 Jacinda Ardern has been re-elected in a landslide. Her Labour Party have become the first party to win an absolute majority of seats since proportional representation was introduced in New Zealand in the 1990s and they've won the greatest vote share of any party in 50 years. And we can take a look now at her victory speech. E haratakatoa e te tōtakitahi, e tōtakitinike. Nō reira tātou, e hui hui mai nei, ka hoāke tōno tātou. Tonight, New Zealand has shown the Labour Party its greatest support in at least 50 years. We have seen that support in both urban areas and immoral areas. And seats we may have hoped for, but in those equally we may not have expected. I only have two simple words. Thank you. Thank you to the people who worked so hard to share our message. Jacinda Ardern, they're starting with speaking in the Māori language. The Māori people are the indigenous people of New Zealand. They're sort of projecting, you know, as she's sort of famous internationally for sort of inclusive identity obviously after the Christchurch massacre. She made headlines and front pages the world over by wearing a headscarf. She sort of talked about how this should not undermine New Zealand as an inclusive society. But probably, you know, the most significant element that sort of underlies and explains her victory is her handling of coronavirus by acting quickly blocking off travel into and out of the country. The Kiwi Prime Minister has limited COVID deaths in the country to 25. Compare that to this country, 40,000 deaths or over 40,000 deaths. That's really phenomenal. But when anyone wins this big, so 49%, she got in that election, obviously many people sort of gather round or try and claim her politics as theirs. So anyone who's been on left Twitter today will see that many different wings within the British Labour Party are trying to say, ah, Ardern is one of us. This is how you win big. I think some of it's not as informed as it could be. But I'm not going to be here to tell you who Jacinda Ardern is and I'm not an expert on New Zealand politics either. So today I spoke to someone who is, and in fact it's someone who has intimate knowledge of the Labour parties in the UK and New Zealand. So Max Harris is a former adviser to John McDonnell and author of the New Zealand Project. My first question to Max was whether, to be honest, politics even mattered in this election. Was it not just a referendum on Ardern's world-beating handling of coronavirus? Yeah, I think a big part of it is about how she dealt with coronavirus and people have talked about it as the COVID election in New Zealand. But obviously that is political in itself, right? And it's interesting to note that most of the response to coronavirus in New Zealand has relied on quite an active, coordinated state that has been involved in testing and with much less use of kind of contracting out consultants than you see in the UK. So I think the first political question is kind of like, what do we take out of her response to coronavirus? And also, I think the election has been about other issues. So the right-wing national party kind of tacked even further to the right, pushed tax cuts in areas of personal responsibility, slightly bizarrely talking about obesity in the final week of the election even though that's not a major political issue in New Zealand. So it was a debate about more than just coronavirus and obviously it matters to the kind of shape of the next three years in New Zealand to clear our handle on the politics of this Labour Government. And a suggestion I saw today, it was in the Guardian I think, is that one of the reasons right-wing populism hasn't been as successful in New Zealand as elsewhere, predominantly Australia and the UK and the United States, is that Murdoch doesn't own any newspapers there. I mean, I don't know what you think about that particular theory. Yeah, it was interesting to read that piece and I read it. I think there are elements of populist traditions in New Zealand as well. I think there's something to that for sure. But actually, we did see quite a right-wing campaign being launched by the National Government. I saw another New Zealand journalist, Henry Cook, say that what Labour succeeded in doing this election was like neutralising the right-wingers on the economy and then centering their health response and kind of social democratic health response. So I think there's quite a lot to that. But I wouldn't rule out elements of right-wing populism being on the rise in the future at all. And I think that the media is only one part of right-wing populism in other places as well. And what can we expect from this government? So it's the first time that any party has had an absolute majority since proportional representation was introduced in 1996. So she could have potentially much more leeway than any Prime Minister in recent New Zealand history, Kiwi history. What can we expect her to do in this free-year term? Yeah, well, it was a very centrist campaign with a very limited manifesto. So I think people on the kind of left, radical left in New Zealand aren't really holding their breath for a very dramatic set of changes to come. I mean, just to give one example of that, the Labour manifesto committed to, I think, $480 million of New Zealand dollars in new spending commitments, so four years. Obviously New Zealand is a lot smaller than the UK, when you think that the 2019 Corbyn manifesto was about $83 billion of annual spending. This is an entirely different scale of ambition. So I think we also saw three years of pretty limited government progress despite a rhetoric of transformation. That said, I think there are a couple of areas to look out for. So I mentioned the four sectoral collective bargaining, or what's called fair pay agreements in New Zealand, which could be a genuinely progressive way to empower trade unions. And they've also talked about criminal justice reform and there was a cannabis referendum at the same time as the election, which we're still waiting on the results for, which could kickstart some more at least social democratic criminal justice reform. And I think a lot turns on the Green