New Zealand has announced it will outlaw smoking for the next generation, so that those who are aged 14 and under today will never be legally able to buy tobacco.
New legislation means the legal smoking age will increase every year, to create a smoke-free generation of New Zealanders, associate health minister Dr Ayesha Verrall said
Continue reading...Legislation will mean people currently aged 14 and under will never be able to legally purchase tobacco
New Zealand has announced it will outlaw smoking for the next generation, so that those who are aged 14 and under today will never be legally able to buy tobacco.
New legislation means the legal smoking age will increase every year, to create a smoke-free generation of New Zealanders, associate health minister Dr Ayesha Verrall said on Thursday.
Continue reading...Two years ago New Zealand’s Whakaari volcano eruption killed 22 people and changed the lives of many others forever
On a pristine day two years ago, a group of mostly international day-trippers boarded boats and chugged over to Whakaari/White Island, a small active volcano and popular tourist destination 48km off New Zealand’s east coast. The guests roamed the moon-like landscape, observing the strangeness of a bubbling, living rock. But below the surface, pressure was building.
At 2.11pm, while 47 people were on the island, the volcano erupted, spewing a mushroom cloud of steam, gases, rock and ash into the air. The eruption killed 22 people, seriously injured 25 and changed the lives of many families forever. It became the country’s deadliest volcanic disaster since the 1886 eruption of Mount Tarawera.
Continue reading...Venues that say they respect personal choices may sound community-minded but really they undermine efforts to keep everyone safe
Like most Aucklanders, I can’t wait to get out of the city. After more than three months in lockdown, I’m keen for a break. Last summer, my partner and I went to Tauranga. We had so much fun that we’re planning to return – but this time, things will be different.
As Aotearoa New Zealand shifts from the Covid-19 “alert level” system to the new “traffic light” system, hospitality venues have been given a choice. Under the “red” and “orange” settings, they can welcome customers inside, but only if they’re willing to check vaccine passes. If they don’t want to do that, their service has to be contactless.
Continue reading...The new National leader is a millionaire, anti-abortion, ex-CEO who owns seven homes and is against increases to the minimum wage
In the end, the party of business picked the businessman. Former National party leader Simon Bridges is out – again – and former Air New Zealand chief executive and MP for Botany, Christopher Luxon, is in.
In hindsight it seems like it was always a done deal. Sir John Key, the former prime minister and National party leader, was a prominent supporter while outgoing leader Judith Collins was running an “anyone but Bridges” policy, effectively handing the leadership to Luxon (and making him a hostage to her and her faction’s demands in the process). Political commentators were picking Luxon as a future leader before entering parliament and, only one year later, here he is.
Continue reading...Vaccinated people in New Zealand’s largest city can now go to the pub for the first time in over 100 days
In Auckland, nature was healing. The ungroomed lined up for their eyebrow appointments. Bars flung open their doors with the promise of free drinks. Locals posted photos of their flat whites and brunch menus. The city’s sky tower was lit up for the first day of the “traffic light” reopening. And, in perhaps the truest sign that the gridlock-plagued city was on its pathway to normalcy, four lanes of the southern motorway were bumper to bumper.
The traffic light system, announced by prime minister Jacinda Ardern in late November, ends lockdowns in favour of restrictions on the unvaccinated. The red, orange and green levels depend on vaccination rates and the level of strain on the health system, but even at red – the strictest level – businesses are fully open to the vaccinated, with some restrictions on gathering size.
Continue reading...Luxon, who has spent just a year in parliament, will be the party’s fifth leader in as many years after he replaced Judith Collins
New Zealand’s opposition has announced a new leader, former airline boss Christopher Luxon, after its leader Judith Collins flamed out of the role last week.
The National party emerged from its caucus meeting on Tuesday to announce Luxon, a political novice and former Air New Zealand chief executive, would be taking the party’s helm. He will be National’s fifth leader in as many years, and will work alongside deputy Nicola Willis. The party was forced into a new leadership vote last week, after leader Judith Collins self-destructed in an ill-fated attempt to take down political rival Simon Bridges.
Continue reading...Green party MP Julie Anne Genter set off for the hospital while already in labour, and gave birth an hour later
New Zealand MP Julie Anne Genter got on her bicycle early on Sunday and headed to the hospital. She was already in labour and she gave birth an hour later.
