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Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Opposition Leader Judith Collins clashed with the media on their way to their respective party assemblies on Tuesday morning, as Parliament resumes its sessions for the week.
Parliament will regain its full numerical strength after Auckland was moved back to Covid alert level 1 at midnight Monday.
The week of sessions begins with a backdrop of good news for the government, as S&P Global improved New Zealand’s credit rating. New Zealand is the first country since the pandemic to receive a rating upgrade.
Finance Minister Grant Robertson said Things Monday night that when the government plunged New Zealand into lockdown last year, an improvement in ratings was certainly not expected.
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Things
Judith Collins and Jacinda Ardern will meet today in Parliament.
“That would have been one of the least likely outcomes I would have expected at the time. You know, until the middle of last year we had some very scary forecasts about what could happen to the New Zealand economy. “
The other big news coming Tuesday will be the child poverty statistics for the year ending June 2020.
As part of the Child Poverty Reduction Act, which aims to “help achieve a significant and sustained reduction in child poverty in New Zealand”, the Government is required to report once a year on its progress towards a combination of three annual and five-year goals.
Progress is measured against a set of nine criteria, including ‘material difficulty’, the measure favored by Commissioner for Children, Andrew Beecroft.
Tuesday’s figures should represent two full years of measurement since the Ardern Labor government took office.
Covid-19 and the government response will also remain a political issue this week, after the first round of vaccines began to be distributed to border workers late last week.
At 2:00 p.m. there will also be a motion in Parliament to mark the 10th anniversary of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake.
