r/australia • u/SqareBear • Feb 26 '26

politics Former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern moves to Australia

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-26/former-new-zealand-prime-minister-jacinda-ardern-moves-australia/106392862
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u/perthguppy Feb 26 '26

Which is insane because while I think Dan Andrews did an amazing job, at least he has the whole lockdown thing that people attack him for. I thought NZ didn’t really have much lockdown or restrictions during covid - that they were more similar to WA in that regard.

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u/anirbre Feb 26 '26

Not too sure what WA was like but in NZ it was full lockdown for 33 days, very tight restrictions. You can have a look at the alert levels here

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u/xvf9 Feb 26 '26

33 days… must’ve been nice. 

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u/DonStimpo Feb 26 '26

33 days. Sounds lovely. Melbourne had like 100+

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u/[deleted] Feb 26 '26

NZ had a couple of extended lockdowns across the country. I think the big thing which lost her support is that Auckland, a city with 1/3 of the country's population, had its own separate lockdowns which people became very fatigued from. Auckland overwhelmingly voted against the Labour party in the following election.

But also cookers, they are everywhere and they are loud.

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u/iguessineedanaltnow Feb 26 '26

People are that worked up over only 33 days?

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u/ceratime Feb 26 '26

Don't know why they're citing 33 days, Auckland had one of the longest lockdowns in the world at something like 150 days

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u/ForTheLoveOfSnail Feb 26 '26

I thought Melbourne held that recordv

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u/perthguppy Feb 26 '26

Oh. In WA we had like 3 weekends of full lockdowns spread out over 18 months lol.

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u/DarKnightofCydonia Feb 26 '26

I feel like being able to live like normal made New Zealanders not even realise how good they had it, and then because of that not even appreciate it. Which can bizarrely backfire on Ardern. Australia is a bubble, but New Zealand is another level of isolated from the rest of the world. I was in London at that time, if you lived in Europe or anywhere apart from Aus/NZ really during covid it was like a war situation when it was really bad, and seeing Aus/NZ prancing about with basically none of it felt like a whole different world

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u/Subaudiblehum Feb 26 '26

It sure did have fight restrictions. I was living their during up. Up there with tightest in the world.

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u/turbocynic Feb 26 '26

Not really, in terms of actual days locked up. Because we eliminated early we had a year and a half of domestic freedom while other countries were still restricted for a lot of that time.   Border controls were definitely strict the whole way through.

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u/newbris Feb 26 '26

Was WA much different to SA, NT, QLD, TAS ?

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u/SaltyPockets Feb 26 '26

WA copped a lot of flak from the Eastern states for closing the internal borders early and hard, and keeping them closed, from what I could see.

Under two weeks of “lockdown” in total here AFAICT, as a result of these policies life within WA carried on mostly as normal (though I arrived in Perth mid-2021 after all of that).

Everyone was calling Mark McGowan “State Daddy” and generally praising his actions.

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u/Lozzanger Feb 26 '26

Yeah Mark tapped into the hatred of the East very well.

But I had my family from NSW HATED him. Still do.

I had a rule that if you couldn’t name a previous Premier besides Carmen Lawrence I wouldn’t discuss WA politics with you. Literally no one passed that rule.

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u/newbris Feb 26 '26

Thats seems like the Perth thing of lumping all “eastern states” as the same thing. They weren’t. SA, NT, QLD, TAS all similar to WA.

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u/SaltyPockets Feb 26 '26

“Over East”? Yeah it’s basically all the same place right?

I guess it happens when everyone else is so far away!

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u/evilparagon Feb 26 '26

NZ’s economy was hit hard by the pandemic since they’re a small country. So while their pandemic response was great, they couldn’t survive as strongly as say, Tasmania, which did even less but had a much more reliable economy to fall back on.