The former NZ Prime Minister, Helen Clark, gave a topical online presentation at the Chilean Centre for Public Studies (Centro de Estudios Públicos/CEP) on 17 March 2020.
The presentation focused on the way in which New Zealand has developed and whether that is relevant to Chile as it considers the way forward in the wake of the major upheavals of late 2019. This was titled in Spanish ¿Nueva Zelanda: Un modelo a seguir?/New Zealand: a model to follow? Please see Helen Clark’s prepared text for this online seminar and the presentation is also available interpreted into Spanish.
Q&A session, 23 mins length: with Leonidas Montes, Director of CEP and Isabel Aninat, CEP Researcher:
Q: “What are the questions and issues in terms of multiculturalism for New Zealand that you see going forward?”
Helen Clark response (R): 37.40 mins
Q: “What is in your opinion really important for a new constitution in Chile?”
R: 43.36 mins
Q: “NZ faced a very big crisis in the 1980s and you did major reforms in terms of the state and economy. Looking back, what would you say were the political enablers or conditions that helped facilitate these reforms, helped those reforms go through and allowed the NZ State Sector and economy to work as now?”
R: 48.21 mins
Q: “We’re facing a crisis for democracy and representation around the world. We were talking about this polarisation around the world in many ways that is not that acute in NZ, but in many countries including Chile, there is a different political conversation, a loss of civility. How do you the think the world will evolve optimistically to come back, for example, to what we had…at the turn of the century. I will give an example, we had President Lagos here and you were the Prime Minister of New Zealand, the political discourse/conversation was different. What do you think is the situation now and how to face that given that context?”
R: 54.09 mins