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"E rau rangatira mā, e ngā reo, e ngā mana. Tēnā koutou katoa.
(I acknowledge amongst us today our distinguished leaders, speakers and those who bear authority.)
Ngāi Tahu Whānui, tēnā koutou.
(My greetings to the whole of Ngāi Tahu.)
E papaki tū ana ngā tai o maumahara ki runga o Ōtautahi.
(The tides of remembrance flow over Christchurch today.)
Haere mai tātou me te aroha, me te rangimārie, ki te whānau nei, e ora mārire ai anō rātau, e ora mārire ai anō, tātou katoa.

(So let us gather with love, i n peace, for this family, so that they may truly live again, so that we all may truly live again.)

We gather here, 14 days on from our darkest of hours. In the days that have followed the terrorist attack on the 15th of March, we have often found ourselves without words.
Christchurch memorial: standing ovation for Ardern at New Zealand service
What words adequately express the pain and suffering of 50 men, women and children lost, and so many injured? What words capture the anguish of our Muslim community being the target of hatred and violence? What words express the grief of a city that has already known so much pain?

I thought there were none. And then I came here and was met with this simple greeting. As-salaam Alaikum. Peace be upon you.

They were simple words, repeated by community leaders who witnessed the loss of their friends and loved ones. Simple words, whispered by the injured from their hospital beds. Simple words, spoken by the bereaved and everyone I met who has been affected by this attack.

As-salaam Alaikum. Peace be upon you.

They were words spoken by a community who, in the face of hate and violence, had every right to express anger but instead opened their doors for all of us to grieve with them. And so we say to those who have lost the most, we may not have always had the words.

We may have left flowers, performed the haka, sung songs or simply embraced. But even when we had no words, we still heard yours, and they have left us humbled and they have left us united.

Over the past two weeks we have heard the stories of those impacted by this terrorist attack. They were stories of bravery. They were stories of those who were born here, grew up here, or who had made New Zealand their home. Who had sought refuge, or sought a better life for themselves or their families.

These stories, they now form part of our collective memories. They will remain with us forever. They are us.

But with that memory comes a responsibility. A responsibility to be the place that we wish to be. A place that is diverse, that is welcoming, that is kind and compassionate. Those values represent the very best of us.

But even the ugliest of viruses can exist in places they are not welcome. Racism exists, but it is not welcome here. An assault on the freedom of any one of us who practices their faith or religion, is not welcome here. Violence, and extremism in all its forms, is not welcome here. And over the last two weeks we have shown that, you have shown that, in your actions.

From the thousands at vigils to the 95 year old man who took four buses to attend a rally because he couldn't sleep from the sadness of seeing the hurt and suffering of others. Our challenge now is to make the very best of us, a daily reality.

Because we are not immune to the viruses of hate, of fear, of other. We never have been. But we can be the nation that discovers the cure.

And so to each of us as we go from here, we have work to do, but do not leave the job of combatting hate to the government alone. We each hold the power, in our words and in our actions, in our daily acts of kindness. Let that be the legacy of the 15th of March. To be the nation we believe ourselves to be.

To the global community who have joined us today, who reached out to embrace New Zealand, and our Muslim community, to all of those who have gathered here today, we say thank you.

And we also ask that the condemnation of violence and terrorism turns now to a collective response. The world has been stuck in a vicious cycle of extremism breeding extremism and it must end.

We cannot confront these issues alone, none of us can. But the answer to them lies in a simple concept that is not bound by domestic borders, that isn't based on ethnicity, power base or even forms of governance. The answer lies in our humanity.

But for now, we will remember those who have left this place. We will remember the first responders who gave so much of themselves to save others.

We will remember the tears of our nation, and the new resolve we have formed.

And we remember, that ours is a home that does not and cannot claim perfection. But we can strive to be true to the words embedded in our national anthem

Men of every creed and race,
Gather here before Thy face,
Asking Thee to bless this place
God defend our free land

From dissension, envy, hate
And corruption, guard our state
Make our country good and great
God defend New Zealand

Ko tātou tātou

As-salaam Alaikum
Topics

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Jacinda Ardern's speech at Christchurch memorial - full transcript

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"E rau rangatira mā, e ngā reo, e ngā mana. Tēnā koutou katoa. (I acknowledge amongst us today our distinguished leaders, speakers and those who bear authority.) Ngāi Tahu Whānui, tēnā koutou. (My greetings to the whole of Ngāi Tahu.) E papaki tū ana ngā tai o maumahara ki runga o Ōtautahi.

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Global Issues from SDGs

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Kia ora koutou katoa,

Kia orana,

Malo e lelei,

Ni sa bula vinaka,

Fakalofal lahiatu,

Namaste,

Ni Hao,

And thank you so much for that welcome.

And a warm welcome to those who travelled near and far, like my wonderful mum Laurell all the way from Niue, and to those watching this online - including my sister in London.

And yes, that was a test Louise to see if you are watching.

Thank you for joining our movement. Our strength rests on all your shoulders. You keep the faith. Many of you pound the pavements and work the phones.

It's your energy that has been our constant motivation, and it's your passion that will help us win.

I feel incredibly honoured to be the leader of the New Zealand Labour Party.

Leadership is not always easy though. I saw that first hand, before I even took on this job.

And that's why I want start today by paying tribute to Andrew Little.

I watched you, Andrew, give everything to leading our team. Over more than two years, you pulled us together and led an incredible ground campaign. You then made one of the hardest calls I have seen someone make in politics.

You have always been focused on doing whatever it takes to put Labour in the best position to help others - and that is a legacy I promise to uphold.

To Kelvin Davis, the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and to his informal campaign manager - Creature of Northland.

I have never seen someone whose instincts are more directly connected to the people they serve than Kelvin. We are incredibly lucky to have the leadership you provide, and also as a member of our Maori caucus. It's a caucus we will grow this election, and will see the strongest representation for Maori and women that we have ever had. That makes me so proud.

To all of our candidates who work so hard representing and advocating for their communities. Each and every one of you deserve to be in Parliament, and together, many more of you will join us on the 23 rd of September.

Ladies and gentlemen, friends.

Just a few weeks ago I stood before the media and told them we were about to run the campaign of our lives. Looking at you all, I know that's true.

I remember the last time that I felt that way was nineyears ago. It was the 16 of December 2008, the day I gave my first speech to parliament.

The first speech you give in Parliament, your maiden speech, is always treated as quite a big deal. It's a little bit like an Oscar acceptance speech, except in some cases you haven't actually won anything.

They are speeches that are full of hope, and aspiration.

Here's how I started mine, nine years ago:

Quote: "Maiden speeches are a bit like words spoken in a heated argument. Like it or not, they will come back to haunt you."

But sometimes, there are words that you want to come back. Things you want to haunt you again and again, to remind you why you are there.

Because sometimes they are not just words; they're convictions, they are experiences, they are faces and they are stories.

I have described myself as relentlessly positive.

That's probably because I was born in Hamilton, where everyone is always optimistic that the fog will lift. Literally.

But at a young age my family relocated to Murupara.

I was just about to start school when we packed up to move to a place that we had never visited, and that we would call home for the next few years.

We lived in the small grey-brick house in front of the police station. When you're a child, you remember the little things. The nice lady at the dairy who you bought lolly mixes from. How you couldn't walk round town without jandals because of the broken glass. The kids who didn't have shoes, even in winter when the puddles would ice over. And the number of people who had lost their job, and their hope.

It was the 1980s and I was living in a place that remains etched in my memory even today.

But I was young. This was not the place or moment I was politicised. It was the moment I empathised.

And that is ultimately what I still see as the foundation for what we should be doing in this place. Understanding the issues people in our communities face, their experiences, and never being satisfied that things are the way they are, and can't be changed or made better.

That is why I chose politics. That is why I am here.

But I am not the first Labour politician to see the world that way.

My dad shed a tear when Norman Kirk died.

Kirk passed away 6 years before I was born, so the first I knew of this man was that he made my father cry. That was enough for me to know he was special.

His picture hangs on my wall. Not your usual portrait photo, but a newspaper clipping from the Te Aroha News. He's on his way to a Hindu wedding, standing next to a neatly dressed woman.

That woman is my Nana, or as she would have liked to have been known, the Secretary of the Piako Labour Electorate Committee.

I was twelve years old when my Nana died. I was too young to have ever talked to her about politics. So instead that clipping is a reminder to me. A reminder that MPs come and go, leaders come and go, and all we can do is make sure we leave something good behind.

