Jacinda Ardern gets standing ovation as she delivers farewell speech to New Zealand parliament

Jacinda Ardern was given a standing ovation as she delivered her farewell speech to the New Zealand parliament.

Ms Ardern stepped down as New Zealand’s leader in January, telling the country: “I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice. It is that simple.”

She offered to stay on as a politician though until April, to prevent a special election from being held before the ones planned in October. Since stepping down, she has been replaced as prime minister by Chris Hipkins.

In her final speech an MP, Ms Ardern, wearing a traditional Maori cloak called a Korowai, talked about how she navigated the pandemic and the response to a mass shooting during her five-year term as prime minister.

“A domestic terror attack. A volcanic eruption. A pandemic. A series of events where I found myself in people’s lives during their most grief-stricken or traumatic moments,” she said. “Their stories and faces remain etched in my mind, and likely will forever.”

She also told a number of anecdotes, including about a time a European leader admired the hair of her chief of staff, leading to them fluffing it like a hairdresser – with Ms Ardern joking the hairstyle helped secure her a free trade deal.

Among the jokes, she also urged her now former colleagues to take the politics out of climate change, saying: “There will always be policy differences, but beneath that, we have what we need to make the progress we must.”

Elsewhere in her 35-minute speech, she talked about her IVF journey and becoming only the second-ever global leader to give birth while in office.

Ms Ardern also talked about her approach to the COVID-19 pandemic, saying she used a scientific method, adding New Zealand fared among the best-developed nations in the world when it came to excess mortality.

She also regaled the time she tried to talk down a lone protester over a conspiracy theory, telling parliament: “But after many of these same experiences, and seeing the rage that often sat behind these conspiracies, I had to accept I was wrong,” she said. “I could not single-handedly pull someone out of a rabbit hole.”

After her speech, her fellow MPs from across the political spectrum gave Ms Ardern a standing ovation, followed by renditions of indigenous Maori songs.

Ms Arden will begin a new, unpaid, role later this month, combatting online extremism for the Christchurch Call – an initiative she began in 2019 with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, in the wake of the shooting in the city that killed 51 people.

She will also join the board of the Earthshot Prize – Prince William’s environmental charity.

In her speech, she told MPs she came to be the country’s leader through a surprising chain of events, and said she could not control how others defined her tenure.

But she added: “You can be anxious, sensitive, kind and wear your heart on your sleeve.

“You can be a mother, or not, you can be an ex-Mormon, or not, you can be a nerd, a crier, a hugger, you can be all of these things, and not only can you be here, you can lead, just like me.”

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