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Early life and start in politics

Ardern becomes party leader.

• The 2017 election
• Forming a coalition government
• The March 2019 mosque attacks in Greater Christchurch
• Whakaari/White Island tragedy, coronavirus pandemic response, and election to a second term
• The road to resignation

How did Jacinda Ardern become famous?

Where did jacinda ardern grow up.

Jacinda Ardern

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• Jacinda Ardern - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
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The charismatic Jacinda Ardern gained fame by leading a struggling New Zealand Labour Party to a surprising victory in the 2017 parliamentary election. She earned a reputation as a “rock star” politician on the way to becoming New Zealand ’s youngest prime minister in more than 150 years at age 37. She resigned in January 2023, saying “I no longer have enough in the tank.”

Jacinda Ardern, the second of two daughters raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , spent her first years in Murupara, New Zealand , a small town known as a centre of Māori gang activity. Later, her father—a law enforcement officer who became the national government’s high commissioner to Niue —moved his family to Morrinsville, southeast of Auckland .

Where did Jacinda Ardern go to school?

Jacinda Ardern received her primary and secondary education at schools in Morrinsville, southeast of Auckland on New Zealand ’s North Island . She matriculated at the University of Waikato in Hamilton (also on North Island) in 1999, and she received a bachelor of arts degree in communication studies in 2001.

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Jacinda Ardern (born July 26, 1980, Hamilton , New Zealand) is a New Zealand politician who in August 2017 became leader of the New Zealand Labour Party and then in October 2017, at age 37, became the country’s youngest prime minister in more than 150 years. She resigned as prime minister in January 2023.

The second of two daughters born to a Mormon family, Ardern spent her first years in Murupara, a small town best known as a centre of Māori gang activity, where seeing “children without shoes on their feet or anything to eat for lunch” inspired her to eventually enter politics. Her father—a career law-enforcement officer who later (2014) became the New Zealand government’s high commissioner to the island of Niue —moved his family to Morrinsville, southeast of Auckland on New Zealand’s North Island , where Ardern attended primary and secondary school. She matriculated to the University of Waikato in 1999.

Even before earning a bachelor’s degree in Communication Studies (2001), Ardern began her association with the Labour Party. In 1999, at age 17, she joined the party and, with the help of an aunt, became involved in the reelection campaign of Harry Duynhoven, a Labour member of parliament (MP) in the New Plymouth district. Following graduation, Ardern became a researcher for another Labour MP, Phil Goff. That experience would lead to a position on the staff of Prime Minister Helen Clark , the second woman to hold New Zealand’s highest office and Ardern’s political hero and mentor .

In 2005 Ardern embarked on an “overseas experience,” an extended—usually working—trip to Britain, which is a traditional rite of passage for the children of New Zealand’s middle and upper class. Instead of labouring in a London pub or warehouse and then touring the Continent, however, Ardern worked for two and a half years in the cabinet office of British Prime Minister Tony Blair , serving as an associate director for Better Regulation Executive with the primary responsibility of improving the ways in which local authorities interact with small businesses. In 2007 she was elected president of the International Union of Socialist Youth (IUSY), a position that took her to destinations such as Algeria, China, India, Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon.

In 2008 Ardern was chosen as Labour’s candidate for MP of the Waikato district, a seat that historically had been beyond the party’s reach and that Ardern lost by some 13,000 votes. Nevertheless, she entered parliament as a list candidate. New Zealand’s mixed member proportional (MMP) election system allows candidates who run for a district seat also to be on a party’s list of candidates, from which 49 MPs are chosen in proportion to the number of votes received by their parties. At age 28 Ardern entered the House of Representatives as its youngest member. In her maiden speech she called for the introduction of compulsory instruction in the Māori language in New Zealand schools and she castigated the New Zealand government for what she characterized as its “shameful” response to climate change . In addition to being named Labour’s spokesperson for Youth Affairs, Ardern was appointed to the Regulations Review and the Justice and Electoral select committees.

In 2011 she ran for the seat representing Auckland Central that was held by another of New Zealand politics’ brightest young stars, Nikki Kaye of the New Zealand National Party , who was just five months older than Ardern. Kaye narrowly (717 votes) won the race, dubbed the “Battle of the Babes,” but once again Ardern returned to parliament as a well-placed list candidate. Ardern’s support for David Shearer in his successful quest for Labour leadership won her a high profile assignment as Social Development spokesperson. In 2014 Ardern once again faced off with Kaye for the Auckland Central seat, this time losing by only 600 votes. Nonetheless, ensconced at the number five position on Labour’s list, Ardern easily returned to parliament. Labour leader Andrew Little expanded her portfolio to include positions as spokesperson for Arts, Culture , and Heritage, Children, Justice, and Small Business.