That means taking on the hard issues. Thinking not just about the next three years, but the next ten. It means being bold and being brave.

Kirk was both of those things, and so were others. In fact it has always been Labour governments who have confronted New Zealand's challenges, who haven't been afraid of standing up, or of doing things differently.

For Savage, that meant seeing hardship, and creating the welfare state.

For Fraser, it was predicting the challenges of the future and bringing in free education from kindergarten to university.

For Kirk, it was seeing a loss of dignity and getting back to basics like full employment.

For Lange, it was standing up for peace by standing up to nukes.

For Clark, it was about social infrastructure.

And for me it's simple: I want to build a country where every child grows up free from poverty, and is filled with hope and opportunity.

But of course, that requires me, and Labour to be elected. And for some people, there are some unanswered questions which simply boil down to one, simple thing.

Now what?

Kiwis know we have an economy some would argue compares well internationally, and we're told people want predictability and certainty. But the gap between rich and poor is just getting more and more entrenched.

So now what?

We know we have homelessness, that there are people living in cars who can't afford increasing rents, but we don't want to waste time with blame and sometimes we're not even sure it's something politicians can fix.

So now what?

We have infrastructure in our cities that cannot keep up with daily demand, while our regions look for the job opportunities that will make their young people stay.

So I ask again: Now what?

Well now we stand up. We do what we have done before. We refuse to accept the status quo, the idea that things can't be improved and that we have no choice.

We have a choice, and we can choose better.

Some have said that the only thing I need to show you to prove that I deserve to govern is an appreciation of the economy.

You will never hear me question the importance of a strong economy. Never. I worked alongside the last Labour government whose economic record speaks for itself and for that, I say thank you Helen Clark, and thank you Michael Cullen.

But the major point of difference on economic issues this election is not how long either leader has spent working with Treasury - it's what we use as the signs of success.

I will always maintain that a successful economy is one that serves its people. Not the other way around. And that means judging success differently.

GDP rates, and numbers on a sheet of paper don't always tell you much about the wellbeing of the people working to keep our economy going.

Yes GDP is rising in New Zealand. And in some respects we're told we are the envy of the world. But how someone in Whanganui feels about their wages, their cost of living, and their prospects matters more to me than the praise of overseas financial commentators.

And on that measure, we could be doing so much better. Last year two thirds of people had a pay rise that didn't keep up with the increasing cost of living. If people feel like they are going backwards, how can we claim we are moving forwards.

Add to that the more than 70,000 young people not in employment, education, or training, and perhaps the measure that bothers me the most, we have nearly 300,000 kids living in poverty.

I want economic success to feel real, and it won't feel like anything but faint praise until it feels real for all New Zealanders.

That is why the markers of success have to change, and I am starting with kids.

Under Labour, we will change the Public Finance Act so that every budget, you don't just hear about surpluses and deficits, you will hear about how many kids we have lifted out of poverty.

We will do the same when it comes to showing our progress on challenges we have postponed for too long, and yes that includes the environment and climate change.

Because when we hold ourselves to account, you can hold us to account.

And we will only do better, when we are honest about where we are starting.

But it's also time we shared that same honesty about economic success not being evenly spread - between people, but also across our regions.

I have spent longer living in small town New Zealand than I have spent in Auckland. I have seen the constant battle to find a way to make young people stay, and to build a future.

No one expects central government to have all of the answers, but they should expect us to ask questions.

A government that I lead will be an active partner in our regions - not telling them what to do, but sitting down with council, employers, unions and employees - figuring out ways to support the growth of decent, well paid jobs.

That is why last year we went to Gisborne, and collectively developed an initiative to process timber into prefabricated houses.

That is why we went to Dunedin, and co-created the Centre of Digital Excellence.

That is why we went to Whanganui and pledged to fix their Port.

And that is why we will keep asking - what can we do together, because I know regional economic development can change towns, it can change cities and it can change lives.

But there is one more marker of success I want to focus on. Because the answer to this one lies at Labour's core.

Economic experts talk a lot about our low productivity. I can see why.

It's shorthand for relying on people to work longer to prop up our economy. It's shorthand for low wages. It's shorthand for fewer hours at home with your kids.

And it's shorthand for a country that's dropped the ball on skills and innovation.

All of that flies in the face of what New Zealand is meant to be.

We are a nation of small business, so let's reward people who invest in them.

We are innovators, so let's bring back the R&D tax credit.

We are young and facing so much change so let's educate our workers of today, and upskill our workers of tomorrow.

And with Labour, that's exactly what we'll do.

You will have heard it said that education is the great leveller. It's part of what has made us the fair society we have all been so proud of.

But I would go further - education is a public good, and that's why it should be free.

I remember when I first started studying. I worked in a fish n chip shop, then a gift shop, then a supermarket. For a time I was doing all three at once. I would change into my chippy uniform at the back of the gift shop ready for my Friday night shift. My wages basically kept my 1979 Toyota Corona on the road.

I saved hard. I wanted to go to university, and I was determined to do it without debt. But I had choices and opportunities, many don't and that should never be a barrier to learning.

Since 1999 we have been campaigning to make education more accessible, and we're still doing it today.

That is why Labour is committed to revolutionising education.

We have already pledged to make the first three years of post secondary education free. Whether you are an apprentice, going to polytech, or taking on a degree. Whether you are coming straight from school, or need to retrain - Labour will invest in your future.

We will change our schools from being a place of assessment to a place of creativity.

We will reopen our night schools so that people of any age and any background can keep learning.

With a Labour Government, education won't just be a leveller again, it will be what sets our country apart.

Leading a country that gives our next generation hope and opportunity means there is another issue we can't look past. Housing.

Housing affects everything. There is nothing more basic than having a roof over your head. That is why a warm, dry, decent home is a right.

I was door knocking in Hastings a few years back, and remember some doors where I couldn't see inside for the dampness pouring down them. Even in my home electorate. I've seen kids who sleep stacked underneath bunk beds because there is just no room.

That is our housing situation at its worst. But this is not a reality we have to accept.

I do not accept that young people, our teachers and our nurses should give up on owning a home. Not when we can do just three things that will make all the difference.

Under Labour, we will remove speculators' unfair tax advantages.

We'll stop foreign buyers who have no interest in New Zealand buying existing homes.

And we'll just get on and build more houses.

And for those who genuinely choose to rent, you deserve to know that your home is warm and dry. You deserve to have greater security. And under Labour, you will.

There is an old saying of Norman Kirk's that I really treasure. He once said that people don't want much, just "someone to love, somewhere to live, somewhere to work and something to hope for".

Some might say that hope and love aren't things that government can really offer. Those people haven't thought enough about an issue we all have a stake in - our country's mental health.

I've spoken before about why this issue matters to me. Everyone knows someone affected by mental health, or devastated by suicide.

Yesterday I asked a room full of young people if they did, and every single hand in that room was lifted into the air. Every single one.

New Zealand's youth suicide rate is the highest in the OECD. While there is a lot of talk about targets, I know I will never ever be satisfied so long as there is even one life lost.

It is time we focused on love and hope rather than grief and loss. And we need to start with young people.

That's why we will put a nurse in every single public high school across the country. And we will make sure that every single child in Canterbury and Kaikoura will also have the support they need, when they need it.

It's a $50 million investment, and it's amongst the most important investments we will make.

But our children, and our young people, also need us to look to their future.

The very first time I was booed in politics was in Matamata. It was a public meeting during the 2008 election, and I was asked about climate change. A wise candidate told me later - if 50% of a public meeting isn't disagreeing with you at any one time, you're probably not saying anything. I did wonder if 100% of the room meant I was saying too much.

But I will never stop talking about it, because it's the challenge that defines my generation.

I remember listening to a couple of members of my family discussing climate change a few years ago. It's fair to say they were sceptical. I was waiting for my moment to jump in, when suddenly I heard my father pipe up. "I don't know much about the science he said, "but I do know what they showed me in Kiribati".

He had visited with local village leaders who had shown him where the water sat when they were children, and where it was now - lapping squarely around their survival.

There will always be those who say it's too difficult. There will be those who say we are too small, and that pollution and climate change are the price of progress.

They are wrong.

We will take climate change seriously because my Government will be driven by principle, not expediency. And opportunity, not fear.

And there is an opportunity, that we can turn into our advantage, and shape our identity. It is a transition that can, and must, be just.

