Listener Editor: Why the Jacinda Ardern doco puts us to shame

Prime Minister is Jacinda Ardern’s story from 2017, when she was Labour’s deputy leader, through to her resignation from the leadership in early 2023, and a little beyond. Thanks to the handy camera and film-making skills of her partner-to-husband, Clarke Gayford, the viewer is close to the subject as history unfolds. We get the good (Ardern’s pregnancy, Neve’s birth, the wins of her first term) the bad (the Christchurch massacre, the pandemic descending, Whakaari White Island) and the ugly (the parliamentary protests, creepy people protesting at Gayford’s parents’ home, staring in the windows as children play).

Due to Gayford’s presence with a camera, you are there in “the room where it happens” as the musical Hamilton put it, power-adjacent to the conversations in Ardern’s office, conference rooms, corridors, hotel rooms, living rooms and often, in the couple’s bedroom. She’s not always up for his questions: “I am not doing this now,” she says with exasperation to another go by Gayford to get her to unload about the day’s events.

So, there we are in their own home in Auckland (not flash but friendly), the guest room at the in-laws’ beach house (very coastal chic) and at Premier House, for which there are few words to describe its magnitude of awfulness. As far as houses go, it’s a national embarrassment – it’s surprising no subtitle pops up to say, “The lamps came with the place, we did not choose them,” to distance Ardern and Gayford from the décor.

Recommissioned by the Crown in 1990 as the official residence for the prime minister when in Wellington – from 1977, Vogel House in Lower Hutt was the stately home away from home – the house is charming from the outside. Built in the 1840s and purchased by the crown in 1865, Premier House has been added to during the years but retains enough of its grand villa bones to be scheduled as a Category 1 Historic Place by Heritage NZ. It’s housed and hosted the great and good during the decades and, for an extended period reaching into the 1970s, was a training school for dental nurses.

Many a Wellington child of that time will attest to shuddering just thinking about 260 Tinakori Rd. The practising dental nurses may have packed up their drills and moved on, but the nightmares persist. Rather the ghosts of dental nurses past, the place is more likely to be haunted by the spectre of an elderly lady bearing a yardstick, a bolt of maroon fabric and a book called Get the Look: British country houses on a budget. For that is the style that informs everything from the front door on.

The house has had money reluctantly assigned to its upkeep during the decades. But it would seem that no one’s had the bottle to tackle the interiors, which are frozen in a Victoriana-meets-1990-time warp, a dated drabness more akin to a budget Cotswolds hotel than a house of state. And of course government funds should largely be assigned to matters of critical need to keep the population healthy, educated and safe. But we also need to maintain the built assets we have, like this old house.

The current Prime Minister dragged his Florsheim’s about moving in there. Christopher Luxon cited “maintenance issues” at Premier House as a reason to stay in his own capital apartment. Perhaps that was a way of saying, “I cannot make a Marmite sandwich in that kitchen.”

The house has to function as both a private home and a public asset: if there’s no PM living in (Wellington-residing PMs are not able to move in) then it’s used for state events. Which is even more mortifying: we willingly show visitors this stuff.

There can be a stylish marriage of heritage and contemporary style, but as it is now, this is Windsor Castle Lite: stuffed wingback chairs, tizzy lampshades, cabriole legs and mahogany cabinets. There’s a sprinkling of “modern”, if we can refer to the décor of the late 1980s that way. All together it’s horribly tired, very dated and now, everyone with a Netflix account gets to know about it. As the kids would say, so cringe.