Former prime minister Jacinda Ardern and her onetime deputy, Grant Robertson, spoke about their close friendship at a Dunedin event. Tara Ward was there.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI cried last night in Wellington, so it\u2019s only fair to have a cry here too,\u201d Dame Jacinda Ardern said last night, just moments after being welcomed onto the stage of Dunedin\u2019s Regent Theatre. The sold-out audience had just given Ardern and her close friend and former political colleague Grant Robertson a long and emphatic round of applause, cheering as they sat down together on a brown leather couch in the middle of the stage. The city of Dunedin had always been a warm place to visit, Sydney-based Ardern told the crowd, and she was happy to be back home.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ardern was in \u014ctepoti to promote her autobiography A Different Kind of Power, and had teamed up for a special one-off conversation with \u201cSouth Dunedin boy\u201d Robertson, whose autobiography Anything Could Happen was also published last year. Hosted by Stacey Morrison (Te Arawa, Ng\u0101i Tahu), the event was presented by Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival, and was Ardern\u2019s only South Island stop in her national book tour.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The night was billed as a chat between two old mates, but Ardern and Robertson aren\u2019t just friends. They\u2019re also the former Labour prime minister and deputy prime minister who led New Zealand through one of its most tumultuous periods, which included the Covid-19 pandemic, the Christchurch mosque shootings and the Whakaari disaster. The crowd was a friendly one, but security for the event served as a reminder that their political era still has strong critics. There was a visible police presence, bag searches, and metal detecting wands in use to scan ticket holders. As the crowd queued to get through the security check, three protestors stood silently on the Octagon footpath, holding signs that read \u201cWef puppets release Pfizer contracts\u201d.<\/p>\n
Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson (Photo: Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival)<\/p>\n
Inside the theatre, however, there was a lot of love. Ardern and Robertson began by discussing the nice things they\u2019d said about each other in their books, with Robertson saying his proudest moment was when Ardern asked him to be her wedding celebrant (the ceremony was delayed by an hour, thanks to a Daily Mail helicopter flying overhead). They shared colourful insights into the early days of their friendship, when they were both advisors to then-prime minister Helen Clark and shared an office where Robertson swore a lot and left piles of paper strewn across the floor and Ardern was tidy and preferred low light.\u00a0<\/p>\n