In 2015, the politics of New Zealand was dominated by the center-left Labour Party, which had been in power since the 2014 election. The party was led by Prime Minister John Key and focused on a range of economic reforms, such as reducing public spending and increasing foreign investment. The party also sought to promote New Zealand values such as freedom of speech and religious tolerance, while also working to improve relations with other countries in the region. Other political parties included the National Party (NP), as well as several smaller parties. See ehealthfacts for New Zealand in the year of 2005.
The 2015 election was held in September of that year and saw Labour win a majority in both chambers of Parliament with 50 out of 122 seats. This ensured that they would remain in power for another three years. During this time, Prime Minister Key sought to implement further reforms to improve New Zealand’s economic standing while ensuring social justice for all citizens. He also worked towards improving relations with other countries in the region and strengthening ties with international organizations such as the United Nations. In 2017, he was succeeded by Jacinda Ardern following a successful presidential election campaign.
Yearbook 2015
New Zealand. An aircraft belonging to a company that offers parachuting jumped into engine problems and crashed in January in Lake Taupo on the North Island. However, all the 13 on board managed to save themselves by jumping in parachute from about 1,300 meters altitude. No person was seriously injured.
According to COUNTRYAAH, Wellington is the capital of New Zealand which is located in Polynesia. The Swedish government decided to return human remains from the Karolinska Institutet (KI) to New Zealand. As early as 2008, the Museum of New Zealand demanded that Sweden return a large number of Moorish skulls. The skulls believed to be stolen from the indigenous peoples’ graves in the 1890s had then been sold to shell meters at KI in Solna.
- Also see AbbreviationFinder.org for New Zealand country abbreviations, including geography, history, economy and politics.
Materials leaked by American Edward Snowden and published by the New Zealand Herald magazine showed that New Zealand has been monitoring data and telecommunications from Pacific countries such as Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and more.
The U21 Men’s Soccer World Cup was played in New Zealand in June. The victory was taken home by Serbia.
Author Ted Dave’s teen novel “Into the River” was banned in New Zealand. After many legal trips, Family First, a conservative Christian lobby group, succeeded in banning the book. The lobby group believed that the novel includes, among other things, “graphic sexual content and pedophilia, explicit and glorifying descriptions of drug use, insidious manipulation of 14-year-olds and very offensive language use”.
A September tiger killed a woman working in a zoo in the city of Hamilton in September. The woman must have been attacked while cleaning the tiger’s fence.
A man from the island nation of Kiribati who sought asylum because of climate change was deported in September. According to New Zealand’s Supreme Court, climate change is not a valid reason for getting asylum because the UN states that refugees are persons subjected to some form of persecution in their home country. New Zealand rugby national team All Blacks won the rugby World Cup for the third time in October.
Six tourists and a pilot were killed in November when a helicopter crashed during a flight in the Fox Glacier on the South Island. The accident is believed to have been caused by bad weather conditions.
New Zealand
Art
The practitioners of the various arts among the Maoris were called tohunga (‘priest’, ‘sent person’), whether it was canoe builders, wood carvers or tattoo artists. With simple tools, they built large plankhus, adorned with rich cutouts, and magnificently cut canoes up to 30 m. In Maori art is the image of man (tiki), the central symbol, which goes back to the small pendant jewelry of jade, the axes and clubs, shrines, masks, ancestral figures and in the ornate and meeting houses’ ornate panels and sculpted pillars.
Awareness of Maori culture is one pole in contemporary art, the other New Zealand landscape – as with Frances Hodgkins, the first of New Zealand’s artists to gain international recognition. A group of artists, which included Colin McCahon and Don Binney, claimed in the 1960s the regional distinctiveness to international influences. The group paved the way for today’s diverse art with exponents like environmentalist Ralph Hotere, Philippa Blair, Jeffrey Harris and sculptors Christopher Booth and Neil Dawson.
Literature
The first phase of New Zealand’s literary development, from 1840, when the country became part of the British Empire until the interwar period, is completely dominated by the motherland’s culture and style ideal. Gradually, it enters a phase of cultural liberation and national self-knowledge. That books such as Samuel Butler’s “Erewhon” (1872) and Katherine Mansfield’s short-story collections of the 1920s have a New Zealand background is obvious and well-known. However, it is really only through later authors, e.g. the novelist Frank Sargeson, often called the father of New Zealand literature, and the poet Allen Curnow with the anthologies “A Book of New Zealand Verse” (1945) and “The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse” (1960) as well as novelist Janet Frame and lyricist James K. Baxter like New Zealand found its literary identity.
The storytelling form has been relatively dominant, and the stories often contain dark and threatening elements. Interest in Maori culture has increased continuously. Witi Ihimaera’s short collection “Pounamu, Pounamu” (1972) and “Tangi” (1973), the first Maori novel in English, has been followed by Patricia Grace and Keri Hulme.
Of literary magazines, Landfall, founded in 1947, is the oldest and most famous.
Although the country has traditionally been characterized by male ideals and ‘mateship’, there are, in addition to the aforementioned, strikingly many female writers who have become well known outside the country. These include Fleur Adcock (born 1934), editor of the Oxford Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry (1982), author and educator Sylvia Ashton-Warner and Ngaio Marsh, author of a wide range of detective novels.