This is my generation's nuclear free moment, and I am determined that we will tackle it head on.

But restoring our role as innovators, and as a clean green nation on the world stage, means tackling something closer to home.

Our rivers are dying. The majority are almost too dirty to swim in.

I don't accept that this is just the way things are now. Not when we our water is a taonga. Not when we have a duty to protect it. And not when we can turn things around.

We will clean up our rivers. We will do it for the next generation. And we will do it together.

We do have some hard calls to make. But the government I lead will be a government that listens, then acts. A government that leads, not follows.

I will never stop believing that politics is a place where we can do good.

That we can build a confident and caring nation if we include each and every person, in each and every town and region. That is New Zealand at its best.

It's been three weeks now since I was asked to take this job and lead our campaign. In those three weeks, I've never once felt alone. Whether it's been on social media, on the streets, or by your show of support here today, I feel humbled and heartened.

So, the question for all of us - for you and for me - is this: Now what?

Now we re-double our efforts.

Now we focus not just on the challenges, but the opportunities that will bring lasting change.

Now we be bold, and now we be brave.

This is our moment, and it starts with you.

This is a time for talking with your families and friends. This is a time for knocking on doors and working the phones. This is a time for sharing our vision of tomorrow with everyone you meet.

Let's go from here today and run the campaign of our lives.

Let's do this.

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Kia ora koutou katoa, Kia orana, Malo e lelei, Ni sa bula vinaka, Fakalofal lahiatu, Namaste, Ni Hao, And thank you so much for that welcome. And a warm welcome to those who travelled near and far, like my wonderful mum Laurell all the way from Niue, and to those watching this online - including my sister in London.

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I'm really pleased to be here in Dunedin.

For all of the creativity, history, and beauty that this city holds, you still had me at 'cheese roll.'

I'm also pleased to be here because this is my first leader's speech at a Labour Party conference.

That means my first order of business is a very simple one - to say thanks.

When I took over the leadership from Andrew at the beginning of August last year, the election was seven weeks away.

I said we'd run the campaign of our lives. And we did.

To all those who worked the phones, pounded the pavements, stuffed the letterboxes, erected the hoardings, or did countless other tasks - thank you from the bottom of my heart.

There are a few people I also need to pay special tribute to.

To our president, Nigel. To everyone in our party organisation from branch level to the New Zealand Council.

To my deputy Kelvin, and my parliamentary colleagues. My warm thanks for the support you give me, and for expanding. We welcomed 17 new MPs to our caucus after last year's election.

And that Class of '17 included ten women - a fitting tribute to mark Suffrage 125, and let's be honest, just a bloody good addition to our team.

There are also a few people outside of the Labour movement I want to acknowledge. The Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters and his New Zealand First team for their commitment to the success of the Coalition Government.

The Greens and in particular their co-leaders James Shaw and Marama Davidson for their goodwill and co-operation in this most MMP of governments.

It's not easy to describe the journey since the Labour caucus handed me the profound responsibility of leading our party.

A number of words come to mind.

Frenetic.

Fascinating.

Fulfilling.

Which you could call a polite set of F words.

None of that probably seems surprising.

You'd probably expect that in this job I get to meet amazing people every day. And I do.

That I get thrown a diverse set of challenges and exciting opportunities. And I do.

And that there are some days that are tougher than others. And there are.

But I will be honest, there are some things that have surprised me about this job, and I want to reflect on one of them.

Letters.

It's fair to say I get a few. In fact every MP probably does.

I still remember, as a brand new member of parliament, being given the opportunity to feature alongside a National Party MP in a weekly breakfast TV slot known as 'The Young Guns'.

One day I received an email from a member of the public politely advising me that she thought my hair clashed with the National MP, and perhaps I should consider dying it.

I replied that perhaps she could make the same suggestion to the other MP. After all, his hair was shorter.

But whether they're positive, negative or indifferent - it's not the letters themselves that have been surprising, it's the profound impact they have had on me.

I should have known that was possible. I remember some years ago watching old footage from when David Frost carried out an interview with the late great Prime Minister Norman Kirk in 1973.

He asked him a broad open-ended question- what was his most memorable incident since taking office?

He could have talked about absolutely anything. Instead, he said this, in that quietly spoken way that he often adopted:

Quote "I would think the thousands of letters that came in December after we'd made a nominal payment to social security beneficiaries and not the fact that we'd given an extra week's pay, but in those letters, and there were thousands of them, came through the fact that there were a whole section of our community who were missing out on ordinary everyday things.

One women wrote in and said "I had my first pair of shoes in seven years." she had trouble with her feet and had to have them specially made and "oh what a comfort to have new shoes" and you know, you don't think in 1972 or 73 of people not having access to basic things like that but literally, there are thousands."

A Prime Minister who was gifted a question on national television, had an opportunity to speak on anything, and he talked about a woman who wrote him a simple letter about buying an extra pair of shoes.

There are many things that have changed since Kirk's time, but the power of this simple form of communicating with the people we are here to serve has not.

They tell me when we are on the right track or the wrong track.

They tell me when we have made a difference, or when we need to make a difference.

They tell me what children think, what adults think, and sprinkled in-between, what my mother thinks.

But there is a particular group you won't be surprised that I keep coming back to. Kids. They write to me in their hundreds.

About just about everything, like this letter from a young child with some interesting economic philosophy:

I think we should make everything free because then there would be no such thing as poor people.

And a seven year old who clearly thinks my powers have no limits and wrote:

Dear Jacinda, can you change the boring grey toasters into bright colours please. Perhaps you could pass a law?

The lovely kids of Rolleston Primary in Canterbury sent me a letter with their wish list of ideas to make New Zealand a better place. It reads:
Stop the pollution. Make our rivers clean for swimming. Don't close any more schools because it makes children sad. Stop cyber bullying. Peace. No nuclear bombs. Help the homeless. Look after the animals. Help beached whales. Help the sick, the poor and the old.
I can assure you Rolleston Primary, it is on our list too!

But if you ask me the same question that was asked of Kirk all those years ago - what has been the most memorable letter since I have become Prime Minister, it's not quite toasters.

It's the families package. It has been my greatest source of pride, and I hope is yours too.

Under this package some 384,000 low and middle income families will receive on average $75 a week extra once it's fully rolled out.

In addition, we are helping one million people heat their homes in the coldest months of the year with the Winter Energy Payment.

And we are supporting young families with the $60 a week Best Start payment for their first child, and extending paid parental leave to 26 weeks.

I know what a difference this more than $5billion package is making, because people have told me.

Just a few weeks ago a mother of three wrote to me and said:
Dear Jacinda. I have been meaning to email you for a while now....I have a son, step daughter and step son...times are just so tough. Money doesn't go very far at all so I had started working as a cleaner part time....Anyway, I just wanted to say that the extra money in family tax credits that we receive because of your government has meant I can work one less cleaning job, creating less stress, less tiredness and a bit more of the mother I want to be. Thank you from the bottom of me and my family's hearts.
And another wrote this in a letter:
With the extra money I am able to buy my kids some more school socks with no holes in them, I am able to buy warm sheets and blankets so they are warmer at night.
But whether it's shoes in the 1970s, or sheets and socks now - it's the fact people are going without these things that stands out to me the most.

These letters may have been written to convey thanks or acknowledgment, but I just see further work that needs to be done.

Kids should be warm at night. A mum shouldn't have to work multiple jobs to get by.

There are still huge systemic problems that we all know we need to address. And that's why I want to pay particular tribute to our Finance Minister, Grant Robertson.

Grant knows and understands those challenges, and has made it a priority to transition New Zealand to a sustainable and inclusive economy, where everyone benefits from prosperity.

He is completely focused on well being, and I know our well being budget next year will demonstrate that.

But alongside this transformation, sits one of the issues that we campaigned so hard on, and that remains one of our most pressing issues.

Because if we want to increase the incomes of families we need to reduce their biggest cost - housing.

Housing will be one of the things that our success or otherwise, will be measured against. And I welcome that challenge.

Already there are over 1200 more public housing tenancies than a year ago.

In our last budget we funded 6400 more public homes and housing New Zealand are investing $4billion to not only build this new stock, but to renovate existing state houses so they are warm and dry.

And then there is kiwibuild.

Last Saturday I stood alongside Phil Twyford as we welcomed 18 families to their new neighbourhood in McLennan, Papakura. They were the first families to buy a KiwiBuild home.