As Ardern’s political profile increased in prominence, the details of her personality and personal life became better known. Opposed to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ stand on homosexuality and same-sex marriage , Ardern became a lapsed Mormon. She gained notoriety by performing as a disc jockey . She was also involved in a romantic relationship with broadcast personality Clarke Gayford, who in 2016 became the host of Fish of the Day , a part-fishing, part-travel television program that took him to exotic island locales throughout the Pacific. Ardern bridled at media attention to her physical attractiveness, characterized herself as an “acceptable nerd,” and described her approach to life as “relentlessly positive.”

In 2017 Ardern registered a landslide victory in the parliamentary by-election for the vacant seat representing the solidly Labour district of Mount Albert in Auckland. When Labour’s deputy leader, Annette King, announced her resignation, Ardern was unanimously elected as her replacement. Meanwhile, as the general parliamentary election scheduled for September 2017 approached, Labour’s showing in preference polling was abysmal . Even after some nine consecutive years with the National Party in power, there was seemingly little interest among voters in trying Labour Party rule. A pair of polls in July found Labour Party support to be less than 25 percent—some 6 percent worse than the party’s standing in a June polling. With fewer than two months left before the election, Little stepped down as leader but not before securing Ardern’s pledge to stand as his replacement (reportedly, she refused seven times before agreeing). Running unopposed, Ardern was elected leader on August 1.

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Rutherford, Ernest

Story: rutherford, ernest, page 1: biography.

Ernest Rutherford

Ernest Rutherford (right) and Hans Geiger

Manchester University physical and electro-technical laboratories staff, 1910

Lord Rutherford discussing research into nuclear fission

1871–1937

This biography, written by John Campbell, was first published in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography in 1996. It was updated in January, 2002 .

Ernest Rutherford was born at Spring Grove in rural Nelson, New Zealand, on 30 August 1871, the fourth child of 12 born to James Rutherford, a mechanic, and his wife, Martha Thompson, who had been the schoolteacher at Spring Grove. He was officially but mistakenly registered as Earnest; in the family he was called Ern. When he was five they moved to a small farm near the new railhead at Foxhill, where he attended Foxhill School.

In 1883, when Ern was 11 years old, his father moved the family to Havelock, at the head of the Marlborough Sounds, to be nearer to the flax mill he was now operating by the Ruapaka Stream. Martha Rutherford ensured that all her children were well prepared for school and all received good educations. In 1887 Ernest won, on his second attempt, the Marlborough Education Board scholarship to Nelson College.

Rutherford boarded at Nelson College from 1887 to 1889. In 1889 he was head boy, played in the rugby team and, again on his second attempt, won one of the 10 scholarships available nationally to assist attendance at a college of the University of New Zealand. From 1890 to 1894 he attended Canterbury College in Christchurch. There he played rugby and participated in the activities of the Dialectic Society (a student debating society) and the Science Society. In 1893 he graduated BA in pure mathematics and Latin (both compulsory), applied mathematics, English, French and physics.

Rutherford's mathematical ability won him the one Senior Scholarship in mathematics available in New Zealand. This allowed him to return for a further (honours) year during which he took both mathematics and physics, and was influenced by Professor Alexander Bickerton . The physics course required students to undertake an original investigation; Rutherford elected to extend an undergraduate experiment in order to determine if iron is magnetic at very high frequencies of magnetising current. He invented two devices: a simple mechanism for switching two electrical circuits with a time interval between them which could be adjusted to be as short as one-hundred-thousandth of a second, and a detector of very fast current pulses. By the end of 1893 he was an accomplished researcher (his first research was published in his second scientific paper in 1895). In 1893 Rutherford obtained an MA with double first-class honours in mathematics and mathematical physics and in physical science (electricity and magnetism). At this time he boarded with a widow, Mary Newton, who was active in the suffrage movement.

