The 5.9 magnitude quake forced the prime minister to pause and grip her podium before continuing to outline post-Covid lockdown plans
New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern has been interrupted by an earthquake midway through announcing the country’s plans for a post-Covid-lockdown future.
The 5.9 quake rattled parliament in Wellington on Friday as Ardern was holding a press conference on the country’s new vaccination targets.
Continue reading...Researchers estimate 1m sq km of seascape globally has been modified by coastal structures which bring in invasive species and damage habitat
Artificial structures have replaced more than half of the coastline of 30 cities around the world, according to new research suggesting coastal infrastructure will have a significant ecological impact if not well managed.
“Coastal hardening” – replacing natural coastal habitats with seawalls, breakwalls, wharves and other structures – is “consistently extensive” across cities in North America, the UK, Australia and New Zealand, finds a study published on Friday.
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Continue reading...‘Groundbreaking’ agreement criticised by UK farmers is part of 10-year plan to pivot to Indo-Pacific
Britain has struck a trade deal with New Zealand, a key ally, as ministers hope to stem the country’s reliance on China – but the agreement is expected to add no value to the UK’s gross domestic product.
Despite the Department for International Trade heralding the deal as a “groundbreaking” achievement that was a “vital part” of Boris Johnson’s commitment to levelling up, the prime minister has been accused of selling out British farmers.
Continue reading...UK reports further 223 deaths but UK government says no to plan B for now; US study shows success in preventing hospitalisation of 12- to 18-year-olds
The Czech Republic is embroiled in a political crisis with the ill-health of far-right president Miloš Zeman coinciding with a general election, and it is also seeing rising Covid numbers.
Robert Muller reports from Prague for Reuters that the Czech Republic detected 2,521 new cases of Covid yesterday, the highest daily tally since late April.
Continue reading...Latvia has closed schools, restaurants and entertainment venues for a month; UK reports 49,156 new cases and 45 Covid-linked deaths
Australia’s Northern Territory chief minister, Michael Gunner, has hit back at US senator Ted Cruz who criticised the Northern Territory’s vaccine policy, telling the Texan conservative “you know nothing about us”.
The spat began when the US Republican shared a video of Gunner announcing the territory’s wide-ranging vaccine mandate for workers. Cruz lamented the “Covid tyranny of their (Australia’s) current government,” which he said was “disgraceful and sad”.
Continue reading...Celebrities encourage turnout as response surpasses Jacinda Ardern’s call to administer 100,000 shots
New Zealand’s “Super Saturday” of Covid vaccinations has proved a hit, with more than 2.5% of the population responding to the call to get jabbed on a single day.
The prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, set an ambitious goal of administering 100,000 shots on the day, aiming to push vaccination rates towards her 90% goal.
Continue reading...The government is using an array of sweeteners, gimmicks and incentives to raise inoculation rates, including turning a 787 Dreamliner into a vaccination clinic
You can do it in the cabin of a Dreamliner plane. You can do it at a race track. You can even do it in a fast food drive-through queue.
New Zealand’s government is employing a host of increasingly weird and wonderful strategies, gimmicks and sweeteners in a bid to get the last 20% of its eligible population inoculated against Covid-19.
Continue reading...Plans for how health system would deal with surge revealed as country records 71 new cases
New Zealand is preparing to face up to 5,300 cases of Covid-19 a week in Auckland and the neighbouring region of Northland alone next year, even with a vaccination rate of 90%, according to modelling from the Ministry of Health.
The minister of health, Andrew Little revealed the plan for how the health system could manage a surge in cases after the current vaccination drive, as the country recorded 71 new cases on Thursday.
Continue reading...Allowing the virus to become endemic would mean the regular closure of schools and businesses and thousands of deaths each year
As New Zealand switches from elimination to suppression, those who argue that Covid-19 will become endemic and part of our lives either do not understand or ignore what this would actually mean.
Elimination has always been a tricky word because it implies eradication. But we have only ever eradicated one human disease – smallpox – and are close with several others.
Continue reading...The prime minister has enjoyed huge support during the pandemic – but the country’s new course may force unpopular trade-offs
This week, New Zealand’s locked-down cities woke to a brave new world of lifted restrictions: state-sanctioned picnics in parks, the prospect of reopening schools, a chance to reunite with friends and family. Infusing the visions of grass-stained blankets and beachside beers, however, is a strong dose of Covid anxiety. Cases continue to circulate in the community, and the country’s long-held commitment to elimination is being been cast off.
As New Zealand steps into the unknown with its Covid approach, so does its prime minister, Jacinda Ardern. Having brought the country through the pandemic largely unscathed so far, she was richly rewarded with political popularity and trust. Now the prime minister faces the difficult task of guiding it through a new era of Covid suppression – and it could be the most significant political challenge she has faced yet.
Continue reading...By granting freedom as case numbers rise, Jacinda Ardern has diverged from the nation’s understood strategy of aligning policy with expert consensus
The New Zealand government called time on its world-leading Covid-19 elimination strategy on Monday, announcing a suite of measures that grant Aucklanders greater freedom after seven weeks of community transmission, despite experts urging tighter restrictions. In doing so, the government has snookered itself in three mutually-reinforcing ways: on social license, on enforcement, and on the economy.
New Zealand’s strategy depends on social license, and people feeling like they understand and are part of the system, and can contribute to its success, knowing others will be prevented from undermining their efforts.
