Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced the move Sunday evening after an urgent meeting with other top lawmakers in the Cabinet.

She said they decided to take a cautious approach until they found out more about the outbreak, including whether the infections were of the more contagious variants.

The rest of New Zealand will also be placed under heightened restrictions although will not go into lockdown, Ardern said.

In a significant setback to New Zealand’s efforts to keep the coronavirus from spreading in the community, three people from one Auckland family have tested positive with the source of the infections unknown, health officials announced Sunday.

The news prompted Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to cancel her plans and return to the capital Wellington for further briefings and decision-making.

New Zealand had successfully stamped out community spread of the virus, although new cases are regularly caught at the border among returning travellers, all of whom are required to spend two weeks in quarantine.

Officials said they’re keeping an open mind on how the Auckland mother, father and daughter caught the disease.

They said the mother works at an airline catering company, and officials are investigating whether there is a link to infected passengers.

“We are gathering all of the facts as quickly as we can, and the system that served us so well in the past is really gearing up to do so again,” said COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins.
He described the cases as new and active.

He said scientists are carrying out genome sequencing to see whether the cases are of the more transmissible variants, and also to see whether they match with any infected passengers.

New Zealand, with a population of 5 million, has reported a total of just over 2,300 cases and 25 deaths since the pandemic started.

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Priyanca has been given multiple roles as the Minister of Diversity,Inclusion and Ethnic Communities, Minister for Youth, Minister of Community and Voluntary Sector and Associated Minister for Social Development and Employment.

Earlier, Priyanca has served as the private Secretary to the then Minister for Ethnic Communities Jenny Salesa and later as the Assistant speaker in the second term of the government led by Labour Party. She had also acted as policy advisor to former MP Phil Goff.

This is the second time Priyanca is elected as MP representing Labour Party. She has been active in Labour Party for the last 14 years.

Priyanca completed her education from Singapore and New Zealand. She holds a masters degree in Development Studies from Victoria University. Hailing from Paravoor in Ernakulam, Priyanca is daughter of Raman Radhakrishnan and Usha. IT professional Richardson is Priyanca’s husband.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern unveiled what she called an “incredibly diverse” cabinet on Monday, as she promised to prioritise economic recovery in the wake of COVID-19 pandemic.

Ardern has revamped her ministerial lineup in the wake of a landslide election victory, allowing her form the single-party government since New Zealand moved to a German-style system of proportional representation in 1996.

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Dr Gaurav Sharma immigrated to New Zealand around twenty years ago. A native of Himachal Pradesh’s Hamripur district, Sharma has a bachelor in medicine and surgery and works as a general practitioner in Nawton, Hamilton. He also completed his master’s in business administration from George Washington University in the United States.

According to the Labour Party, Sharma has been involved in public health, policy and consulting in several countries and also advocated rights for refugees and helped rebuild villages in Nepal after a massive earth quake hit the hill nation in 2015.

Sharma was studying in class nine when his father, who was an executive engineer in the electricity board of Himachal, migrated to New Zealand with his family. His dad took the leap, left his government job and decided to shift to a new country. However, his family struggled during the initial years in the country. Sharma’s father took six years to find a new job and the family has experienced homelessness- sleeping on parks and benches and used the Auckland City mission for arranging food.

Even if Dr Gaurav Sharma spend majority of his life in NZ, he had not lost touch with the place where he was born. He cherishes eating native Himachal food and liked to speak the native language Pahari in Himachal.

Congratulating him on his victory, Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur said the people of the state were proud of him.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern delivered a huge victory for the Labout Party and is all set for her second term in office.

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With two thirds of the vote counted, Ardern’s centre-left Labour Party was on 49.2 percent, far ahead of the opposition National Party at 27 %. The Labour Party is forecast to take around 64 seats in the 120-member pariliament.

While the count has not been finalised, the figures were enough for opposition leader Judith Collins to congratulate Ardern.

Her conservative National Party was expected to take around 35 seats in what appears to be its worst result in nearly 20 years.

No leader has achieved an absolute majority since New Zealand adopted a proportional voting system in 1996, leading to a succession of multi-party governments. Typically, parties must form alliances to govern, but this time Ardern and Labour can go it alone.

Her emphatic victory is the result of her success in controlling COVID-19 across New Zealand. Jacinda,40, said that she would use her mandate to rebuild an economy battered by the coronavirus pandemic and tackle social inequality.

Ardern had dubbed the vote “the Covid election” and campaigned on her government’s success in eliminating community transmission of the virus, which has caused just 25 deaths in a population of five million.

The pandemic is just one of a string of crises that showed Ardern’s leadership qualities during a torrid first term.

She displayed both empathy and decisive action on gun control after a white supremacist gunman killed 51 Muslim worshippers in the Christchurch mosques attack last year.

Ardern again found herself comforting a shocked nation when a volcanic eruption at White Island, also known as Whakaari, killed 21 people and left dozens more with horrific burns.

Labour is pledging massive spending on infrastructure to boost the economy and has pledged to impose a higher tax rate on income over NZ$180,000 ($120,000) a year to raise more revenue. Ardern has ruled out implementing the wealth tax proposed by the Greens.

Ardern said she would govern for all New Zealanders and declined to say whether she would invite the Green Party into her government until final results were in. The Greens had 7.6% of the vote.

The landslide victory will give Ardern more scope to deliver the transformational government she promised when she came to power three years ago, particularly if the Greens push her to be more progressive on issues such as poverty and climate change. Still, she will be wary of alienating centrist voters with increased social spending at a time when debt is spiraling due to the government’s pandemic response.

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Meanwhile, the death toll due to the COVID disease rose to 774,288, with the US reporting the highest deaths in the world (170,052), followed by Brazil (107,852), Mexico (56,757), and India (50,921).

Globally, more than 13 million people have recovered from the infection (13,372,643), with the highest number of recovered in Brazil (2,655,017) and followed by India (1,919,842).

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Monday decided to delay New Zealand’s national elections by four weeks as the country deals with a new coronavirus outbreak in its largest city, Auckland. The election had been scheduled for September 19 but will now be held on October 17. Under New Zealand law, Arden could delay election for two months.

South Korea, which efficiently controlled the virus outbreak, witnessed a triple-digit spike in new coronavirus cases, as fears grew about a massive outbreak in the greater capital region. The government urged people to stay home and curb travel.

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Auckland was swiftly put under a three-day lockdown after four cases were confirmed in one family there. The family had not travelled overseas and the source of their infection is unknown.

This is significant because the country had not recorded transmissions of the virus within the community in more than three months and daily life had returned to normal except for strict border control.

The health authorities had repeatedly warned people not to be complacent and a second wave of infections was “inevitable”.

All 22 known cases of the virus reported before were reported among returning travellers quarantine in isolation facilities.

Arden said “many questions” remain about the four new cases of covid-19 diagnosed in the community, after 102 days of no such cases in the country.

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