It was a huge day. I was standing near the front of one of the families' new homes when I overheard Phil Twyford say to one of the people gathered at the street party "this is one of the most important days of my political life".

And I can see why.

KiwiBuild will give thousands of young families who have been locked out of home ownership a chance to buy their own affordable home, not through a subsidy, but through the government using our scale and buying power to do what the market hasn't.

It's an example of the government seeing a problem, and fixing it. And that's exactly what Michael Joseph Savage did.

I like the way he summed up his housing agenda though. As new state house tenants were moving into their new homes, Savage once told a gathered crowd that;
"We are trying to cater for everyone...we do not claim perfection, but we do claim a considerable advance on what has been done in the past."
But housing is not the sum of our ambition. We are after all the Labour Party, we will always have a focus on the value and dignity of decent work with decent wages.

That's why we have increased the minimum wage, extended the living wage to core public sector workers, and improved our pay equity laws.

But it's also why we are so focused on skills and training, especially for the next generation.

I'm really proud for instance of our Mana in Mahi, or Strength in Work, programme. It will help some 4000 young people to gain apprenticeships.

I know it will make a difference, because people in the industry have told me that. Here's just one letter I received after we introduced this programme.

Mana in Mahi trade training initiative is the most intelligent skills training proposal witnessed thus far.

The proposal of businesses topping up wages to the minimum wage is a step in the right direction. Implemented across the whole work spectrum should be the next move. It will promote business expansion and God forbid it may even claw back some ownership of our economy.

And that of course is not the only tool we're using to drive job opportunities.

We will continue to work with our regions on regional development strategies, and supporting them through the Provincial Growth Fund.

And we will continue to reach out to communities, including Māoridom, to find solutions to economic and social challenges through partnership.

We have set up the Māori-Crown Relations: Te Arawhiti portfolio to oversee the Government's work with Māori in the post-settlement era - our recent partnership on housing in Porirua with Ngati Toa shows just what is possible.

But so have the existing partnerships with maori around governance and the environment.

I've talked a lot about the environment in the past year.

Our changing climate.

Our dirty rivers.

The pollution of our precious coastal and marine areas by plastics.

And yes, I do think plastics warrants its own special mention. And why? Because the kids told me so. And they didn't tell me just once. They wrote and told me hundreds of times.

Like the student in the Waikato who wrote me a letter to say:

Dear Prime Minister, I'm only 10 years old and I am trying to convince you to ban plastic bags. They are killing our wildlife, they swallow the plastic and it gets stuck in their bodies and they can't breathe. It is our responsibility to stop this.

I agree. And so with the help of Green Party Minister Eugiene Sage, we have.

The past year has also seen David Parker pursue a comprehensive plan to restore our rivers to becoming swimmable again, James Shaw's progress on our climate change goals, and with the ambition of New Zealand First in the mix, our plan to plant one billion trees is well under way (for those who don't follow the tree counter as religiously as I do, we are up to 60.6 million).

As you have probably picked up by now, if you pick a subject, I will have received a letter on it. It is fair to say some subjects generate more mail than others, and as much as Grant will be disappointed to hear this, the Budget Responsibility Rules haven't been the subject line of too many messages.

And yet we all know that some of our critics gloomily forewarned that Labour in government wouldn't be able to balance the books.

But Grant - a proud Dunedin boy - has proved the naysayers wrong.

He has kept a firm grip on the country's finances and he is focused on running surpluses which is a vital part of our plan.

A surplus is a safety net.

Nobody knows what's around the corner. The surplus is insurance against those risks.

Right now the volatile international situation means having that cushion is more important than ever.

But we are also balancing that financial security with the pressing social needs that the Government promised to deliver on. That is what we were elected to do.

We can't do everything at once, just like it doesn't make sense to spend every cent you earn.

But we are investing carefully in the areas that need it most. Things like health, housing, education.

In the seven or so years since the Canterbury earthquakes, there has been insufficient investment across these important areas.

Over the next four years we're turning this around, and significantly. In fact we're investing $24 billion more than the last government in those priority areas, because that's what we need to start rebuilding New Zealand's infrastructure, and improving the wellbeing of our people.

We're also prioritising managing the debt that arose from the GFC and Canterbury earthquakes, because we always need to be prepared for the challenges of the future.

And there are challenges.

We may have a lot to be proud of - long list of things we have managed to do these last 12 months - but we have many things we are yet to do too.

But we will miss the urgency if we just characterise that list as statistics or numbers.

If I say for instance that there is a lot to do in education, that there has been significant under investment over the last nine years, that we came into office facing the reality that not even population growth had been factored into future spending by the last government - all of that may be true - but it doesn't factor in the human face.

I want to share with you an example of what does, with a letter written to me by the aunty of a boy with special needs.

We as a whānau have tried with dead ends where ever we turn so I then turn to you Prime Minister and plead for your help, he is missing out on so much and it just isn't fair. Please help us find a solution for this young boy who deserves the best chance living with autism.

There's a lot in that letter that stood out to me - including the words "the best chance"

You may have heard me talk about my goal to make New Zealand the best country in the world to be a child.

We simply will not achieve that unless we ensure that every single child, no matter where they live, no matter their background or ethnicity, their ability or disability, has the best education possible.

We've already begun the enormous job of rebuilding our public education system.

In the last budget we provided funding for 1500 more teachers.

We provided the first per pupil funding increase to ECE in ten years.

We have begun plugging a massive hole - running to hundreds of millions of dollars - in New Zealand's schools rebuild budget.

We got rid of National Standards to free teachers up from the red tape and hours of compliance so they could focus on teaching.

And we provided the biggest increase in learning support in over a decade.

This funded around 1000 extra places for students with complex needs so they could get specialist support such as speech therapy

Teacher-aide funding received an extra $59.3 million,

About 2,900 deaf and hard-of-hearing students and approximately 1,500 low-vision students got more help, and

Around 1,900 more children with high needs in early childhood education will now receive support each year.

Yet there's more to do.

There are still children who need extra support to learn.

Maybe it is help to hear, or concentrate, or to be calm.

If a child needs support and is not getting it, that's not fair, and I'm not prepared to tolerate it.

So today I want to say to parents, to kids, to teachers, to aunties, to anyone who has asked for more support for those with additional needs - we've heard you.

Today, I am announcing that we'll be employing a new workforce of approximately 600 Learning Support Coordinators to work alongside teachers across the entire country.

Their job will be to make sure that children with extra needs are identified. They'll work alongside classroom teachers to ensure kids with high and complex physical needs then get the support they deserve.

This will be a game changer for those children.

It will be a game changer for teachers, who've been crying out for these roles, so they're freed up to do what they do best - teach.

And it's a game changer for those children who don't need additional learning support, who'll get more quality learning time with their teachers.

These coordinators - similar to what we now call SENCOs - are part of a new way of doing things and have been developed by my New Zealand First colleague and Associate Minister of Education, Tracey Martin, through the draft Disability and Learning Support Action Plan.

But teachers have been urging governments for some time for this kind of role to be dedicated and fully funded. And for good reason.

At the moment schools ask their existing teaching staff to do the work of Special Education Coordinators. But teachers tell us this is a drain on their time and takes them away from their classroom teaching.

That's why these coordinators will not only do that job for them, they will also support teachers, with professional advice and guidance about how to teach children with additional needs.

But more than that - these new roles will give parents a single point of contact with someone who understands the needs of their child, and will advocate for them as they move through their time in the school.

This is a big change.

It will mean investing $217 million over four years - and these 600 fully funded Learning Support Coordinators are just the start.

Taken as a whole, this investment alongside what we have already done means that in just 12 months in office, we've committed nearly half a billion dollars to special education and ensuring every child has access to the best education possible.

Thank you Tracey for your work in this area. And thank you to Chris Hipkins for your leadership in education too.

I've shared with you today what people say when they get in touch with me.

In finishing I will tell you what I would say if I was writing a letter to New Zealand.

I'd start by saying thank you.

Thank you for supporting us.

For giving us this incredible privilege of being in government.

For allowing us to create a fairer, kinder New Zealand.

And I would finish with a big giant PS;
Let's keep doing this. Watch the livestream of the speech here. Read more about the education announcement here. Watch an update from the Prime Minister about the announcement here.

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Jacinda Ardern's Speech to the 2018 Labour Party Conference

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I'm really pleased to be here in Dunedin. For all of the creativity, history, and beauty that this city holds, you still had me at 'cheese roll.' I'm also pleased to be here because this is my first leader's speech at a Labour Party conference.

