When it rolls out free period products in schools the government should think about sustainability and educating boys
As Labour tries to fulfil its many election promises, there is one area it could score an easy win – the period product rollout scheduled for June.
And if New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern is serious about ending period poverty, she needs to take a good look at England and Scotland.
Continue reading...Proposals include making sale of cigarettes to anyone born after 2004 illegal
New Zealand has announced a suite of proposals aimed at outlawing smoking for the next generation and moving the country closer to its goal of being smoke-free by 2025.
The plans include the gradual increase of the legal smoking age, which could extend to a ban on the sale of cigarettes and tobacco products to anyone born after 2004, making smoking effectively illegal for that generation.
Continue reading...Australian gunman earlier said he wanted to start legal action over his designation as a terrorist and lack of access to news and letters
The Christchurch terrorist who said he wanted to take the government to court over a lack of access to news and letters in jail and his designation as a terrorist entity has failed to attend the first court hearing on the matter.
The hearing in Auckland, New Zealand, was indefinitely postponed and the terrorist must ask to have it rescheduled after his no show on Thursday.
Continue reading...From the outside, the country seems like a likely candidate for progressive drug laws but internally, change is proving hard to bring
After New Zealand’s referendum to legalise cannabis failed, social service agencies across the country are seeking a new path to decriminalisation of drug use, but obstacles are plenty.
On Monday, a broad coalition of social service, advocacy and health organisations released an open letter calling on prime minister Jacinda Ardern to repeal and replace the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975 “to ensure drug use is treated as a health and social issue”. Signatories include the New Zealand Medical Association, Public Health Association, Auckland and Wellington City Missions, Mental Health Foundation, and the Māori Law Society, along with 20 others.
Continue reading...Prime minister’s comments come after border worker diagnosed last week said to have missed two vaccine appointments
Border workers have until the end of April to be vaccinated before being moved to lower risk roles, the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has said after a third worker from Auckland’s Grand Millenium managed isolation facility tested positive for Covid-19.
“We want everyone to be vaccinated on our frontline,” she told TVNZ’s Breakfast on Monday.
Continue reading...Community leader says: ‘We don’t feel like a part of the “team of 5 million” when Indians are singled out like this’
Community leaders have questioned the New Zealand government’s decision to temporarily close the border to people travelling from India, and say they fear the move could prompt racism and stigma.
“The question of ‘Why India?’ must be asked, and a clear answer should be given,” said Sunil Kaushal, president of the Waitakere Indian Association. He asked why the ruling applied only to India, when other nations including the United States, Brazil, France and the UK had also experienced soaring infection rates, especially when compared per-capita.
Continue reading...New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has announced details of a trans-Tasman travel bubble with Australia, meaning Australians will be able to travel to New Zealand without needing to quarantine. Though most Australian states have allowed quarantine-free visits from New Zealanders for months, New Zealand has continued with enforced isolation for arrivals from its neighbour, citing concern about small Covid-19 outbreaks. The move to allow cross-border travel is one of the first such agreements since the pandemic prompted countries to block foreign arrivals to stop the virus spreading
Continue reading...New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern warns that further Covid-19 outbreaks could mean border closures return
After nearly a year shut off from the world, New Zealand is cracking open its borders, with a trans-Tasman travel bubble allowing two-way quarantine-free travel with Australia.
The NZ prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, announced on Tuesday the bubble would open from 19 April, allowing quarantine-free travel between the two nations. Travellers from New Zealand have been able to enter selected Australian states without quarantining since October but the arrangements did not apply in the other direction.
Continue reading...Finds include 1980s time capsules, old collection boxes and a nativity scene with figures heads ‘taken clean off’
Ten years on from Christchurch’s devastating earthquake, the Catholic Diocese has discovered that it is missing a pair of angels.
As work continues to deconstruct the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament on Barbadoes Street – extensively damaged in the 2011 quake, along with most of the central city – many treasures thought lost have been recovered.
Continue reading...When it comes to mental health, New Zealand’s government has lost sight of what’s important
They call it a last resort, but for people placed in seclusion in New Zealand mental health units it can feel like the beginning of a nightmare. “Seclusion” itself is something of a euphemism, a gentle name for locking someone in a room for an average of 27 hours at a time. It’s meant to be a last resort to stop people from hurting themselves or others, but the practice can itself be traumatising. One woman, recalling her seclusion experience, describes how – even now – she doesn’t like the sound of keys being rattled. It reminds her of being locked up, she says, of feeling hopeless, frightened and alone.
“Being taken into seclusion is absolutely awful, scary and daunting.”
Continue reading...New Zealand may have moved to curb rising prices but could cheap money have permanently rewritten the rules?
It’s hard to disagree with the New Zealand government’s recent assessment that the country’s runaway housing market has moved from mere boom to a bubble that endangers the whole economy. Prices rose a staggering 23% over the past year, putting home ownership way beyond most people not already on the fabled ladder – younger, first-time buyers especially. If it walks like a bubble and talks like a bubble, then it must be a bubble, right?
The only problem is that bubbles might not be what they used to be. House prices are being steadily inflated in many other developed economies such as the US and UK. In Australia, prices rose 2.8% in March, the fastest monthly growth for 33 years. But governments are in no hurry to copy Jacinda Ardern’s canary in the coalmine moment, as the renowned Société Générale economist and market sceptic Albert Edwards has dubbed it, and instruct central banks to make dampening prices part of monetary policy.
