As trust in authorities falls, Ardern keeps faith

The PM has emphasised collective action rather than top-down rules. Studies show the tactic is – so far – paying off

- Tess McClure CHRISTCHURCH

In locked-down New Zealand, life orbits around the 1pm briefing. The director-general of health – frequently alongside the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern – takes the stage behind a socially distanced podium and updates the country.

In the middle of a Covid outbreak, as the country is , those briefings occur almost every weekday. They are so clockwork-regular, so predictable in their essential structure, that certain sentences have become memes: “Kia ora koutou katoa [Hello everyone]. There are X cases of Covid-19 in the community,” each begins. After the last outbreak, media outlet The Spinoff spliced together the director-general of health saying it 44 times.

“It became a cultural phenomenon,” science communication expert Rebecca Priestley said. “We were getting information directly from the prime minister and from the director-general of health and other representatives in a way that’s quite unusual.”