Jacinda Ardern stepping down as PM of Aotearoa/NZ
It's just been announced at the Labour Party Conference today. She is obviously giving her successor time to settle into the job before the election later this year. Opinion polls don't favour Labour for the election, but Ms Ardern has topped the "preferred Prime Minister" polls since the last election.
I admit being totally gobsmacked by this news,
I admit being totally gobsmacked by this news,
Comments
I think NZ will lurch further right in the elections which will be in October or November, and we may end up with a National/Act Party combination. If Act is involved I fear for the future of race relations here.
Is this perception accurate? Admittedly, her handling of the gun-control issue got heavily filtered for international consumption, by people in other countries pushing their own agendas on the same issue: "America offers hope and prayers, New Zealand outlaws guns!"
[FWIW, when I heard people say, a few days after the shooting, that "New Zealand has banned guns!", I assumed they were either seriously hyperbolizing the speed of events, or New Zealand has a very different version of Westminister than the other Realms.]
I agree 100% with this, and her graceful resignation speech was really quite moving. It's wholly understandable that she wants to spend time with her daughter, who starts school this year, and she also made it quite clear that she and her partner are to get married this year...
Given that she seems to be falling out of favour with the electorate, it's sensible to quit before she gets pushed out in the nasty way we have in this country.
As you say, there's no-one else on the political scene in Australia, or anywhere else in the *western* world, quite like her. That is our loss - we and others have to put up with the likes of Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro etc. etc.
Stetson I know that there was multi-party support on the gun legislation possibly because people were so horrified at the shootings, nothing on this scale had happened here before. My (possibly faulty) memory is that there was an arms amnesty and the Police started collecting up firearms from people who volunteered them before the actual legislation was passed for them to do so on a mandatory basis - the unspoken message being "you might as well hand them over now, because they are going to be taken anyway".
I think that there was a honeymoon period too, which probably ended with the Covid lockdowns and the vaccinations which were mandated for some occupations. Alongside that was the virulence of anti- Jacinda posts on social and the threats to her and her family.
There are a couple of articles in The Guardian (English newspaper by Tess McClure - a NZ journalist that I think sum up the situation fairly well.
Anyhow - I always thought she was seen as having handled the pandemic well.
I know diddly-squat about New Zealand politics but she's tended to have had a good press over here in the UK. Can't speak for anywhere else but can imagine the gun thing didn't go down well in parts of the US.
Her resignation did come as a surprise.
But New Zealand is a Realm which has a very different version of Westminster than other Realms do.
Alright. I get it now.
Many here support the steps introduced in NZ. Life would not have been as free as we'd like it but compare what was achieved with the results in the US.
Then there's also the on-line hate directed at prominent women. I don't read social media, so was unaware of the virulence of some of the comments I read reported in other media.
As of today we have a new Prime Minister and Jacinda Ardern will be resigning her seat in April, taking her daughter Neave to school on her first day and marrying her partner Clarke Gayford (though not necessarily in that order). I wish her well.