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OPINION: The hundreds of Labour supporters turned away from an overflowing Dunedin town hall for Jacinda Ardern's first speech to a Labour conference as leader is in stark contrast to the last time they all gathered.

That was in 2017 when Andrew Little could barely fill a hall and was out of ideas to avoid an electoral rout.

Ardern's biggest problem is managing expectations after Labour's nine years in the political wilderness.

Her speech to the 1200-strong audience was one of the few events in the three-day long programme that was open to the media.

READ MORE:
* Labour finally shakes off National's shadow a year on from the election
* 'Thanks for helping put us into Government' - Ardern
* One year on for Jacinda Ardern's coalition government
* Tracy Watkins: The five big things waiting for Ardern's

​The promise of 600 more teachers to ease workloads and give one on one support to students with complex learning needs was hugely popular and bought the delegates to their feet.

That was the image Labour's organisers wanted the public to be left with.

The rest of the conference took place behind closed doors including a session where local branches and committees put up their policy wish lists for a vote.

The likelihood of a breakout of the sort of infighting and bitterness that marred some party conferences in previous years was slim given the relief and jubilation at being back in power.

But Ardern's speech tacitly acknowledged that some of the most trenchant criticism her Government faces includes from the left about policies like Kiwibuild, and her Government's self-imposed spending limits under its Budget Responsibility Rules.

She went on the defensive over Kiwibuild helping thousands of young families into a home "not through a subsidy but the Government using our scale and buying power to do what the market hasn't."

She also quoted Labour hero Michael Joseph Savage in his quote about state housing: "We are trying to cater for everyone ... we do not claim perfection, but we do claim a considerable advance on what has been done in the past."

And she defended the focus on surpluses because "nobody knows what's around the corner".

"We can't do everything at once, just like it doesn't make sense to spend every cent you earn," she told the conference.

But many of Labour's grassroots are impatient for more radical change.

Some of the remits passed by the conference included a proposal to subsidise or make free disposable or reusable menstrual products; universally free dental care, and extending ACC to cover illness or disability.

Many of those remits will struggle to become government policy, even with the unanimous backing from the rank and file. A conference vote only kicks them up to Labour's policy committee, and after that its platform committee - and after that they have to be vetted by the party's funding group, which includes the likes of Finance Minister Grant Robertson. They will be wary of anything which doesn't pass the political sniff test.

And any policies that makes it through all those hoops might not survive coalition negotiations after the election, like much of Labour's manifesto this time round.

Ardern's catch cry that she rallied the troops with at the election was "let's do this", and it was one she reissued at the weekend - but with that caveat that Labour can't do it all at once.

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Jacinda Ardern's message to the party faithful - 'we can't do it all'

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OPINION: The hundreds of Labour supporters turned away from an overflowing Dunedin town hall for Jacinda Ardern's first speech to a Labour conference as leader is in stark contrast to the last time they all gathered. That was in 2017 when Andrew Little could barely fill a hall and was out of ideas to avoid an electoral rout.

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This election will be decided by MMP, Jacinda Ardern has told the audience at Labour's election night party at Aotea Centre in Auckland.

Ms Ardern was referring to the upcoming negotiations that will need to take place in order for a Government to be formed.

"Bill English and National have taken the largest number of votes. I have called Bill and acknowledged that and the campaign work he has done," Ms Ardern said.

"But the final outcome of tonight will not be decided by us. I simply cannot predict at this point what decisions other leaders will make."

Ms Ardern rounded off her speech by pledging "all [her] energies, [her] every waking moment" to the Labour Party.

In a forward-looking speech, Ms Ardern made a commitment to Labour's core issues - housing, ridding New Zealand of child poverty and a clean, green New Zealand.

Ms Ardern looked back at her short time as leader, saying that while she initially called it the "worst job in politics", she had changed her mind.

"The last seven weeks have been nothing but a privilege," she said.

"I have been incredibly lucky to talk with New Zealanders across the country; lucky to have had a platform to talk about ideas and politics that I knew would change people's lives."

"The late, great Colin Meads said, 'If you come off the field and you haven't done enough then you've let the side down.'

"I've come off the field knowing that we've given it our all."

Newshub.

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Jacinda Ardern full speech: Let's keep doing this

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This election will be decided by MMP, Jacinda Ardern has told the audience at Labour's election night party at Aotea Centre in Auckland. Ms Ardern was referring to the upcoming negotiations that will need to take place in order for a Government to be formed.

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Barbara Kruger addresses media and politics in their native tongue: tabloid, sensational, authoritative, and direct. Kruger's words and images merge the commercial and art worlds; their critical resonance eviscerates cultural hierarchies - everyone and everything is for sale. The year 1989 was marked by numerous demonstrations protesting a new wave of antiabortion laws chipping away at the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Untitled (Your body is a battleground) was produced by Kruger for the Women's March on Washington in support of reproductive freedom. The woman's face, disembodied, split in positive and negative exposures, and obscured by text, marks a stark divide. This image is simultaneously art and protest. Though its origin is tied to a specific moment, the power of the work lies in the timelessness of its declaration.

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From The Broad Collection: Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your body is a battleground), 1989, photographic silkscreen on vinyl, The Broad Art Foundation. Barbara Kruger addresses media and politics in their native tongue: tabloid, sensational, authoritative, and direct. Kruger's words and images merge the commercial and art worlds; their critical resonance eviscerates cultural hierarchies - everyone and everything is for sale.

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Elvis
The Great Gatsby
Moulin Rouge
Romeo & Juliet

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Untitled (Girl, Don't Die for Love), 1992 - Barbara Kruger - WikiArt.org

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'Untitled (Girl, Don't Die for Love)' was created in 1992 by Barbara Kruger in Conceptual Art style. Find more prominent pieces of poster at Wikiart.org - best visual art database.

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Untitled (Not stupid enough) - Barbara Kruger - WikiArt.org

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‘Untitled (Not stupid enough)’ was created by Barbara Kruger in Conceptual Art style. Find more prominent pieces of figurative at Wikiart.org – best visual art database.

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Climate activist Greta Thunberg, 16, addressed the U.N.'s Climate Action Summit in New York City on Monday. Here's the full transcript of Thunberg's speech, beginning with her response to a question about the message she has for world leaders.
"My message is that we'll be watching you.

"This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!

"You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

"For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.

"You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.

"The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.

"Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.

"So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us - we who have to live with the consequences.

"To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise - the best odds given by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] - the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1st, 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.

"How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just 'business as usual' and some technical solutions? With today's emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years.

"There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.

"You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.

"We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.

"Thank you."

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Transcript: Greta Thunberg's Speech At The U.N. Climate Action Summit

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"You have stolen my dreams, and my childhood, with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones," activist Greta Thunberg, 16, tells world leaders.

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A series of ads, developed as a creative idea for UN Women by Memac Ogilvy & Mather Dubai, uses genuine Google searches to reveal the widespread prevalence of sexism and discrimination against women. Based on searches dated 9 March, 2013 the ads expose negative sentiments ranging from stereotyping as well as outright denial of women's rights.

"When we came across these searches, we were shocked by how negative they were and decided we had to do something with them," says Christopher Hunt, Art Director of the creative team. The idea developed places the text of the Google searches over the mouths of women portraits, as if to silence their voices.

"The ads are shocking because they show just how far we still have to go to achieve gender equality. They are a wake up call, and we hope that the message will travel far," adds Kareem Shuhaibar, copy writer.

For UN Women, the searches confirm the urgent need to continue making the case for women's rights, empowerment and equality, a cause the organization is pursuing around the world. UN Women is heartened by the initial strong reaction to the ads and hopes they will spark constructive dialogue globally.
Join the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag: #womenshould
Watch "The Autocomplete Truth", a new video by Memac Ogilvy & Mather Dubai highlighting gains and remaining challenges for women's equality:

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UN Women ad series reveals widespread sexism

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A series of ads, developed as a creative idea for UN Women by Memac Ogilvy & Mather Dubai, uses genuine Google searches to reveal the widespread prevalence of sexism and discrimination against women. Based on searches dated 9 March, 2013 the ads expose negative sentiments ranging from stereotyping as well as outright denial of women's rights.

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Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg chastised world leaders Monday for failing younger generations by not taking sufficient steps to stop climate change.

"You have stolen my childhood and my dreams with your empty words," Thunberg said at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York.

