Jacinda Ardern’s resignation as Prime Minister has seen commentary varying from hagiographic flim-flam to an accurate accounting of what was promised, but was not delivered. She was variously described as a ‘reluctant leader who brought a better brand of leadership’ and ‘incompetent and vacuous’. One commentator re-invented history by claiming that ‘few leaders have had to shoulder the sort of challenges she has endured in the five years since assuming high office’. That commentator saw her being only the second woman to give birth while in office and the bringing of her baby to the UN as formidable achievements that ‘helped make her a global symbol for modern and achieving women’.

However, Ardern’s own words on resigning condemn her as a feminist failure and a shallow symbol for ‘modern and achieving women’. After five years and three months as Prime Minister she stated, ‘I know what this job takes. And I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice.’

What abject surrender and spineless self-pitying. So much for youth and a truly benign environment in which to ‘lead’ being on her side, and so much for the feminist expectation of equality with men. The ‘sort of challenges she has endured in five years’ in no way compare with those faced and embraced by other world leaders, considerably older than she, today and in the past.

Abraham Lincoln was 51 when he became the US President. His presidency comprised four years of a vicious civil war aimed at destroying the Union. He was ready to run again for President at the age of 56 before his assassination. Winston Churchill was 65 when he became UK Prime Minister and spent his entire time in office – five years and two months – fighting and winning a world war. He was a mere 71 and later 76 when he ran again for re-election. David Ben-Gurion was 61 when he became Prime Minister of Israel. He led Israel in a desperate ten-month war against five attacking Arab nations, fighting in the shadow of the Holocaust not just for Jewish independence but for national survival.

Golda Meir became Prime Minister of Israel at the age of 70. Like Ardern, Meir led her country for five years and three months, but the challenges she faced were incomparable to those of the young, healthy, and fêted Jacinda – Meir had the challenges of the 1972 murder by Palestinian terrorists of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games and the ‘close-run’ 1973 Yom-Kippur War when Israel was again attacked by Arab armies determined to annihilate the Jews. At the age of 74, and despite public anger at her leadership during the war, she stood for re-election and won. Ardern has sniffed public anger and has cut and run before the next New Zealand election.

Margaret Thatcher was 50 years old when she became UK Prime Minister and remained so for fifteen years. The challenges she faced were innumerable, including war in the Falklands. She was a woman of conviction who stood her ground and fought her corner. Together with US President Ronald Reagan (aged 69 when he became President and 73 when he ran again for re-election and won) she helped bring down the appalling and murderous ‘socialist paradise’ of the Soviet Union.

These men and women, probably unknown to today’s ill-educated and historically ignorant, were real leaders. Most were trained in leadership – others learnt it in the crucible of conflict and rose magnificently to the occasion.

With the exception of Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, and our late sovereign, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, Western leaders today are a miserable, feckless, useless lot. Zelensky was 41 when he became president and 44 when his country was invaded by Russia. For the past eleven months he has provided superb leadership and put his country and people before himself. When offered evacuation by both America and Turkey he famously retorted: ‘The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.’ He has not even thought, let alone talked of ‘no more in the tank’. Queen Elizabeth’s 70 years of selfless service stand in stark contrast to Ardern’s five and half years of luxuriating in a Woke limelight. Her Majesty’s tank must have emptied long ago, but she kept on working and serving until her death at 96.

Recent leaders of Australia have consistently shown self-interest, disloyalty, and cowardice as their leadership attributes. They lack training in leadership. Being elected leader of a party does not make one a leader. If asked what were the principles of leadership all would be hard-pressed to answer. If they could trot out some leadership principles in the glib drivel of professional politicians, in no way have they absorbed them, nor have they ever practised them.

Kevin Rudd’s political cowardice meant capitulation to the ‘great moral challenge of our generation’. Turnbull, Rudd’s mirror-image in these appalling personality traits, was overwhelmed when told of the 2015 Bataclan theatre massacre in Paris. The easy times for him were over; it was time to step up and be a wartime Prime Minister, but reality was daunting. Phil Coorey of the Australian Financial Review reported Turnbull as being ‘uncharacteristically, visibly nervous’ when fronting the media in Berlin to make his first comments on the Paris atrocities – a photographer was asked to stop taking photos ‘so Turnbull could compose himself’. He was no Churchill – nor Lincoln, nor Thatcher.

Former Prime Minister Scott Morrison abdicated his leadership, hiding behind his invention of a National Cabinet to avoid ultimate responsibility and accountability, while engaging in knee-jerk ‘crisis management’ of the China Virus inflicted on the world by the Chinese Communist Party. State premiers unashamedly pulled Morrison’s strings, reneged on agreements, and blamed all failures on his hapless and feckless ‘leadership’. Of telling note is the hard fact that in the Australian Health Management Plan for Pandemic Influenza, the ‘Ultimate Decision-maker’, a vital component of any crisis management plan, is not identified. More spineless and cowardly leadership was seen only in Victoria where Daniel Andrews and his government presided over the avoidable deaths of 801 elderly nursing home residents. Andrews side-stepped responsibility and accountability with his trade-mark political cunning.

So Jacinda, your five years and three months of supposed challenging and draining leadership are nothing compared to the times and challenges of others – men and women – in the past and today.

You are no role model for my daughter and other women like her with service in the armed forces – long tours as leaders on military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and at Kabul Airport to manage the reality of Biden’s shameful surrender to the Taliban. She and they faced real challenges under less salubrious conditions than yours – and they have plenty ‘left in the tank’.