Continue reading...Without a dramatic change in New Zealand’s vaccination rates, Covid-19 risks becoming a disease for brown people
And so with that, a confusing 20-minute monologue in the Beehive theatrette, New Zealand’s virus-beating elimination strategy is over. As the Delta variant’s “tentacles”, to borrow the prime minister’s description, creep past the Auckland border, potentially wrapping themselves around parts of the Waikato, the government will no longer aim to cut the monster off at its head with tough alert level four restrictions. Instead public health officials will move to a suppression strategy aiming “to contain and control the virus” while we vaccinate our way out of the pandemic. At its simplest, Jacinda Ardern’s message from the threatrette was vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate.
For 18 months New Zealanders were living life as if there were no pandemic. We were gathering outdoors and indoors in the thousands, mask mandates were literally a foreign concept, and business and public services were operating more or less as normal. We were watching governments that let the virus rip with a good dose of horror and, if we’re honest, a modest dose of smugness. And so yesterday’s announcement – that the virus will remain resident in this country – feels like a form of whiplash. Only two weeks ago the prime minister stood in that familiar theatrette and told the country returning to zero cases was still the goal.
Continue reading...Concerns about the toll a suppression approach may take have dampened excitement about loosened restrictions
New Zealanders are grieving for the end of the country’s Covid elimination strategy and anxious about what the future holds, a day after prime minister Jacinda Ardern announced the country would switch to a suppression approach.
“It’s kind of a grieving for what we are losing,” microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles, one of the pandemic response’s most prominent science communicators, said. “We are very clearly losing alert level one, and the freedoms and privileges that come with [it].”
Continue reading...Last week’s court decision affirmed the view that seabed mining is too dangerous, too risky and too harmful to the environment
The decision by New Zealand’s Supreme Court last week against a giant seabed mining proposal in the South Taranaki Bight is a wake-up call for the world’s would-be seabed mining industry, both in the deep oceans of international waters and for countries contemplating such activities off their own coasts.
The mining operation, proposed by Trans-Tasman Resources (TTR), would have dug up 50 million tonnes of the seabed every year for 35 years, targeting 5m tonnes of iron ore and dumping the remaining 45m tonnes back into the ocean.
Continue reading...Jacinda Ardern puts parts of Waikato into five-day lockdown while country’s largest city records 32 new cases
New Zealand’s Delta Covid variant outbreak has spread beyond Auckland, prompting the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, to put additional regions into a snap lockdown.
There were 32 new coronavirus cases on Sunday in the country’s largest city, which has been in lockdown since mid-August, and two cases in the Waikato region, some 147km (91 miles) south of Auckland. Ardern announced on Sunday that parts of the region will go into a five-day lockdown.
Continue reading...As Auckland grapples with Delta outbreak, opposition leaders dare to break with Jacinda Ardern on pandemic plan
“Things have changed,” Judith Collins declares, sitting in her Beehive government office. New Zealand’s National party leader is fresh off launching her alternative pandemic response plan, marking the first time the main opposition has significantly diverged from prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s largely popular elimination strategy.
The arrival of the Delta variant in New Zealand two months ago, causing an outbreak that the government is struggling to stamp out, has shown that elimination is “clearly not working,” Collins says.
Continue reading...Judith Collins criticises America as ‘foolish’ for walking away from free trade agreements
New Zealand’s opposition leader has hit out at the US and UK over China, saying their failure to adopt free trade agreements was “foolish” and increased Chinese dominance in the Indo-Pacific.
“If any criticism comes to New Zealand, as it often does about this close relationship with China and trade, my answer to everybody – whether they’re the US or UK – is: ‘So where’s our free trade agreement?’,” Judith Collins, leader of the centre-right National party, said in an interview with the Guardian on Friday.
Continue reading...Irresponsible statements are fuel for those who falsely believe their rights have been taken away
When former prime minister John Key referred to New Zealand as a “smug hermit kingdom” in his widely disseminated op-ed, I thought it was pushing it a bit, but not completely off the mark – we closed our borders to outsiders, after all. What I didn’t expect was for him to start calling the government’s response “North Korean”. This isn’t just lazy rhetoric, it’s obviously wrong.
This is what North Korea’s been through: it closed its borders at the beginning of 2020, before most of the world put itself into lockdown. It stopped all shipments in and out of the country, including China, which is its largest trading partner and aid donor. Fishing in its surrounding waters and even salt harvesting was halted, for fear Covid may be transmitted that way. Foreign diplomatic staff left on one-way tickets: one group of Russians took a hand-powered rail cart out of the country.
Continue reading...The Māori who have been screwed by the system are once again being silenced and ignored
Sorry means you don’t do it again. So goes a phrase used by Aboriginal protesters in Australia in recent years.
The phrase references the national apology in 2008 by prime minister Kevin Rudd to Aboriginal peoples for the Stolen Generations, the thousands of children who were taken from their families.
Continue reading...The next generation will be increasingly divided into those can leverage intergenerational wealth to buy a home, and those who cannot
Returning home to a country he couldn’t afford to secure a home in, New Zealand photographer Cody Ellingham began to roam suburban streets at night with his camera. In a new series of photographs, he reflects the unease and discomfort of a generation locked out of one of the world’s most unaffordable housing markets.
Earlier this month, property data analytics companies said the average national house price was hitting between NZ$937,000 and $1m, nearly eight times the annual household income. Real Estate Institute data shows there was a 31% increase over the year to July.
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