believing that “you can’t arrest your way out of everything”—becomes a lens through which we can view Ardern’s later policies on social justice and community healing.
These formative experiences in a predominantly Māori community, where her family was both integral to and separate from the social fabric, created what she calls her political awakening. It’s here that Ardern learned to navigate being simultaneously insider and outsider—a skill that would serve her well in navigating
New Zealand’s complex cultural landscape as Prime Minister.
The Paradox of Sensitivity in Power
Perhaps the memoir’s most fascinating thread is Ardern’s lifelong struggle with what she perceived as her “tragic flaw”—her sensitivity. Throughout the book, she wrestles with the conventional wisdom that effective leaders must develop thick skin. Her journey toward recognizing sensitivity as strength rather than weakness becomes the book’s central theme and its most valuable insight.
This reframing reaches its crescendo in her handling of the Christchurch mosque attacks. Ardern’s decision to wear a hijab and declare “they are us” wasn’t political calculation—it was instinctive empathy. Her detailed account of meeting with Imam Lateef Zikrullah Alabi, whose robes were still stained with blood, demonstrates how vulnerability can create space for healing that traditional political responses cannot.
Crisis Leadership Through a Human Lens
The book’s treatment of the COVID-19 pandemic offers perhaps the most detailed insider account of democratic crisis management available. Ardern reveals the impossible mathematics of leadership during uncertainty: making decisions with incomplete information while bearing responsibility for millions of lives. Her approach—prioritizing health outcomes over economic considerations—wasn’t just policy; it was a reflection of her core belief that government exists to protect its most vulnerable citizens.
Her description of working from home during lockdown, with toddler Neve creating chaos in the background of Zoom calls, perfectly encapsulates the memoir’s central tension: how do you balance being fully human with being fully present as a leader?
The Weight of Representation
One of the book’s most powerful sections deals with the burden of being “firsts”—first female leader to give birth in office, youngest female head of government. Ardern doesn’t shy away from the additional pressures these distinctions created. Her midnight struggles with the Australian Women’s Weekly Birthday Cake Book, determined to prove she could be both Prime Minister and proper mum, reveal the impossible standards society places on women in leadership.
The memoir’s treatment of sexism is particularly nuanced. Rather than focusing on overt discrimination, Ardern explores the subtler ways gender shaped her experience—from media questions about her reproductive plans to the different standards by which her emotional responses were judged.
Literary Craft and Political Insight
Ardern’s background as a speechwriter serves her well as a memoirist. Her prose is clear and engaging, with moments of genuine literary beauty. Her description of the violin that traveled from Scotland to New Zealand with her great-grandmother becomes a metaphor for the stories we carry forward. The recurring image of her father’s police work—listening before acting—provides a throughline that connects her childhood observations to her governing philosophy.
The book excels in its specificity. Rather than broad proclamations about leadership, Ardern offers granular details: the feel of car sickness on childhood road trips, the weight of a bulletproof vest during the Christchurch response, the particular exhaustion of making life-and-death decisions while sleep-deprived.
The Decision to Leave: Leadership’s Ultimate Act
The book’s final act—Ardern’s decision to resign as Prime Minister—provides its most complex and controversial content. Her explanation that her “tank was empty” has drawn criticism from some quarters, but the memoir reveals this decision as perhaps her most profound act of leadership. By stepping aside when she could no longer give her best, Ardern demonstrated a kind of political integrity rarely seen in contemporary democracy.
Her conversation with five-year-old Neve, who tells her “we should never give up,” provides the book’s most heartbreaking moment. It’s a reminder that even leaders who prioritize family face impossible choices about what they owe to their children versus what they owe to their country.
Critical Reflections and Limitations
While A Different Kind of Power succeeds as both memoir and leadership meditation, it occasionally suffers from a certain earnestness that borders on self-righteousness. Ardern’s commitment to empathetic leadership is admirable, but the book sometimes presents this approach as unquestionably superior without fully grappling with its limitations or failures.
The memoir also tends to gloss over some of the more controversial aspects of her tenure, including housing affordability crises and immigration policies that drew criticism from human rights advocates. While this is understandable in a personal memoir, it sometimes makes the book feel incomplete as a historical record.
