📍Morrinsville, Waikato, New Zealand
1990 – 1998“Jacinda Ardern spent her early childhood in Murupara, a struggling timber town in the eastern Bay of Plenty, where her father, Ross, was the local police officer. She has said that seeing children without shoes or enough to eat there was what first made her think about fairness. Around 1990 the family moved to Morrinsville, a dairy town in the Waikato, where her father again served as a police officer and her mother, Laurell, worked as a school catering assistant. Morrinsville was a close, rural community of farms, sports clubs and churches, and the Arderns were active members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Jacinda attended Morrinsville College, where she was the student representative on the board of trustees and campaigned to allow girls to wear trousers to school. Her first job was at the local fish and chip shop, the Golden Kiwi. In her teens her aunt Marie, a longtime Labour Party member, recruited her to help with an election campaign, and she discovered she enjoyed politics. She went on to study communications at the University of Waikato, worked for Helen Clark and in London, and entered Parliament in 2008. In 2017, at thirty-seven, she became New Zealand's prime minister, and she led the country through the Christchurch mosque attacks, the Whakaari eruption and the COVID-19 pandemic with a style she called kindness. She has often spoken of the small-town values of Morrinsville and Murupara, of community and of looking after one another, as the foundation of her politics.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today