New Zealand

Jacinda Ardern’s speech at the China Business Summit was a crowd-pleaser. Geoffrey Miller explains its role in the “rebalancing” of New Zealand’s orientation to China and the West. For critics who believed she had gone soft on China, Jacinda Ardern’s line that differences between China and New Zealand were becoming “harder to reconcile” will be interpreted as tough talk. They will see …

A new analysis by the Democracy Project of Nanaia Mahuta’s public statements and tweets over the past six months reveals some intriguing initial insights into her foreign policy agenda. By the end of Wednesday this week, Nanaia Mahuta had made 31 formal statements or speeches on foreign affairs in her time as minister. On Twitter, she had published 85 original tweets (i.e. excluding retweets …

In the 2021 Project Auckland report we looked at how the construction sector has been navigating constraints from Covid-19, including border restrictions, workforce and materials supply. The report provided an update on Auckland’s housing supply issues and looked at the driving role of Kainga Ora in increasing the pace of development. We heard from Infrastructure and Transport Minister Grant Robertson …

Michael Plank, University of Canterbury; Shaun Hendy, University of Auckland, and Siouxsie Wiles, University of Auckland New Zealand’s latest community cases, the first to be infected with the more infectious B.1.1.7 variant of COVID-19, have a plausible link to the border through one person’s workplace at LSG Sky Chefs, a business that deals with laundry and catering from international flights. …

Richard Meade, Auckland University of Technology Faced with a COVID-19 pandemic of unknown severity and duration, governments around the world are looking for effective and sustainable ways to maintain economic confidence and employment. Even New Zealand, where lockdowns have been few and short-lived, is confronting the reality of repeated lockdowns, especially since the United Kingdom variant has now been detected …

David Welch, University of Auckland; Jemma Geoghegan, University of Otago; Joep de Ligt, ESR, and Nigel French, Massey University New variants of SARS-CoV-2 have now evaded New Zealand’s border protections twice to spread into the community. In the most recent outbreak, which placed Auckland into an alert level 3 lockdown, there are three active community cases of the more infectious …

Michael Plank, University of Canterbury and Shaun Hendy, University of Auckland Relaxing border restrictions for travellers from low COVID-19 risk countries would increase the risk of community cases in New Zealand by around 25%, says an article published today in the New Zealand Medical Journal. This might not sound like a big increase in risk, but it means breaches like …

Germana Nicklin, Massey University Before COVID-19 hit New Zealand’s shores last year, most people’s understanding of defending a border would have come from watching TV reality show Border Patrol. It is easy to understand — on the maps, our country is surrounded by an ocean moat, a natural border. This makes controlling risks arriving from overseas relatively easy as there …

Today’s provisional approval of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine means New Zealand could start rolling out its COVID-19 immunisation programme as early as next month. In announcing the approval, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said border workers and the people they live with, cleaners and nurses working at quarantine facilities, security and airline staff and hotel workers would be among the first to …

Mahmoud Elkhodr, CQUniversity Australia New Zealand’s coronavirus contact-tracing app COVID Tracer was revamped yesterday. It now uses the Bluetooth-based Google/Apple exposure notification (GAEN) framework. This allows Android and Apple (iOS) devices to communicate via a contact-tracing mechanism built into the devices’ operating systems. Meanwhile, Australia continues to use the COVIDSafe app, which also uses Bluetooth, but with a different underlying …