Jacinda Ardern will make a perfect professor. You don’t need a PhD to know that

October 27, 2026 — 3:23pm

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If you could pick one moment, one person, to help us sort the bloody mess we are in, you’d have to say the vice chancellor of the University of Sydney had luck – and love – on his side. I’m not the most sentimental or even the most superstitious of people but Mark Scott’s appointment of former NZ PM and flag-bearer for decency Jacinda Ardern as a professor of practice may, could, should be a turning point in our politics.

In the same month that the member for Indi, Helen Haines, was brutally attacked, in the same month that those who should know better called for Anne Aly to be stoned in the square, in the very same month that Victorian MP Georgie Purcell got a message from a constituent saying he wished the young Animal Justice Party representative had been the victim of the Haines attack – Ardern’s appointment must work as an antidote to all that.

Universities are still the places that educate our leaders. The........

© The Sydney Morning Herald