Thunberg traveled to the U.S. by sailboat last month so she could appear at the summit. She and other youth activists led international climate strikes on Friday in an attempt to garner awareness ahead of the UN's meeting of political and business leaders.

WATCH: Greta Thunberg's full speech to world leaders at UN Climate Action Summit

Read Greta Thunberg's speech below:

This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you?

You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, and yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering, people are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?

For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight? You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency, but no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil and that I refuse to believe.

The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in ten years only gives us a 50 percent chance of staying below 1.5 degrees and the risk of setting up irreversible chain reactions beyond human control. Fifty percent may be acceptable to you, but those numbers do not include tipping points most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution, or the aspects of equity and climate justice.

They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist. So a 50 percent risk is simply not acceptable to us. We who have to live with the consequences. To have a 67 percent chance of staying below the 1.5 degree of temperature rise, the best odds given by the IPCC, the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on January 1, 2018.

Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons. How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just business as usual and some technical solutions? With today's emissions levels, that remaining CO2 that entire budget will be gone is less than 8 and a half years. There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today because these numbers are too uncomfortable and you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.

You are failing us, but young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say we will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this, right here, right now, is where we draw the line. The world is waking up, and change is coming whether you like it or not.

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Read climate activist Greta Thunberg's speech to the UN

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Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg chastised world leaders Monday for failing younger generations by not taking sufficient steps to stop climate change. "You have stolen my childhood and my dreams with your empty words," Thunberg said at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York. Thunberg traveled to the U.S.

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Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face) (article) | Khan Academy

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Adverts by Olivero Toscani - United Colours of Benetton - Race 

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Adverts by Olivero Toscani - United Colours of Benetton - Race 

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The Power of Makeup (Korean Commercial for Mom's Touch burgers)

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The Power of Makeup (Korean Commercial for Mom's Touch burgers)

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The Power of Makeup (Korean Commercial for Mom's Touch burgers)

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‎Stephen Fry’s 7 Deadly Sins on Apple Podcasts

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Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder and current[...]

The Paradox of Choice: The more choices a person has, the less satisfied the person is with any of the choices. Technology, despite its best intentions, exacerbates this paradox. It also succeeds in disconnecting us while it seeks to connect us.

The Paradox of Choice: The more choices a person has, the less satisfied the person is with any of the choices. Technology, despite its best intentions, exacerbates this paradox. It also succeeds in disconnecting us while it seeks to connect us. We're facing a situation in which the desire to present one's best self overtakes the importance of live, in-person contact, which then leads to weaker relationships as a whole.

Dr. Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self is an expert on mobile technology and social networking. In this video, she runs through the various unintended consequences of technologies such as Tinder and Chatroulette.

Dr. Turkle's newest book is Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age.

Sherry Turkle: The use of devices in romance is a very complicated story. Because obviously it brings people together in ways that are bringing tremendous efficiencies into the area of our intimacies and in some ways that's a good thing. But it also is having some paradoxical effects. Like there's this thing called The Paradox of Choice where if you're given a limited number of choices, you sort of choose and are happy with the limited number of choices and you say, "Okay, I'm choosing among 50 women who live more or less in my neighborhood or 50 women who I'm probably going to date in the course of my lifetime and I'll be pretty discriminating, but of those 50 or 75 women, I'll try to meet someone I really like. I'll explore those relationships." If you're swiping through 10,000 women, that's your expectation; it's like, "Whoa the 10,001st that will be a real one." I mean it's kind of like you're offered so many that it almost becomes impossible to think of choosing on any one because the next one could be the real one.

So people who were offered more choices start to be very unhappy with any of their choices. This has been studied in the area of being offered chocolate candy more than it's been studied in the area of being offered romantic partners. But we see that happening in how people talk about romantic partners, that it's just kind of too much, too overwhelming, you know; it's that Chatroulette swipe that became the Tinder swipe that became a sort of just kind of moving on. So that's kind of a side effect of the world of choice and romance that people start to complain about.

And then second, people want to have a lot of their conversations online in romance because they feel they can be there's best self online. They can edit. The notion of editing in romance, the notion of being a better self, a more empathic yourself, your best self comes up a lot. People want to be lovable. People don't want to be rejected. And there's this fantasy that you won't be rejected if you have a chance to kind of listen to what this beautiful woman has said to you and construct the answer that will be kind of the most wonderful for her. But in the course of doing that, she's kind of not seeing you warts and all and she's doing the same thing. And I study one couple, their emails over the years, and they're both editing and they're missing the fundamentals that they need to deal with because they're both editing and you just want to get these people into a room. As you read their edited relationship as they're presenting themselves online, you just see how they're missing the fundamentals because they're not picking up the clues that they would if they were face to face. Ultimately they break up. And I think that we're getting too used to being able to present our edited selves. And again, there's nothing wrong with using technology in romance, but we also have to remember that we're connecting with someone who needs to know who we are, not who we wish we were and we could edit ourselves into.

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder and current[...]

The Paradox of Choice: The more choices a person has, the less satisfied the person is with any of the choices. Technology, despite its best intentions, exacerbates this paradox. It also succeeds in disconnecting us while it seeks to connect us.

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Technology Is Harming Our Relationships, and We Can Stop It

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The Paradox of Choice: The more choices a person has, the less satisfied the person is with any of the choices. Technology, despite its best intentions, exacerbates this paradox. It also succeeds in disconnecting us while it seeks to connect us.

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In The Empathy Diaries, the pioneering computer researcher finally studies her own life. She tells WIRED why now was the right time.

Sherry Turkle has lived many lives. There is the Turkle who pioneered the study of technology as a culture, who created for herself a new interdisciplinary field of research at MIT. There is the Turkle who has authored books about what screens do to our relationships, and who has become a fierce advocate for in-person conversations. Then there's "French Sherry," the version of herself who lived in Paris in 1968, and who catalogued the rise of Jacques Lacan, the psychoanalyst known as the "French Freud." She was once not Sherry Turkle at all, but Sherry Zimmerman-a name that tied her to her biological father, and an identity that her mother made her hide for years.

These lives are contained within Turkle's latest book, The Empathy Diaries, a memoir that unspools years of personal and professional history. The book begins in Rockaway Beach, New York, where Turkle shares a one-bedroom apartment with her mother, aunt Mildred, and grandparents, and where Turkle learns to bear a strange secret about herself and her family history. It ends shortly after Turkle is awarded tenure at MIT in 1983, when computers are still clunky, cubical, and far from mainstream.

Turkle, who in 1996 became the first woman featured on a WIRED cover, has long viewed computers as a kind of Rorschach test: Our attitude toward them says something about ourselves. Her memoir functions in much the same way. Some readers will no doubt gravitate toward the glimpses of early computer culture at places like the "magical incubator" of MIT's Building 20. Others will see the book as a story of the struggle for identity, belonging, and a sense of self.

The Empathy Diaries, which comes out March 2, offers a cogent, if sometimes painful account of the personal experiences that shaped her professional ideas. Even for those who haven't followed Turkle's career, it still functions as a gripping story of a woman's life. WIRED called Turkle to talk about the book, her views on screen time during the pandemic, and how to find connection in times of loneliness.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. WIRED: Before we talk about the book, I want to ask you about the last year. You've written extensively about the ways that technology can create emotional distance between people, even as it claims to connect them. The last year seems like it would've been a major test of that thesis. Has the pandemic reinforced your ideas about connection onscreen or challenged them?
Sherry Turkle: It's turned everything upside down. Instead of being together, we've been together alone. But actually, it's brought out, in my view, some of the best that technology can do for us, in the sense that we've had to be more creative with technology, because technology was all we had. I've found uses of technology that went beyond the boring and deadening uses of the internet. For example, I started watching Patrick Stewart read, every week, a sonnet from his porch. When he got to Sonnet 20, he said, "I'm not going to read Sonnet 20. I don't like the way it depicts women." And so we skipped it. And I think if he'd been Patrick Stewart on a stage reading Shakespeare's sonnets, he would have had to read Sonnet 20. It was kind of on this border between being an actor and being himself, as someone who loves Shakespeare. Yo-Yo Ma, same thing. He performed cello concerts from his kitchen. He called them "Songs of Solace," that were both for other people but also for himself. There was this betwixt and between quality to them. Were they for him? Of course. It was his solace. But they were also performances for all of us.