“Big news!” the Greens politician posted on her Facebook page a few hours later. “At 3.04am this morning we welcomed the newest member of our family. I genuinely wasn’t planning to cycle in labour, but it did end up happening.”
Continue reading...Indigenous settlers of the Chatham Islands celebrate ‘significant milestone’ as treaty enshrined in law apologises for wrongs and returns land
After more than 150 years of struggle for justice, truth and reparation, the Moriori people of Rēkohu, or the Chatham Islands, can turn a new leaf on the history book that rewrote their story and taught generations of New Zealanders they were an inferior race that was now extinct.
Moriori were the first settlers to the archipelago, 800 kilometres east of New Zealand, between 600 and 1,000 years ago and developed a distinct language, customs and culture before they were nearly wiped out.
Continue reading...Known for her political ruthlessness and a fondness for going on the offensive, Collins was unable to unite the caucus behind her
In the end, Judith Collins’s tenure at the top of the National Party ended on the same notes that have sounded throughout her political career: fighting words, a refusal to back down, and one last attempt at crushing a foe.
The MP, nicknamed “Crusher” for a policy that physically crushed the cars of traffic-code-violating ‘boy racers’, was never one to walk away from a battle easily. As the dust settles from her latest, leadership-ending altercation, New Zealand’s opposition will be left scrambling for leadership for the fifth time in about as many years – and commentators say the party’s turmoil risks creating a vacuum at the right of the country’s political spectrum.
Continue reading...‘Priceless’ artefacts recording details of the famed expeditions of the 1910s were discovered in the vaults of New Zealand’s meterological service
“Priceless” artefacts linked to Antarctic explorers Ernest Shackleton and Capt Robert Falcon Scott have been unearthed in a surprise discovery within the dark storage room of New Zealand’s meterological service.
Metservice staff came across a set of logbooks from some of the most famous Antarctic expeditions while preparing to move buildings in Wellington.
Continue reading...RBNZ says homeowners must be ‘incredibly wary’ of rising costs, as focus shifts to policymakers in US, UK and Europe
New Zealand’s central bank has lifted interest rates for the second time in as many months to 0.75%, with many forecasters expecting borrowing costs to rise to at least 2% by next year and possibly higher.
In a warning signal for central banks around the world as they struggle to contain inflationary pressures, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) raised the official cash rate by 25 basis points to 0.75% as expected in its final policy meeting of the year on Wednesday.
Continue reading...Border will first open to New Zealand citizens coming from Australia, then from the rest of the world, and finally to all other vaccinated visitors from April
New Zealand has announced it will reopen its borders to vaccinated visitors in the opening months of 2022, for the first time since prime minister Jacinda Ardern announced their snap closure in the first month of the Covid-19 pandemic. The country’s borders have been closed for more than a year and a half.
The border will initially open to New Zealand citizens and visa holders coming from Australia, then from the rest of the world, and finally to all other vaccinated visitors from the end of April. They will still have to self-isolate at home for a week, but will no longer have to pass through the country’s expensive and highly-space limited managed isolation facilities.
Continue reading...Ardern is imperfect and her government often struggles to implement its agenda – but they excel at crisis management
“If you want to know me, look at my surface”, Andy Warhol once said, or something along those lines. It’s an invitation to the obvious that should apply in politics, and yet the public regard politicians with – at best – a good deal of suspicion and, at worst, contempt. And who can blame them? In New Zealand the workers’ party (Labour) was responsible for introducing and administering neoliberalism in the 1980s, a dramatic break with their social democratic history that the Australian Labor party was also undertaking in the 1980s, the US Democrats in the 1990s, and UK Labour shortly after. As the old joke goes, capturing the distrust most people feel for left and right, “it doesn’t matter who you vote for, a politician always gets in”.
But what distinguishes prime minister Jacinda Ardern from the politicians who bite at her heels is that the Warholian doctrine is probably true. At least in her case. In New Zealand’s double disasters – the Christchurch massacre and the Whakaari eruption – Ardern met each tragedy with immediate action, crisp and clear communication, and an extraordinary human care almost entirely absent in modern politics. She met with victims, their families took her into their own homes and at every opportunity she made an invitation to act in solidarity – from the country’s successful gun reforms to the “Christchurch call”, an international bid to stamp out violent extremism online.
