At Sydney Opera House, Ardern urges rebuilding trust through financial security

Former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern has told Australian politicians they must move away from binary thinking and the language of violence, and rebuild trust by building financial security in a time of deep insecurity. She delivered the message on Sunday from the stage of the Sydney Opera House.

Speaking in a forum with author Anna Funder, Ardern said politicians were exacerbating the problem of polarisation within society and needed to be better. The forum's theme was whether we can disagree without becoming divided.

She said: 'We have a responsibility not to engage in binary thinking, not to engage in the language of violence, but to rebuild trust by building financial security in a time of deep insecurity.'

Ardern added: 'There are things we could be doing but, right now, we're making it worse, not better.'

In her account, people across the world have felt an increasing sense of insecurity over the past few decades as globalisation took hold, and they began attacking institutions like the World Trade Organization. Politicians offered proposals such as Brexit in response, saying 'here's what you blame' — and that paved the way for the rise of leaders like Donald Trump, she said.

The 46-year-old now calls Sydney home. She moved to Australia earlier this year, purchased a house on the northern beaches in September, and last week revealed she would be lecturing and mentoring at the University of Sydney.

Sunday's talk was advertised as bringing together 'two of the world's leading thinkers.'

On polarisation, Ardern said people now hold different opinions so deeply that each believes they alone hold a moral clarity the other side does not. 'Therefore, you couldn't possibly engage with them anymore,' she said, adding that this has made the discourse needed to solve problems much more difficult.

The talk came a fortnight after the alleged attack on independent MP Helen Haines. Ardern did not mention the incident explicitly but stressed that politicians and leaders needed to be aware of the tone they set.

Social media had made it more difficult for people to change their views, she said, because opinions are recorded and held in time — while a healthy democracy depends on the ability to debate and shift views based on new evidence or information.

When she entered politics in 2008, Ardern was not only the youngest sitting MP in the New Zealand parliament, but also the first to enter with an existing social media account. At the time, many politicians — including Ardern — were excited to use social media to communicate directly with voters.

'I was so naive not to think about the fact that that meant the manipulation of information,' she said.

Her view of the online world changed on 15 March 2019, the day of the Christchurch mosque shootings. The attacker, she said, had been radicalised on YouTube and broadcast the attack on Facebook to incite violence among other white supremacists. 'That's when I fully understood the weaponisation,' she said.

Mistrust has been building for years and is now playing out in voters' sense of grievance and insularity, Ardern said, adding that politicians had not been able to address it. At every point where mistrust spiked, there was disruption in what people were feeling and a failure of political response. 'We've not fixed the core of the problem; in fact, we've then weaponised it with blame and distrust of others. We have not just a crisis of trust; we have a crisis of leadership.'

Ardern suggested empathy was part of the solution. 'What empathy brings to politics is a thing that we're missing now. It brings humility, it brings curiosity,' she said. 'If we had more humility in politics — what a difference that would make.'