Continue reading...Small outbreaks and universal genomic sequencing provides unique insights into how coronavirus spreads
Jenene Crossan doesn’t know where she got it. “I caught it in London, have no idea where or from who, in March 2020,” she says. “I’ve been sick ever since.” Crossan used to worry about it – going back over possible infection scenarios, exchanging theories with a friend who got ill at the same time. These days, though, she’s come to terms with not knowing. “The reality is it doesn’t matter,” she says. “London was awash.”
Like many of the vast majority of people unlucky enough to receive a positive Covid test result, the precise moment of infection remains a mystery. Some might narrow it down to a likely household member, friend or workmate who began showing symptoms too. Others trace it to a gathering – a wedding, funeral, or dinner party, where several attendees subsequently came down sick. But most are left wondering. As a New York Times headline put it last year: “How Are Americans Catching the Virus? Increasingly, They Have No Idea”.
Continue reading...When Polish-born Hania Żądło inquired about the strange avocado-like fruit, she was met with a mixture of indignation, hostility … and sympathy
When Hania Żądło, a new arrival in New Zealand, asked an innocent question about an unfamiliar fruit, she was not to know that she was undermining a national treasure.
As a registered nurse, Żądło and her husband, an anaesthetic technician, had both been granted “critical purpose” visas to take up jobs at Dunedin hospital. After landing in Auckland from the UK in late March, they were sent with their two children to the Crowne Plaza hotel for two weeks’ mandatory quarantine.
Continue reading...First figures available for Jacinda Ardern’s term in office reveal inadequate government response despite huge boost in funding
New Zealand’s mental health system is “in crisis” and in worse shape now than four years ago, practitioners say – despite much-heralded government efforts to reform it and prioritise national wellbeing.
A commitment to improving New Zealand’s mental health record has been at the heart of the progressive, Jacinda Ardern-led Labour government. The country has enduring challenges with mental health, including the highest rate of youth suicide in the developed world. When Ardern was leading her first election campaign in 2017, she made it a central election issue.
Continue reading...Many readers say last week’s announcement will have little impact on their – or their children’s – ability to buy a house
Last week we asked Guardian readers about the government’s attempt to rein in New Zealand’s runaway house prices. We heard from investors and renters, first-home buyers and retirees. While some readers – including investors – were supportive, many felt the policy changes didn’t go far enough.
Some pointed out that beefed-up grants to first-home buyers would make little impact in markets such as Wellington and Auckland, with young people still despairing of ever getting a foot on the housing ladder. Many said that the effect on renters had been overlooked, arguing in favour of German-style rent control. Others said they were afraid for their children’s future, while some wrote that they feared they would never be able to afford children.
Continue reading...The government has broken its promises and handed them to the opposition on a golden platter
As the first majority government in New Zealand’s MMP history, with an extraordinarily popular prime minister, many have urged Labour to spend its “political capital.” This is the buffer that enables popular governments to take bold actions that might lose them some voters, while retaining most of their solid support in a metaphorical bank.
Last week Labour spent some of its political capital. In a surprise announcement it said it would extend the brightline test (taxing any financial gain made on the sale of an investment property) from five to ten years and remove mortgage interest as a rental property tax deduction, as part of a suite of housing policy and funding changes.
Continue reading...Government says it will no longer fund risky mission to retrieve 29 bodies from site of New Zealand’s worst mining disaster
Families of the men who died in one of New Zealand’s worst mining disasters have expressed their heartbreak that the government has ended funding to re-enter the mine, leaving the remains of their loved ones trapped inside.
Twenty-nine men were killed when an explosion ripped through the Pike river mine on the west coast in November 2010. Their bodies have not been recovered, and remain in the mine.
Continue reading...The government knows that to quell the mutinous grumbling at home you have to nominate an ‘outgroup’
Since the beginning of the pandemic I’ve taken huge comfort in the knowledge that just about everyone I love is safely inside the fortress-like border that’s been erected around New Zealand. I have no doubt that every other Kiwi still living or trapped in the Covid red-zones of the world feels the same way. But this week’s announcement that returning citizens must now commit to a stay of at least six months, double the previous requirement of three, to avoid a NZ$3,100 (£1,600) fee for their managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) prioritises politics over their right to return.
The government’s official line on the issue is that the changes are being made in the interests of fairness and sustainability. In practice, the policy amounts to a thinly veiled deterrence strategy. A strategy with the additional bonus of delivering visible action in response to public restlessness following the recent series of lockdowns. It neither contributes meaningfully to meeting the cost of the policy nor makes the policy more equitable, but it does make for a satisfying user-pays narrative to placate resentment towards the border and those who cross it.
Continue reading...Cardinal John Dew said he would offer ‘no excuses’ for the actions of bishops and congregational leaders
New Zealand’s Catholic Church has formally apologised to the survivors of abuse within the church and said its systems and culture must change.
Cardinal John Dew, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Wellington and Metropolitan of New Zealand, made the apology on Friday at the Royal Commission into Abuse in Care on behalf of the bishops and congregational leaders in New Zealand.
Continue reading...Legislation allowing three days’ leave applies to parents, their partners, and parents planning to have a child through adoption or surrogacy
New Zealand’s parliament has voted unanimously to give mothers and their partners three days of bereavement leave after a miscarriage or stillbirth.
Labour MP Ginny Andersen, who presented the bill, said it would allow parents to come to terms with their loss without being forced to use up their sick leave entitlements. “The grief that comes with miscarriage is not a sickness; it is a loss,” she said. “That loss takes time – time to recover physically and time to recover mentally; time to recover with a partner”.
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