Party and the governing arrangements that the Labour Party will have with the Green Party and possibly the Māori Party, which also won a seat. So the Green Party probably has more people sympathetic to the Corbyn project than the Labour Party in New Zealand and proposed, for example, like a wealth tax, which the Labour Party's ruled out, but also has policies like opt-out trade union membership. If the Green Party can get a foothold or if popular movements outside of Parliament are able to shift political culture, I think we may see more change, but I think anyone expecting sort of radical public ownership, for example, shouldn't be holding their breath. That was Max Harris on Jacinda Ardern. I'm bringing Dalia back in now because I want us to talk a bit about how this is sort of the fallout from this particular victory in the United Kingdom. Was she a Blairite? Does she prove that the third way is the way to win elections? Was she a Corbynite? And she proves that you have to be bold and anti-capitalist if you want to get 49% of the vote and before I go to you, I actually just want to bring up this article which shows she's not a Blairite as some might suggest. She described capitalism as a blatant failure and she also worked briefly, not for Tony Blair, but in the Cabinet Office when he was Prime Minister. She said she didn't want to work for Tony Blair, so she doesn't identify as a Blairite, but she's clearly not a Corbynite. Dalia, what do you make of all of this? Are you claiming Jacinda Ardern for your own brand of politics? Well, I think obviously, you know, anyone who in kind of British politics says something like capitalism is an utter failure is branded as far left. I think that what she probably represents is actually, you know, kind of quite a traditional social democratic kind of position. She's not like outwardly explicitly hostile to black and brown people, although I know that there has been a lot of contention, particularly from kind of Maori, Maori population around her leadership. So, you know, but the fact that, so I think that it just kind of shows, I guess, how right-wing the pendulum has generally gone that, you know, someone who just objectively can observe that capitalism is not working and that, you know, climate change is real and that it's urgent and that maybe we shouldn't be, maybe Islamophobia should not form a cornerstone about politics is kind of seen as such a sigh of relief, but I think I wonder, you know, to what extent actually, you know, and obviously this is, you know, I'm not an expert in New Zealand politics and Kiwi politics, but I wonder, you know, how to what extent the coronavirus pandemic, you know, we've spoken about it as a kind of shock doctrine and how it's being used to kind of solidify the control of the private sector on our healthcare systems in the UK, et cetera, but I wonder how to what extent the kind of strongman right-wing populist kind of governance that has gained particular popularity over the past sort of like five years. Whatever you want to say about Jacinda Ardern, you can say that she definitely represents an opposition somewhat to that kind of strongman sort of proto, you know, very far-right sort of proto-fascist sort of system of governance and the fact that in the countries that have such leaders, you know, whether it's the US, Brazil, et cetera, you know, have had disastrous responses to coronavirus and particularly when these kind of strongman politics, their biggest appeal is that in times of crisis we will take control and the fact that they fail to do that I think has been a massive blow to their legitimacy and to their appeal. So I kind of wonder on a sort of global level to, you know, that kind of like that fact in addition to the fact that even within the context of New Zealand history this is a massive victory for the Labour Party that, you know, there is something there to be said about how the failure of these sort of so-called strongman, you know, very patriarchal politicians to kind of look after the national family at this time of crisis has kind of demystified and broken that myth a little bit. I wouldn't speak too soon, but it was a thought of when I read the news today. I mean, I think that's a really good point and actually probably it's her relationship to the coronavirus crisis, which is not only more relevant, but also more interesting in terms of the extent of her victory. Because you have to think, you know, who has both done quite well when it comes to coronavirus but also has massively increased their esteem among the public during this crisis and the three people I can think of, you know, most prominently who most obviously come to mind, I suppose other than Xi Jinping for sort of defeating the virus in China and Angela Merkel and Jacinda Ardern, all people who, you know, all relatively centrist but who have sort of come out and said, I'm going to be honest with you here. I'm going to err on the side of caution and who have, you know, that has really been appreciated by their respective publics. Like the complete opposite of what Boris Johnson and Donald Trump have done, which just to say, you know, we're going to take some risks and we're also going to make this all about ourselves. We're not going to be particularly honest with you. We're going to certainly play politics out of this. I'm not saying, you know, maybe Nicola Sturgeon is playing politics out of this, but she's definitely doing it a dam site less obviously than Boris Johnson and you can see actually a kind of a kind of leadership that whilst it might not be transformative at least makes people feel reassured in the middle of a global pandemic, which does count for something, eh? Yeah, and I think, you know, those three figures that you mentioned come from different parts of the political spectrum, but all of them are kind of projects the kind of particular, like the very gendered, like racialised politics upon which they rely is very different to that which, you know, is represented by those kind of strong men figures that I mentioned, whose whose only function is to be able to do swift, bold action in times of crisis, but have failed.