The social scientists call these "liminal spaces," these moments where something really very new and creative comes up. The sense of participation and collective healing in these moments really brought out something in the internet that I thought was unique and wonderful and very special-and that I hadn't participated in on the internet for a really long time. Given that I've so often been associated as a technological critic, I want to celebrate that. When people have great intent, and great desire, and full attention to turn this medium into something extraordinary, they can. The trouble is, we're more likely to use it to make some money, to scrape some data, to turn it into something other than its highest form.
Right, but in terms of connection-almost all of our social experiences are being mediated by screens right now. The usual touchstones are mostly taking place on FaceTime or Zoom. How are you thinking about the impact of that?
You know, for such a long time we've said, "I'll just send a text. I'll just FaceTime my mother. That'll be enough." Now we're likely to be much more deliberate, because we know what we've missed when we only do that. When you feel as though you always have enough time in the world to do whatever you want, you're sloppy. You substitute. But once it's taken away from you, you're more sensitive to what you've been missing. That is one of the things that's come out of our deprivation. It's easy to say, "I'll just send my daughter a quick text. She's busy and I'll see her next week." Once it's taken away from you, you say, "No, no, I want to see her in person."

Now, some people think we've developed a kind of hardening and we've gotten used to the remote. Where I fear that most is not in the realm of personal relationships, but in the realm of institutional relationships. In terms of personal relationships, I think we're eager to not have too much screen time again, when we really want to see somebody's face. I think where we're more vulnerable is in institutional relationships, where businesses are saying, "You know all those meetings that we had? We saved a lot of money doing those meetings remotely, and the meetings seemed to go pretty well." Or in schools: "Professor Turkle taught those classes. The students seem to learn a ton. She could teach that course remotely to a lot more people." I wouldn't have had my successes in my life had I not been mentored face-to-face so many times, by so many people who cared about me and who paid attention to me. I don't think that's so easily done on a screen.

Mentoring really happens best face-to-face. I feel very strongly about that, even as we've gotten so used to screens in this pandemic. It bothers me that my students like to skip office hours and send me their best ideas over email, and then ask me to write back with my best ideas. It's because they don't want to be vulnerable. You know, even in this telephone call, I'm being vulnerable. I could say something stupid, and you could say, "Wow, that's not very smart." Whereas if I was writing to you, I'd never let something stupid come out, because I'd edit it. So my students know that if they write to me, they can fix it all up and never say something stupid. But good ideas happen not because everybody's sending one great idea, and then I send them a great idea. It happens when a student has an idea and the professor says something like, "That's not that good. Why don't we work on that together and then come back next week?" Don't send me something perfect and smart and clever. Send me something not finished so I can say to you, "We'll work on this together again." That's how relationships form that will be sustaining.
It makes me wonder about children, who have had not just school but social experiences and extracurriculars replaced by screen time for an entire year. What do you see as the consequence of that?

Learning is going to be made up much more quickly than the social skills. A year of skills-I approach you, you approach me, we circle each other, we start to sniff each other out, you share a secret, I share a secret, all that-that's a very long year, as opposed to losing a year of algebra. These are the costs of the pandemic. Not all children have suffered as much as other children. Some parents and siblings and "pods" have made up for some of it. But I think this is going to be a very different cohort, with a lot of remedial work around love and attention needing to be paid to them.

That reminds me of my favorite thing that I love to hate: Artificial intelligence to chat with them is really not the answer. One of the funniest things that happened to me during the pandemic was that I'm called by this New York Times reporter who tells me how, much to my astonishment, everyone-millions of people, he says-are downloading this avatar who will be your therapist, or your best friend. It's called Replika.

Oh, yeah, I know Replika.

He wanted my comment: Why are all of these people talking to Replika in the middle of the pandemic? They're all using it as a friend, as a therapist, this thing where you're talking to a machine. So, not to be a spoilsport, I decided to see what's up. So I go online and I make a Replika. I make as nice a Replika as I can possibly make, and I said, "I want to talk to you about the thing that's most on my mind." It says, "Oh, absolutely." So I say, "OK, well, I'm lonely. Can you talk to me about loneliness? I'm living here alone. I'm managing, but I'm lonely." It says, "Oh, absolutely." So I said, "OK, well, what do you know about loneliness?" And she says, "It's warm and fuzzy."

I thought, this is too stupid. This must be a bug. But I got back to the New York Times reporter and I said, look, if you want to talk about your problems, if you're lonely, if you're fearing death-you really have to talk to somebody who has a body. It has to be somebody with some skin in the game. Pretend empathy is not what people need right now. And pretend empathy is what it is. If we just give our children and ourselves pretend empathy, we're in risk of losing our sensibility for how important the real thing is. I think that's a big danger. That we get so enamored with what machines can do that we forget what only people can do.
You arrive at a similar conclusion in your new book. You've written many books, but this one is the first that's entirely about you and your life story. Why did you decide to write it?
I had this belief, from being such an outsider in my own family, that there was always a story behind the story. That outsider status has given me a kind of superpower, because it's made me realize that there is always another story to tell. When people said that the computer was just a tool-and people said that to me for 20 or 30 years-I would always say, "OK, but what else? The computer is a tool, but what else?" The book is really about saying, well, what about me? What's the story behind my career? I decided to use some of the things I had learned studying other people to study my own life. I had always said that thought and feelings shouldn't be studied on separate floors. But then, what about me? What if I insisted I put my thoughts and feelings on the same floor?

I waited until I was at a point in my life when I wasn't angry, when I didn't have an ax to grind. I wasn't trying to get back at anyone or accomplish any tales of retribution. I felt I had an important story to tell about the atmosphere around the computer culture when I grew up in it. It was crazy, and it was very odd, and very interesting.
Did you learn anything surprising from studying your own life that way?
One thing that didn't occur to me until after I finished the book-I was editing for typos, but really, it was too late to change a word-was about the story about Steve Jobs. [ Jobs, who had just launched the Apple II computer, visited MIT in 1977. Turkle was asked to host a dinner on his behalf.] I worried that I made the wrong kind of food, and sure enough, he told me, "This is the wrong kind of vegetarian." But as I was editing for typos, it hit me: Why wasn't I invited to have a meeting with Steve Jobs? Why was my job to make him dinner? I was a professor at MIT. I was a fucking-excuse me. I was a professor, not a secretary or even a research fellow. I was a professor doing research in his area, and it never occurred to anyone that this woman who was doing research in his area should be one of the people to take a meeting with him in her office. Not to my credit, but it didn't occur to me either. It didn't occur to me for the 30 years in between. It didn't occur to me when I was writing the book. It only occurred to me while I was copy editing the book.
A big theme of your book are the secrets you kept and tried to uncover. Your mother left your father when you were very young, and after she remarried, she insisted that you use your stepfather's name, Turkle, instead of your legal name, Zimmerman. You also lost touch with your father after the remarriage and then spent years in your adulthood trying to track him down. I wonder if you've thought about how that would've played out differently in the internet age, which has collapsed so many information barriers.
That's a very interesting question. One thing that should be clear is that it was pretty ridiculous that my mother was able to keep this secret at all. It might've been only a secret in her own mind. Part of my confusion and dismay, growing up, was that I went to school and signed my name on my papers, Sherry Zimmerman. And then I did the 20-minute walk home, locked up my papers, and became Sherry Turkle. It was a tissue of lies woven to make my mother feel as though she had successfully shed her other identity, but it made me a little bit of a nut as a child. If I had to tell the story rationally, this was a secret kept from my half-siblings, who didn't know my name was Sherry Zimmerman. The people who participated in this charade understood that my mother wanted her other children not to know anything about a previous marriage, a previous father. She accomplished that. They found that out when I was 40 years old.