Additionally, Ardern’s writing occasionally lapses into political speak, particularly when discussing policy achievements. These sections lack the emotional honesty that makes the personal passages so compelling.
A New Template for Political Leadership
Despite these limitations, A Different Kind of Power succeeds in its larger ambition: redefining what effective leadership can look like. Ardern’s model—leading with empathy, acknowledging uncertainty, prioritizing long-term wellbeing over short-term political gain—offers a template for governance that feels both revolutionary and deeply traditional.
Her approach to the Christchurch attacks and COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates that “soft” qualities like compassion and humility can produce “hard” results like social cohesion and public health outcomes. This isn’t touchy-feely leadership; it’s strategically empathetic governance.
Global Resonance in Troubled Times
The memoir arrives at a moment when democracies worldwide are grappling with declining trust in institutions and rising polarization. Ardern’s model of leadership—transparent about uncertainty, willing to admit mistakes, comfortable with showing emotion—offers an alternative to the strongman politics that has dominated recent global discourse.
Her emphasis on kindness as a political virtue feels particularly relevant as societies struggle with division and animosity. The book makes a compelling case that kindness isn’t weakness—it’s the foundation for building the social trust that effective governance requires.
Literary Merit and Emotional Honesty
As a work of literature, the memoir succeeds through its commitment to emotional honesty. Ardern’s willingness to share her struggles with fertility, faith, and self-doubt creates intimate moments that transcend politics. Her description of crying into her partner’s shoulder after the Christchurch attacks, or her panic about making the perfect birthday cake for Neve, reveals the human cost of public service.
The book’s structure, moving between personal reflection and policy discussion, creates a rhythm that mirrors the actual experience of leadership—the constant shift between intimate human moments and weighty public responsibilities.
Comparative Context: A Different Kind of Political Memoir
A Different Kind of Power stands apart from other recent political memoirs through its willingness to examine failure and uncertainty. Unlike books that seek to justify every decision, Ardern’s memoir acknowledges moments of doubt and paths not taken. This honesty makes her successes more meaningful and her perspective more trustworthy.
The book joins a small but growing canon of memoirs that prioritize emotional intelligence over political calculation. It shares DNA with works like Kamala Harris’
The Truths We Hold or Pramila Jayapal’s Use the Power You Have and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s approach to political communication—leaders who refuse to separate their humanity from their public service.
Lessons for Future Leaders
The memoir’s most valuable contribution may be its practical insights for aspiring leaders. Ardern’s emphasis on building diverse teams, listening before speaking, and maintaining perspective during crisis offers a masterclass in emotional intelligence applied to governance.
Her approach to decision-making—gathering multiple perspectives, acknowledging uncertainty, communicating clearly about trade-offs—provides a template for leadership in complex, uncertain environments. These lessons extend far beyond politics to any context requiring moral leadership.
Recommended Reading for Political Leadership
For readers interested in similar explorations of empathetic leadership, several works complement Ardern’s memoir:The Power of Moments by Chip Heath and Dan Heath – explores how leaders can create defining moments
Daring Greatly by Brené Brown – examines vulnerability as a leadership strength
Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin – Lincoln’s approach to inclusive leadership
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt – understanding moral psychology in governance
Option B by Sheryl Sandberg – resilience and leadership through adversity
Final Verdict: A Necessary Voice for Our Times
A Different Kind of Power succeeds as both personal memoir and political manifesto. Ardern has created a work that is simultaneously intimate and universal, specific to New Zealand’s context yet relevant to anyone grappling with questions of moral leadership in challenging times.
The book’s greatest achievement is demonstrating that vulnerability and strength are not opposing forces but complementary aspects of effective leadership. In an era of performative toughness and manufactured certainty, Ardern’s willingness to admit uncertainty and show emotion feels revolutionary.
While the memoir occasionally suffers from its earnestness and glosses over some controversial aspects of her tenure, it ultimately succeeds in its larger mission: expanding our understanding of what leadership can be. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of democratic governance and the possibility that politics might yet be a force for healing rather than division.
Ardern has given us not just a memoir but a meditation on power’s true purpose: not to aggrandize the leader but to serve the led. In our fractured political moment, this message feels both timely and timeless—a reminder that the different kind of power Ardern practiced might just be the kind our world desperately needs.
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