Jacinda Ardern

Labour MP Jacinda Ardern talks to SHARON LUNDY of NZPA about the path to becoming Parliament's youngest current MP.

Wellington, July 8 NZPA - Labour's youngest MP, Jacinda Ardern, is pretty glamorous, but her six months in New York were anything but a scene from Sex in the City.

Think instead of soup kitchens and dossing on a friend's couch -- what the 28-year-old describes as the "grittier" side of New York.

Ms Ardern headed off on her OE after the 2005 election, having been part of then prime minister Helen Clark's advisory team.

Flights were cheap, she had a friend in New York who was a fellow member of the International Union of Social Youth, so the Big Apple it was.

"Visas were pretty difficult and I just took a gamble and decided I would see if I could make it work once I got there," she said.

"It was pretty tough."

Many 24-year-old women living in New York probably aspire to a few Sex in the City moments; buying a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes or or sipping cocktails in the hippest bars.

Instead, Ms Ardern was making meatballs for 150 homeless people and joining them for lunch.

"I probably didn't experience that kind of glamorous side of New York," she concedes. "I saw the grittier side, I guess."

She initially volunteered for the Service Employees International Union, one of the biggest unions in the United States, working on campaigns such as Justice for Janitors.

Then it was on to a soup kitchen in Brooklyn; working there was the highlight of her time in New York, she says.

"(But) when I got to a point when I was eating lunch while I was there, I thought it was probably time to go and get a job that was going to pay me.

"It started getting a little bit desperate.

"I'd been living on a couch that entire time. It was a nice couch but a couch nonetheless."

The New York sojourn was Ms Ardern's second US experience; she spent a semester in 2001 at Arizona State University and was there during the September 11 terrorist attacks.

"It went from being a very conservative place to being an ultra conservative place," Ms Ardern says.

"It's a level of patriotism that I'm just not used to, and I found it quite hard."

Initial rumours were that the terrorists were from Afghanistan, and Ms Ardern's flatmate had the solution -- the US should simply "go in and just wipe Afghanistan out".

"I remember having a bit of a chat to her about it and being a bit negative towards her and she just said to me `well I don't think you should say anything in class about it today, because no one wants to hear from a foreigner'," she says.

When Ms Ardern dared to suggest during class, several weeks later, that people should look at why the attacks had happened, she was shut down.

"My lecturer said `well are you telling me that if I understood why it happened I would be okay that 3000 people had died'," she says.

"I thought well if that's where the academics are going then I didn't hold much hope."

Ms Ardern's interest in politics, and a wish to fix the cause rather than concentrating on the effect, grew gradually as she did.

The Ardern family -- Ross and Laurell, and daughters Louise and Jacinda -- moved to Murupara when the girls were young.

"My memories of that place are vivid. I knew a lot of people had lost their jobs, but I didn't understand it was caused by the privatisation of the forestry industry and the complete lack of support from central government," she said in her maiden speech to Parliament.

"I knew there were suicides, and that the girl that babysat my sister and I one day turned yellow from hepatitis and couldn't visit any more. But I didn't understand the linkages between all of this and the poverty in the community I was living in.

"My passion for social justice came from what I saw; my love of politics came when I realised that it was the key to changing what I saw."

The family later moved to Morrinsville, with Ms Ardern attending Morrinsville College before heading to Waikato University, where she studied a Bachelor of Communication Studies through the management school.

After graduating, Ms Ardern headed for Wellington, where she worked for several ministers -- Phil Goff, followed by Harry Duynhoven and Miss Clark.

That work set her up for a post-New York stint in Britain, where she worked in the cabinet office in a unit set up by the prime minister Tony Blair.

She was also seconded to the Home Office to work on a review of policing in Britain and Wales.

She found the British system, with its 300-plus MPs, very different from that of New Zealand.

"The thing that struck me was the level to which civil servants had such an overt role in the operation of the cabinet, for instance," she says.

"We would know every other minister's position on an issue before our minister went into a meeting and could virtually script the way meetings were going to go, in a way you just couldn't do here."

In early 2008, Ms Ardern's thoughts turned to the looming election in New Zealand and how she could drum up support for Labour among ex-pats.

She planned just to get people enrolled to vote, and raise awareness of the election. Then someone suggested she stand for Parliament.

Convinced, she quit her job and concentrated on campaigning. As a young kiwi on her OE, she knew where to find the backpacker set -- although she did draw the line at campaigning at that infamous antipodean haunt, The Church.

Ms Ardern headed back to New Zealand in October and a month later found herself in Parliament. She was soundly beaten in the Waikato electorate by sitting National MP Lindsay Tisch but was high enough on the Labour list to make it into Parliament.

The transformation from Young Labour member to MP was complete. And as for her aspirations?

"I'm not sure that when someone joins a company, people immediately ask the new employee `so do you want to be the chief executive'," she says.

"I'm happy to be here."