I do often think about the many hours that I spent looking through all of the phone books trying to find my father, and what I could've done with the internet. I've had many, many fantasies about whether, as a younger child, I would've found my father and somehow confronted my mother. But the truth is, there is another reason I didn't find him earlier. It was clear that he was toxic to my mother. When I finally decided that I was going to find him, my mother was dead, I had married, I had a kind of home of my own, and I was finally ready to find out what was wrong with him. Because I had sort of faced the fact that there had to be something wrong with him for my mother to keep him from me. I had seen other divorced people, I had seen various custody arrangements, and I knew that the father I had wasn't even on that spectrum.
There are a lot of lonely moments in your childhood. You're alone with this secret about your father. You're alone, in some ways, at MIT. Through that loneliness, you seem to have embedded yourself very deeply with your communities. It strikes me that we're in a moment of collective loneliness right now, and I wonder if you have any advice on how to push through that.
That's where I think [Victor] Turner [the cultural anthropologist who talks about "liminal spaces"] is so helpful. In the betwixt and between moments-these liminal moments-when the old rules don't count anymore, and the communities the people belong to break down. That's where we are now. We're alone. We thought we identified with a certain kind of Americanness, and now, no. The communities we belonged to don't make sense to us the way they did before. Organizations we belonged to we now see, well, that might've been a racist organization. Things are up for grabs. I saw that in May of 1968, and I see that now. That's a moment of deep loneliness, and deep anguish. And I think we're going to come out of this and really have an opportunity to create new kinds of bonds and new kinds of friendships and new kinds of affiliations. We're so yearning for each other, and the boundaries that we usually put up with each other are much more permeable. And I think that there's a possibility for very deep connection. That's my good news story. I think when we emerge, we're going to look at each other and say, "Well, what are we going to do next?"

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Sherry Turkle Talks Going Remote, Loneliness, and Her New Book

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In The Empathy Diaries, the pioneering computer researcher finally studies her own life. She tells WIRED why now was the right time. Sherry Turkle has lived many lives. There is the Turkle who pioneered the study of technology as a culture, who created for herself a new interdisciplinary field of research at MIT.

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Sherry Turkle, PhD, is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT; and the founder and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. She teaches about the psychology and sociology of how computers and cell phones change the way we learn, how we feel, and how they affect not just what we do but who we are. The author of a number of books, her most recent, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, was released in 2015 and investigates how a departure from conversation undermines our relationships, creativity, and productivity - and why reclaiming face-to-face conversation can help us recover lost and valuable skills.

What got you interested in tackling in your book the effects of technology - smartphones in particular - on communication among young people today?
I became very involved with noticing that people were doing more texting than talking. Particularly young people were having conversations and looking at their phones at the same time. They were talking more about what was on their phones than with each other.
We know that when people do that they're not able to maintain an empathic connection with the people they're with. All the research shows that combination really is bad for the kind of empathy that teenagers, in particular, need to build to grow up effectively. So I began to study this issue.

As you mentioned, we see a lot of young people today communicating via text or posts on Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. Can you explain the difference between connection and conversation?
Connection is a kind of degraded conversation. You're sitting with a bunch of friends at dinner. You're talking but all six of you also have your phones out. You're dividing your time between talking to each other and looking down at your phone. You keep the conversation light because you're paying attention to what's on your phone. What you have at that table isn't conversation, it's connection. It's conversation minus the empathy and the commitment to putting yourself in the other person's shoes.

Online, we often settle for connection because we can't do any better. You have connection when you have a Facebook interaction. You can acknowledge that you like something in a post, but it's not a conversation. It's connection without all the deeper things that can happen when you're really with someone and involved with what he or she has to say in a deeper way.

You talk about the importance of solitude and the growing lack of empathy among people today. At first glance, those two things don't necessarily seem related. Can you explain the connection?
This is the most important takeaway from my work. The capacity for solitude - the capacity to be at peace with yourself - is the groundwork for being able to form successful relationships. If you're content within yourself, you can then listen to another person and really hear what he or she has to say instead of just projecting onto him or her what you need to hear because you're not okay with yourself. Let them be who they are because you're okay with who you are. This really is the most important building block of relationships. That's what you want childhood to accomplish, what you want the lessons to lead to.

How do you think camp fits into promoting real conversation?
Children need to have a place to practice conversation. It's a crucial skill that we are losing in our culture. Grown-ups are not stepping up, they're stepping back. Eighty-nine percent of grown-ups said in their last conversation they pulled out a phone, and 82 percent acknowledged it was detrimental to the conversation (Turkle, 2015). Adults are modeling that for their children, and children are not learning how to have conversations.

We're going to be shocked if this generation of children grows up staring at the floor. There needs to be much more self-consciousness on the part of camps that they are part of the solution. It really is a call to action.

Camps can do the right thing. They say no cell phones. But the reason I wrote the book (Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age) was to really bring the evidence of the lack of empathy among children to the foreground so camps and other institutions can understand the critical role they play. As a culture, we haven't owned up to the degree to which we're letting our kids down. That's a really important next step. If we acknowledged the extent of the problem, we would take ourselves and kids more seriously, and schools and camps would better understand their role.

So how big a problem is this lack of solitude and growing lack of empathy among young people?
A recent study of college students showed that two-thirds of males and a fourth of the females studied would rather give themselves mild electric shocks than be alone with themselves for six minutes (Wilson et al, 2014). They couldn't be alone with their own thoughts. That shows that people are not willing/not able to have enough self-contentment to let their imaginations take them to someplace within.

Needing to turn to a screen is one of the greatest problems of our time. There has been a 40 percent decline in college students' ability to experience empathy (O'Brien, 2010). Most of this decline in empathy has happened in the last ten years, which makes us think that it has to do directly with the rise of smartphones.

If you don't teach your children to be alone, they'll only know how to be lonely. It's a very bad impasse that we've come to. It's a very dangerous impasse if after six minutes college students give themselves electroshocks rather than being alone with themselves.

The situation sounds pretty bleak. Is there no hope?
Reclaiming Conversation is an optimistic message. We can absolutely turn this around.

We have developed habits around how we are with phones that are damaging. It wasn't a conspiracy. The people who developed phones didn't say, "Here's a way to mess around with the minds of children." They really didn't understand the unintended consequences. We really didn't do ourselves a favor, and now we have to make it right. Camps are a very big part of this story. It is crucial that children have a place to go where they don't have their phones.

Camps can be part of the turnaround in our culture, the coming back to ourselves, the kinds of conversations that are going to bring us back to our empathic connection with each other. Did you know within just five days at sleepaway camp, the capacity for empathy starts to be restored?

That is pretty remarkable. How do camps accomplish that?
Camps are a place where children can practice conversation. You can take a phone away from children in a nonpunitive way and give them the experience of talking. And solitude, imagination, mind wandering, and even boredom are such an important part of healthy mental life. Some children only have this when they go away to camp and their phone is taken away. Kids rediscover their imaginations when they're at camp, and that's tremendously important.

When the empathy levels that have been suppressed start to come back, in my own experiences at camp, children are aware of what's changed. On a hike, they don't even first comment on the scenery; they comment on the fact that their imaginations wander. I think that's just amazing - that they're so deprived of that happening that they're commenting on the experience of letting their imaginations wander and not being constantly connected.

They talk about how their conversations at camp are better than their conversations with friends at home. Not because their friends at home are less interesting, but because they talk about what's on their phones instead of what's on their minds. When I visit dining halls in schools and colleges, kids have their phones out and they're talking about what's on their phones; at camp they're looking into each other eyes and having real conversations about what's going on in their lives. That's very compelling.

If camps are lucky, they get kids for two weeks in the summer, and perhaps multiple summers in a row. Any advice to camp directors and counselors for making the most of that time and promoting real conversations?
I think they should do a little bit more in parent education, and they should educate their counselors about the importance of the story and their place in the story. There's a sense that the lack of phones is good, but reaching out to explain to counselors what's at stake and the roles they're playing, and to parents about what's been accomplished at camp and how to continue that in the home, is really important.

The skills developed at camp need to be brought forward into the kids' home lives. Parents can't step back; they need to step up.

[Cell phones and divided attention] - these are very ingrained cultural habits. But a lot is at stake. We're really at a turning point. It's too early to say that the game is lost, but we're starting to see the cost. Children are extremely resilient, but we really need to step up and give them these opportunities for deep conversations and truly connecting on an emotional level - because they don't have enough of those opportunities and children really want them.

That was one of the most stunning parts of my research - learning that children want these opportunities. They are tired of tugging at the hands of their parents, babysitters, and caretakers and having these people be on the phone. I don't think adults realize the degree to which they are making themselves inaccessible to children. And now children are making themselves inaccessible to each other.

That's why camps are so crucial.

References
O'Brien, K. (2010, October 17). The empathy deficit. The Boston Globe. Retrieved from boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/10/17/the_empathy_deficit/
Wilson T.D., et al. (2014, July). Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind. Science. Retreived from http://science.sciencemag.org/content/345/6912/75.full
Turkle, S. (2015, December 9.) Personal Communication

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Reclaiming Conversation: An Interview with Sherry Turkle

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Sherry Turkle, PhD, is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT; and the founder and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.