We'll all be moving to New Zealand

[Prime minister Jacinda] Ardern’s leadership of New Zealand through the coronavirus crisis has compounded credentials well established by her government’s deft and empathetic handling of the horrific massacre in Christchurch last year. When corona hit, the lockdown of the country was swift, draconian and effective; there have only been 21 deaths from the disease to date in New Zealand, and while the rest of the world grapples with a rising number of daily cases, no new cases have been reported in New Zealand in three days.

A mind-boggling 92% of New Zealanders laud their government’s containment efforts. According to latest polls, Ardern is the most popular party leader there in more than 100 years.

  Guardian

Understandable.

With an impending opportunity to restructure the New Zealand economy for post-corona reopening, Ardern is exploring a policy suite of uncommon ambition. Hard-hit tourism is New Zealand’s largest export industry, employing 15% of New Zealanders and contributing to almost 6% of GDP, and it was in the context of rescuing this industry that on Wednesday Ardern suggested – informally, in a Facebook Live video from the tourist town of Rotorua – that, should the country move to a four-day working week, more leisure time may allow the domestic tourist market to expand to meet the present shortfall.

Brilliant.

When Ardern explained that “there’s just so much we’ve learned about … [the flexibility] of people working from home, the productivity that can be driven out of that”, she was speaking to the lived, material reality of the most physically transformed workplaces in living western memory.

Because across the world, social distancing has resulted not only in record numbers of people working from home. It has staggered and rearranged shifts, reorganising the deployment of labour around continually improvised new systems of production, distribution and exchange demanded in a health and economic crisis. Economists have called it the biggest workforce change since the second world war, and parallel to the ongoing horror of managing an invisible, lethal virus that underscores every rearrangement, for some workers there have been surprising benefits.

[...]

Among a claque of western leaders yearning for “snap back” to the way things were before the virus – some pursuing “recovery” strategies of even lesser benefit – it’s New Zealand’s, conspicuously, who repeatedly shows the courage to snap forward.

I've long wanted to live in New Zealand ever since I saw a PBS garden tour show from that country. Fantastic envirronments and beautiful plants.

And now, a great leader.