Prime
A nice piece of news for a change. Reirani Kiri Taurima on Facebook:
This is The Prime Minister Of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern. She’s 37. She’s the youngest head of government in the world. She’s also the first western woman to give birth while in power. 2 days after the baby was born – with midwives, standard in NZ hospitals – she introduced her to the country during a press conference on the nightly news. It was really lovely. She named her Neve Te Aroha. Te Aroha means “The Love” in Maori. It represents ALL the names that were submitted (upon her request) from various tribes throughout the country, and was her attempt at capturing them all.
This is her and her partner, no, he’s NOT her husband (gasp!), walking to the press conference. He’s TV fishing show Host Clarke Gayford, and HE will be staying at home with baby Neve when his lady goes back to running the country in 6 weeks. Clarke sports a snazzy sweater he picked up at the op-shop (second-hand store) in Gisborne, and thinks its just kinda logical that he gives up his day job to stay home and look after the baby.
A week after the birth on July 1st Jacinda introduced a $5billion Families Package that she’d drafted on the floor of her friends house in Hastings – before her pregnancy. It’s based on the knowledge that the first few years of a babies life are the most important. The package gives an extra $75 a week to low-income families with new babies, and an extra $700 to families for winter heating costs as well (it’s cold as hell down there in the winter). It also increases the Paid Leave for all new parents from 20 weeks to 22 weeks. She announced the details via Facebook live, from her couch, right after she’d finished breastfeeding the baby. Because Kiwis. Some of the most down-to-earth, no-drama-having, just-do-it kind of people you’ll ever meet.
And because Women. We really do know how to lead, and to do it well.
Welcome to the world Neve Te Aroha.
<3
The reactionaries hate her with that special passion they reserve for young, independent, capable women. Since she became Prime Minister they’ve used every belittling, derogatory and outright offensive turn of phrase you can imagine. Someone even started spreading a rumour about Clarke that resulted in the Police taking the extraordinary step of releasing a statement that he was not, and never had been, subject of any complaint or investigation. There are some nasty people out there. Personally, I have a lot of time for both Jacinda and Clarke.
Rob
They certainly do. I noticed the familiar sentiment that, somehow, Ardern and her government are not legitimate. Gillard got the same treatment her in Oz.
Tony Blair had a baby while in office. Nobody seemed to care, it was assumed that his wife would suspend her – much more lucrative – career to look after it. She probably did, I don’t know, nobody really talked about it.
But when a woman takes a few hours off to have a baby, all sorts of people lose their minds.
It’s great that there’s a lot of positive sentiment but still fucked up that there needs to be.
Latsot, you’re right of course. Jacinda has been at pains to repeatedly say that she is not the first woman to do this. One of the least awful behaviours displayed by many of the haters has been to maintain initially that she couldn’t possibly be an effective Prime Minister while pregnant the, when it became clear that she could, to bomb every article around the birth, babies name etc, with chants of ‘who cares, she hasn’t done anything special, don’t want to hear about it’. Then of course they swap back to ‘she couldn’t possibly manage to be a mother and a Prime Minister’. It’s deeply pathetic behaviour, made unpleasant by the stark double standard compared to how the same commentators treated the previous male conservative Prime Ministers. Oh well. I take pride iliving in a country where it is possible for most of the population to take pride and pleasure in having an unwed pregnant Prime Minister, or at least to tak that in stride. It’s also a reality check to see the significant plurality that have lost their minds and behaved so horribly over it.
Yeah, it’s wonderful to see her rise above all that by, you know, just having a baby and doing her job like billions of other women. It’s horrible that it has to be seen as a thing and especially that it has to be seen as a thing because misogyny is just right up there in everyone’s heads.
This should be an opportunity for the media to say “yeah, she has a baby, so what?” but they seem mostly to be saying “yeah, she has a baby, therefore”.