After sharing a few ‘if you do it, I’ll do its’, they signed up to join the Labour Party. What started as “a bit of a joke” led to her receiving a scholarship to attend an international women’s rights conference in Melbourne next week.
The 18-year-old from Redcliffs will be rubbing shoulders with the very person who inspired her in the first place.
She is attending the Women Deliver conference from Monday to Thursday, and will be helping facilitate a session with Global 50/50 about feminist leadership principles and another about democracy and conflict.
“I really wasn’t expecting to be chosen, but it’s really exciting. Melbourne is such an amazing city and there’s some real inspirations of mine going,” she said.
She applied for the scholarship in the middle of last year after seeing it in a newsletter she subscribed to. She had to supply information about the work she had done in her local community and how it relates to young women.
The conference will feature keynote speakers such as Ardern, Helen Clark and former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard.
“I’m really looking forward to seeing Jacinda, I think she’s just been such a big inspiration for me,” she said.
“Julia Gillard as well, she’s another one who I just think has been such an incredible leader and role model for young women around the world.”
Love-Smith has always had a passion for social justice, which was reinforced after joining the Labour Party in 2023.
“I think we really learnt how to articulate the things that we’d always kind of believed to be true,” she said.
“When you find yourself in those kind of rooms, you start to realise how much politics affects the every day.
“I got to know the people who hold positions of power and how those systems work, I think that’s the first step into learning and being able to create change is understanding how change comes about.”
She was also on the Rūnaka Taiohi o Ōtautahi Christchurch Youth Council for two years, where she co-founded an inter-school shoe drive.
“We brought out over 1000 pairs of second-hand shoes to children in need in primary schools in east Christchurch,” she said.
She is currently a spokesperson for Make It 16 – an organisation trying to lower the age of voting in elections – and is a project advisor for Gen Z Aotearoa, which is focused on helping youth movements thrive.
“I think it’s ridiculous that I’m able to be a member of a political party at 15, I can have that experience and then at 16 I’m still unable to vote,” she said.
“When we’re facing issues like climate change, an ageing work population, these kind of things that would disproportionately affect young people, the generations still in school and the generations yet to be born, if we can’t value their perspectives and their input, then we’re never going to see real change.”
She is also passionate about gender equality and wants to see pay equity laws reinstated.
“Our care and support workers, general practice nurses are such crucial parts of our healthcare system and to see the scheme to support closing the gender pay gap and acknowledges female dominated industries do suffer, I was really disappointed to see the Government make that change.”
Along with her advocacy work, she is in her first year at Canterbury University, studying a Bachelor of Law and a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in politics and minoring in youth and community development.
She moved to Hagley College for her final year of high school. Its alternate education allowed her to do a political science paper at UC for which she received an A.
Love-Smith was Labour List MP Tracey McLellan’s youth MP last year.
She was part of the group of youth MPs who said they were told not to criticise the Government and avoid speaking on major political issues at Youth Parliament.
“We were genuinely discouraged by the miscommunication around that, but I think having that experience of being able to prepare a press release, prepare our statements and do a press conference on the steps of Parliament is one of the best experiences you can get as a Youth MP,” she said.