Continue reading...When people are born into money it’s like they’ve stepped on an up escalator, borne effortlessly upwards while the poor go down
In the last few decades, an apparently ordinary financial institution has assumed an importance that could hardly have been foreseen. It is not a finance company, a payday lender or even a crypto-currency. It is, rather, the Bank of Mum and Dad. Barely a day goes by without a media story about the struggles of young people to afford a first home, and their experience is rarely free from some kind of parental influence. Even the young grafters who have supposedly pulled themselves up by the bootstraps into homeownership often turn out to have lived rent-free with their parents or received some other kind of family support. Even more often, of course, they have simply relied on a large deposit from mum and dad.
This is, in one sense, innocuous: parents want to assist their offspring financially, and have surely been doing so for as long as money has existed. But it is also insidious, because it allows some young people a significant – and completely unfair – advantage over others. And because those who can help their children into homeownership are themselves more likely to be homeowners, it ensures that advantage and disadvantage are passed down the generations. The economist Shamubeel Eaqub, with his eye for a well-turned phrase, calls this “the return of the landed gentry”.
Continue reading...Cabinet ministers have been meeting with gang leaders as the country targets an ambitious vaccination rate
After the needle entered his right arm, the man raised his left fist in a brief salute. Surgical mask covering parts of his facial tattoos, he nodded to the nurse. A long ponytail cut a line through the blue and white letters covering his back: a patch, signifying membership of one of New Zealand’s largest and most infamous street gangs. Mark Pitman, leader of Black Power New Zealand, was getting vaccinated on national television.
“I want to do it and I want the rest of our organisation around the country to know I’ve got it done,” Pitman told the camera. “I’m a leader. And I lead from example.”
Continue reading...The window to achieve that goal is vanishingly small, but it is there. Now we must seize this one last chance
Like many others, I would like to have seen a stronger outcome from Cop26. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that much was achieved – and the final outcome does get us much closer to where we need to be than where we were a few weeks ago.
For the first time countries agreed to take action on fossil fuels. Yes, it could have gone further – but let’s not forget that never before has there been a single word uttered on fossil fuels in any Cop agreement. So the agreed text is significant.
Continue reading...The country has seen a rapid uptick in protests and online disinformation, tinged with far-right undertones
For more than a year, New Zealand’s “team of 5 million” stood largely united in the face of Covid-19. This month, as the country expanded vaccine mandates and a tougher roadmap of restrictions for the unvaccinated, that mood has splintered and darkened. Among a small but vocal sliver of the population, dissent has been turning ugly, with death threats against MPs and journalists, increasing protests, warnings from security services about Covid-prompted terror threats, and what researchers have called a “wave” of disinformation tinged with violent rhetoric, QAnon-style conspiracy theories and far-right undertones.
“We’re talking … your aunt and uncle type-people using language like Nuremberg 2.0, common law trials, like ‘the prime minister is a Nazi’ – these are quite extreme terms and terminologies,” says Kate Hannah, a research fellow at Te Pūnaha Matatini’s disinformation project, a research institute that monitors online extremism and rhetoric. Hannah says the team observed an incredibly rapid shift in both the volume and tone of disinformation circulating in New Zealand’s online communities since the Delta outbreak and level 4 lockdown began.
Continue reading...Police say two, possibly three, bodies found using new technology, just days before 11th anniversary of country’s worst mining disaster in a century
The remains of some of the men killed in the Pike River mine disaster, one of New Zealand’s worst mining disasters, have been found more than a decade after the explosion.
The blast in November 2010 killed 29 workers, and many of the families have been fighting to have the remains of their loved ones found ever since. The mining tragedy – New Zealand’s worst in 100 years – resonated around the world: among the men who died were 24 New Zealanders, two Australians, two British citizens and one South African.
Continue reading...Irish restrictions include advice to work from home to fight rising hospitalisations; Cyprus health officials react to rising cases
Our economics editor Larry Elliott has written his analysis this morning on how the UK economy is beginning to emerge from Covid, but old problems remain. He concludes:
The economy as a whole is now starting to go post-Covid. The inflation figures due out on Wednesday will still show the impact of the virus on global energy prices and on supply chains but in other respects it is as if the past 18 months never happened.
There are two sides to that. The good news is that the labour market has emerged relatively unscathed. The bad news is that the problems of February 2020 – low investment, low productivity, weak underlying growth – are problems that remain to be tackled in November 2021.
Continue reading...