In 1894 Rutherford returned to Canterbury College where he took geology and chemistry for a BSc degree, awarded in 1895. For the research work required of a candidate for an 1851 Exhibition scholarship, he extended his researches of the previous year to even higher frequencies using the damped oscillatory current obtained from discharging a Leyden jar (an electrical capacitor), either alone or via a Hertzian oscillator. He showed that a steel needle surrounded by a loop in the discharge circuit was indeed magnetised for frequencies as high as 500 million per second, and by slowly dissolving the needle in acid he showed that only a very thin surface layer of the needle was magnetised. This work was reported in his first published paper in 1894.

Rutherford was a not particularly successful relieving teacher at Christchurch Boys' High School for a few weeks late in 1894. Having failed for the third time to obtain a permanent job as a schoolteacher he looked to other avenues. He submitted his work of 1893 and 1894 to the University of New Zealand in support of his application for the biennial 1851 scholarship. There were two candidates and the university's examiners in England recommended that James Maclaurin of Auckland University College be nominated. Maclaurin could not agree to the new conditions of the scholarship, which was then awarded to Rutherford.

Ernest Rutherford left New Zealand in 1895 as a highly skilled 23-year-old who held three degrees from the University of New Zealand and had a reputation as an outstanding researcher and innovator working at the forefront of electrical technology. He chose to work with Professor J. J. Thomson of the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory; he was the first non-Cambridge graduate to become one of its research students. Rutherford adapted his detector of very fast transient currents for use as a frequency meter, and used it to measure the dielectric properties of electrical insulators. To compare its sensitivity as a detector of electromagnetic waves against that of the standard detector of the time, the coherer, he mounted his detector in the receiving circuit of a Hertzian oscillator–receiver unit and found, as had others before him, that he could detect electromagnetic waves over a few metres even when there was a brick wall between the two circuits.

Rutherford was encouraged in his work by Sir Robert Ball, who had been scientific adviser to the body maintaining lighthouses on the Irish coastline; he wished to solve the difficult problem of a ship's inability to detect a lighthouse in fog. Sensing fame and fortune, Rutherford increased the sensitivity of his apparatus until he could detect electromagnetic waves over a distance of several hundred metres. However, Thomson, who was soon to be the first to discover an object smaller than an atom (the electron), quickly realised that Rutherford was a researcher of exceptional ability and invited him to join in a study of the electrical conduction of gases. The commercial development of wireless telegraphy was thus left for Guglielmo Marconi.

Rutherford developed several ingenious techniques to study the mechanism whereby normally insulating gases become electrical conductors when a high voltage is applied across them. When X-rays were discovered a few months later he used them to initiate electrical conduction in gases. He repeated this with rays from radioactive atoms when they were discovered in 1896, but his interest soon switched to understanding radioactivity itself. In 1898 he discovered that two quite separate types of emissions come from radioactive atoms and he named them alpha and beta rays. Beta rays were soon shown to be high-speed electrons.

In 1898 Rutherford accepted a professorship at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. In the well-equipped laboratories there Rutherford, with the later help of a young chemist, Frederick Soddy, unravelled the mysteries of radioactivity, showing that some heavy atoms spontaneously decay into slightly lighter, and chemically different, atoms. This discovery of the natural transmutation of elements first brought him to world attention. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1900 and of London in 1903. His first book, Radioactivity , was published in 1904; others on the same subject followed in 1908 and 1913. In 1908 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his investigations into the disintegration of elements and the chemistry of radioactive substances.

On realising that lead was the final decay product of uranium, Rutherford proposed that a measure of their relative proportions and the rate of decay of uranium atoms would allow minerals to be dated. Subsequently, this technique placed an acceptable lower limit on the age of the formation of the earth. Radioactive dating of geological samples is an important part of modern geology.

Rutherford had returned to New Zealand in 1900 to marry Mary Georgina (known as May) Newton, the daughter of his landlady in Christchurch. They were married at Christchurch on 28 June 1900; their only child, Eileen, was born in 1901. The Rutherfords visited New Zealand in 1905 in order to renew ties with their families. In 1907 Ernest was attracted to Victoria University of Manchester where he would be nearer the main centres of science. There he showed convincingly what he had long suspected: that the alpha particle was a helium atom stripped of its electrons. He and an assistant, Hans Geiger, developed the electrical method of detecting single particles emitted by radioactive atoms using a device which evolved into the Geiger–Müller tube.

