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The café that hosted both Dame Jacinda Ardern and The Late Show host Stephen Colbert during his visit when she was the prime minister has shut down.
The Auckland business, KIND, cited economic headwinds that had failed to improve in the years following Covid lockdowns.
Its closure comes at a time when 44-year-old Ardern, now residing in the United States, is facing calls to return to her homeland to testify at an inquiry regarding her administration’s handling of the Covid pandemic.
The café owners issued a statement about it’s closure to social media on Monday.
“We are shutting down permanently tonight… Economic challenges, rising costs, and high rent are some of the reasons for our decision to close. We have been struggling for too long, hoping for a change that hasn’t come,” the announcement stated.
‘KIND was founded as a social enterprise to make the neighbourhood of Morningside a greener and healthier place to live. We have been part of this awesome neighborhood for seven years and still love it.
Thank you to all our neighbours and customers who have supported us through the good times, the covid times and the hard times. We wish we could have kept going, but it was not to be. In a world where you can be many things, be kind.’
Ardern took Colbert to the café when he visited in October 2019 after she had invited the Lord of the Rings fan to visit when she appeared as a guest on The Late Show a year earlier.
The Late Show host Stephen Colbert, KIND café co-owner Cathie Cottle and Jacinda Ardern
The café said economic headwinds had caused it to close in the years following Covid
A Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Covid-19 response in New Zealand has held public hearings this week.
A first stage of the inquiry was held in 2023 and this second stage will look at vaccines and lockdown decisions made by the government in 2021 and 2022.
Ardern has lived in Boston since late 2023 and there have been calls for her to return to give evidence at the inquiry, which she has indicated through a spokesperson she is prepared to consider.
The mother-of-one, who is the joint-youngest women to give birth while a sitting world leader, was a popular prime minister for most of her time in office but her approval rating plummeted before she resigned in January 2023.
Since leaving office, she has made few incursions back into public life, but has expanded on her time in office in her memoir, A Different Kind of Power, released in June by Penguin Random House subsidiary Crown.
She re-entered the political fray in May with a rallying call for internationalism, rebuking the inward outlook of the US under President Donald Trump.
She spoke at Yale College’s Class Day, the undergraduate arm of the prestigious Ivy League university ands opted against ‘the usual pep talk that perhaps you might expect’ in an address witnessed by thousands.
‘The world,’ she said, ‘Over the course of a few short months, moved from tumultuous to an all-out dumpster fire.’
Ardern gave an address at Yale in May that was politically charged
‘There’s the war in the Middle East and Europe, with both leaving questions over our sense of humanity.
‘The daily reminder of climate change that bangs on our door but falls on deaf ears at the highest echelons of power.
‘Challenges to rules around trade, increases in migration flows, and a decreasing regard for civil rights and human rights, including the right to be who you are.’
Ardern said the world stood at an ‘inflection point in global politics’, fuelled by post-pandemic economic challenges, when politicians needed to care for the most vulnerable.
‘Some of the greatest leaders here in the United States have recognised that amongst all of the challenges politicians face, they must meet the most basic needs of their citizens, first and foremost,’ she said.
‘FDR (former president Franklin D Roosevelt) said in 1944 while still governing a country at war, ”true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made”.’
Ardern supported unsuccessful Democratic candidate for president Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, appearing at party events.
In a thinly veiled attack on Trump’s America First economic doctrine, she said isolationism was an ‘illusion’.
‘You cannot remain untouched by the impacts of infectious disease. A trade stand-off can never just hurt your competitors,’ she said.
‘A warming planet does not produce extreme weather that respects borders, and far-flung wars may not take the lives of your citizens but it will take away their sense of security and humanity.
‘We are connected. We always have been,’ she said.
