New Zealand’s new conservative prime minister is to abandon one of the world’s toughest smoking bans as part of a clutch of policies that signal a desire to take the country in a radically different direction from Jacinda Ardern.
Christopher Luxon, a former Unilever and Air New Zealand executive and leader of the National party, who was sworn in on Monday, said this week that his administration’s “number-one job is to fix the economy”.
The new centre-right government lost little time in unveiling measures aimed at rolling back Ardern’s progressive agenda, including lifting a prohibition on new oil and gas exploration, scrapping Māori names for government departments and repealing the generational smoking ban.