While at McGill Rutherford had noted that a narrow beam of alpha particles became fuzzy on passing through a thin sheet of mica, so he offered to a young student, Ernest Marsden , the project of measuring the relative numbers of alpha particles as a function of scattering angle. Marsden found that some alpha rays even scattered directly backwards from a gold film. It was, as a surprised Rutherford stated, as if one had fired a large naval shell at a piece of paper and it had bounced back. In 1911 Rutherford deduced from these results that almost all the mass of an atom – an object so small that it would take about a million of them side by side to cross a full stop on this page – is concentrated in a nucleus a thousand times smaller than the atom itself. The nuclear model of the atom had been born. This second great discovery gave him enduring fame. Niels Bohr, a young Dane attracted to work with Rutherford, used his quantum ideas to produce a stable orbit model of the atom. The Rutherford–Bohr atom features in chemistry and physics books used in schools worldwide, and Rutherford scattering is still used today to probe sub-nuclear particles and layers of atoms in microelectronic devices.

Rutherford was knighted in the 1914 New Year's honours list, later visiting Australia and New Zealand for a scientific meeting and a family reunion. After a three-month stay he returned to Britain where he worked on acoustic methods of detecting submarines for the Admiralty Board of Invention and Research. His only patent derived from his development of a directional hydrophone. When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, Rutherford led the delegation to transfer submarine detection knowledge to them. While there he fruitlessly advised the United States government to use young scientists on problems associated with war work and not to waste their lives and skills in the trenches.

Near the end of the war Rutherford returned to the pursuit of atomic science. While bombarding nitrogen atoms with alpha rays, he observed outgoing protons of energy larger than that of the incoming alpha particles. From this observation he correctly deduced that the bombardment had converted nitrogen atoms into hydrogen atoms. He thus became the world's first successful alchemist and the first person to split the atom, his third great claim to lasting scientific fame.

In 1919 Rutherford became the director of the Cavendish Laboratory. The following decade was one of consolidation, of setting up a first-class research team and of tidying up loose ends.

In 1925 Rutherford once more travelled to Australia and New Zealand to give public lectures and to visit ailing parents. He was then an imposing figure: tall, well built and with bright blue eyes. The six-week tour of New Zealand, his fourth and last visit to his homeland, was that of an international celebrity. Wherever he went he was accorded a civic reception and halls were packed to overflowing to hear him give illustrated talks on the structure of the atom. Rutherford declared that he had always been very proud of being a New Zealander.

He also publicly encouraged the government to reserve some of the most scenic parts of New Zealand for posterity and supported education and research. In particular, he recommended that New Zealand scientists devote special attention to researches of benefit to farmers. His support helped see the establishment of New Zealand's Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in 1926.

Tragedy came to the Rutherfords when their daughter Eileen, who had married Ralph Fowler, a mathematical physicist at the Cavendish Laboratory, died in December 1930, nine days after the birth of her fourth child. This overshadowed Rutherford's elevation to the peerage in the New Year's honours list of 1931, as Baron Rutherford of Nelson. He chose to include in his coat of arms a kiwi, a Māori warrior and Hermes Trismegistus, the patron of knowledge and alchemists. His shield is quartered by the curves of the decay and growth of radioactivity. His Latin motto, 'Primordia quaerere rerum' (To seek the nature of things), was chosen from Lucretius's De rerum natura. He spoke only twice in the House of Lords, on both occasions in support of industrial research.

For Rutherford and the Cavendish Laboratory 1932 was a vintage year. James Chadwick discovered the neutron, which a decade earlier Rutherford had predicted must exist. In that same year John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton finally split the atom by entirely artificial means using protons, the nuclei of hydrogen atoms, which had been accelerated to very high speeds in a high-voltage accelerator. The age of big science had begun under Rutherford's guidance.

Rutherford served well his science, his laboratory, his university and his adopted country. He campaigned for Cambridge University to grant women the same privileges as men. He carried out regular public duties such as supporting the freedom of the British Broadcasting Corporation from government censorship, and served on its general advisory council. While on the board of management of the Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851 he defended the award of scholarships to overseas universities. As chairman of the Advisory Council of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research he advised the British government on scientific matters and opened many research laboratories. He also advised the New Zealand University colleges on selection of most of their professors of physics. Rutherford accepted many New Zealand students and academic staff for work in his laboratory because he knew they had so little opportunity at home.

