An Enlightened Leader

 

NEW ZEALAND

Neverland, Discovered

It’s almost like New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is living in a fairytale.

Ardern closed the island nation to foreigners and imposed a tough lockdown with the help of the so-called “team of 5 million,” – New Zealand’s population. Rather than a popular revolt, the policy was a smashing success. After a recent resurgence of the virus, Ardern announced that Kiwis had beaten Covid-19 twice.

She is incredibly popular, the Economist reported, and not just at home: Her image has been projected onto the world’s tallest building, made the cover of Time magazine and she has been “feted by progressives globally for compassionate and decisive responses to crises…for her embrace of multilateralism and liberal values,” the Washington Post wrote.

A member of the left-leaning Labor Party, Ardern is expected to win big, earning a second term and garnering a rare one-party majority when New Zealanders go to the polls on Oct. 17 to elect a new parliament.

The opposition National Party’s campaign keeps pointing out that Ardern failed to fix New Zealand’s housing crisis or improve the lives of impoverished children.

The attacks don’t stick, wrote Bloomberg. Ardern’s standing is too high. Only 25 of her constituents have died during the pandemic. She incidentally also led the country during two other recent dark periods: a white-supremacist terror attack that killed 51 and a volcanic eruption that claimed 21 lives.

The country today has instituted testing and tracing measures that are the envy of the world, as Axios explained. They are figuring out how to lock down specific towns or neighborhoods, one at a time, to stop the spread without bringing everything in a city or region to a halt.

Ardern takes stands. Raised a Mormon, she left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in her 20s because she disagreed with the church’s opposition to LGBTQ rights, Newsweek reported. Ardern is expected to ban conversion therapy that seeks to change the sexual orientation of LGBTQ folks.

She is also promising to phase out coal-fired boilers, mandate the use of electric boilers and reduce carbon emissions from public buses. “During our first term in government, climate change was at the center of all our policy work and commitments,” she told Reuters. “It is inextricably linked to our decisions on issues like housing, agriculture, waste, energy and transport.”

Arden has also taken a softer foreign policy tack toward China in contrast to other members of the so-called “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing partnership that also includes Australia, Britain, Canada and the US, reported the South China Morning Post. While those other countries are seeking to counterbalance China, New Zealand has been less confrontational. Its economy also happens to be more dependent on China than the others.

The world is not perfect. But somewhere in the South Pacific, people still have faith in their government.