With Pandemic Australia Has New Lens on NZ

“New Zealand’s response to the coronavirus is just the latest reason Australians have sometimes looked wistfully, or at least with interest, across the Tasman,” ABC-TV’s 7.30 chief political correspondent Laura Tingle writes in Quarterly Essay: ‘What Australia Can Learn From New Zealand’.

“[Prime Minister Jacinda] Ardern is not the first reason we have had to look across the Tasman and wonder whether there is another way of doing things. And her uncompromising positions do feel like part of a pattern,” Tingle writes.

“Little New Zealand – perhaps the only place in the world that has suffered isolation and the tyranny of distance more than Australia – has repeatedly jumped out of its comfort zone and changed direction harder, faster and for longer than Australia has done in the past half-century.

“We talk of greater ties with our region, yet overlook the neighbour who is closest to us historically. It has taken a dynamic, young female Prime Minister in Wellington to pique our recent interest in New Zealand at a time of disillusionment with our own politics.”

Original article by Laura Tingle, Quarterly Essay, November 27, 2020.

Photo by Bruno Figueiredo.