Rutherford was one of the first to determine that the energy involved in the radioactive decay of an atom was millions of times that of a chemical bond, and he was the first to be convinced that this energy was internal to all atoms. In 1916, at the height of the First World War, he stated that it was not then possible for the energy of the atom to be extracted efficiently; he personally hoped that methods for doing this would not be discovered until man was living at peace with his neighbours. Nuclear fission, which made possible the efficient release of energy from uranium, was not discovered until two years after his death.

In 1933 Rutherford helped found, and was president of, the Academic Assistance Council, which aided academics displaced by Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany. He presided over a meeting of the Cambridge University branch of the Democratic Front, in which he made a case for an international ban on the use of aeroplanes in warfare.

Ernest Rutherford died at Cambridge on 19 October 1937, the result of delays in operating on his partially strangulated umbilical hernia. His ashes were interred in London's Westminster Abbey, under an inscribed flagstone near the choir screen in the nave. Lady Rutherford retired to Christchurch where she died in 1954. Rutherford's medals, possibly the world's best assemblage awarded to one scientist, were given to Canterbury College.

During his lifetime Rutherford was awarded scientific prizes and honorary degrees from many countries and fellowships of a variety of societies and organisations (such as the Royal College of Physicians of London and the Institution of Electrical Engineers). Among other honours he was elected president of the Royal Society of London (1926–30) and president of the Institute of Physics (1931–33), and was appointed to the Order of Merit (1925).

Death did not stop the public acclamation. Buildings in a number of countries have been named in Rutherford's honour. He has appeared on the stamps of four countries: Sweden in 1968, and Canada, the USSR and New Zealand in 1971. In 1969 element 104 was named rutherfordium in his honour. In 1991 the Rutherford Origin was built on the site of his birth. It incorporates into a garden setting a permanent outdoor display of information about his life and work. In 1992 his portrait featured on New Zealand's new $100 banknote.

Ernest Rutherford is regarded as one of the greatest of all scientists, radically altering our understanding of nature on three separate occasions. Yet he was no solitary genius, and his success at putting whichever laboratory he was leading at the forefront of experimental physics owed much to his ability to draw essential contributions from his fellow workers. Young graduates and prominent scientists from around the world were drawn to work with him. He treated the most famous and the most junior alike as equals. He was generous in giving credit to younger colleagues: often his name did not appear on papers covering important work which he had initiated. His conversation was animated, and he inspired enthusiasm in others. He was unassuming and modest; the tone of his publications was tentative, never claiming more than had been strictly verified. Rutherford enjoyed the warm regard of people of many different nationalities and was capable of giving strong support to colleagues in personal distress. He is remembered alike for his breadth of humanity and his contribution to human knowledge.

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John Campbell. 'Rutherford, Ernest', Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published in 1996, updated January, 2002 . Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/3r37/rutherford-ernest (accessed 31 August 2024)

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William Hobson

After a lengthy Royal Navy career in which he saw action in the Napoleonic Wars and was twice captured by pirates in the Caribbean, William Hobson (1792-1842) became New Zealand's first Governor .

Governor Bourke had already sent him to New Zealand in 1838, and his report so impressed Lord Glenelg that when he decided, in December 1838, to appoint a Consul to New Zealand, he offered the post to Hobson. Hobson, though, took two months before accepting, on 14 February 1839, as he had been hoping instead to receive further promotion as a senior naval officer.

Sent out by Lord Normanby in 1839 with detailed instructions, he travelled first to Governor Gipps in Sydney, whose lieutenant he was to be, for further instructions. Hobson arrived in the Bay of Islands on 29 January but landed on 30 January to read his proclamation of appointment and arranged for a meeting at British Resident James Busby's house on 5 February, while the Treaty was being drafted . On the following day, 6 February, as the chiefs came forward to sign he greeted each of them with the words 'He iwi tahi tatou' (We are all one people). At the end of 1840,

New Zealand ceased to be a protectorate of New South Wales and became a colony in its own right, with Hobson as Governor and Auckland as its capital city. The administration was short of cash and had frequent conflict with settlers, who were hungry for land and wanted control of the colony's government. After barely two years as Governor, he died from a stroke at the age of 49.

Adapted from the DNZB biography by K. A. Simpson

• Read the full entry in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography

How to cite this page

William Hobson, URL: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/people/william-hobson, (Manatū Taonga — Ministry for Culture and Heritage), updated 8-Nov-2017