Conservatives triumphed in New Zealand on Saturday as the country decisively voted to kick the far-left Labour Party out of power. That comes after the recent resignation of former PM Jacinda Ardern, who led the nation's years-long "zero COVID" push. 

Christopher Luxon will now become the country's new prime minister.

After an election campaign of fits and starts, in which neither major party appeared to offer much solace to a weary nation, voters in New Zealand on Saturday ousted the party once led by Jacinda Ardern and elected the country’s most right-wing government in a generation, handing victory to a coalition of two conservative parties.

New Zealand’s next prime minister will be Christopher Luxon, a former chief executive of Air New Zealand, whose center-right National Party will lead a coalition with Act, a smaller libertarian party.

Absent from the Times' write-up is any mention of Ardern's tyrannical COVID policies, but it would be ludicrous to suggest they didn't play a role in her party's defeat. Inflation and cost of living where top issues for voters in the latest election, and nothing harmed New Zealand's economy more than the "zero COVID" policy that kept the nation locked down well in 2021, and to a lesser extent into 2022.

Ardern is also infamous for promoting censorship as a means to fight supposed "disinformation." 

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says free speech is a weapon of war, and censorship is necessary to protect free speech. pic.twitter.com/O8jQMtNs55

— illuminatibot (@iluminatibot) September 19, 2023

Those chickens have come home to roost, and despite her early resignation, Ardern will not escape the legacy of failure and authoritarianism she left behind. She was one of the worst, most ineffective world leaders in modern history. No amount of praise for her progressive ideals will change that. 

Meanwhile, next door in Australia, a major referendum meant to racially divide the country's government was decisively struck down. 

With a two-letter word, Australians struck down the first attempt at constitutional change in 24 years, a move experts say will inflict lasting damage on First Nations people and suspend any hopes of modernizing the nation’s founding document.

Preliminary results from the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) suggested that most of the country’s 17.6 million registered voters wrote No on their ballots, and CNN affiliates 9 News, Sky News and SBS all projected no path forward for the Yes campaign.

The proposal would have created a special carve-out for "indigenous people" within Australia's constitution while creating an "indigenous body" that would help shape government policy.

The proposal, to recognize Indigenous people in the constitution and create an Indigenous body to advise government on policies that affect them, needed a majority nationally and in four of six states to pass. 

Australians wanted no part of that tiered system despite the global press being firmly behind it. Read this paragraph and try not to laugh. 

During months of campaigning, the No vote gained momentum with slogans that appealed to voter apathy – “If you don’t know, vote No” – and a host of other statements designed to instill fear, according to experts, including that it would divide Australia by race and be legally risky, despite expert advice to the contrary.

Experts giving expert advice while experting as experts!

Those kinds of appeals just don't land anymore, especially after the betrayal of truth by so many "experts" over the last several years. In the end, Austrians didn't want a constitutionally codified division of its residents. That is a perfectly acceptable and logical decision. 

What these elections show (as well as Italy's 2022 election, among others) is that the far-left is suffering defeats internationally due to its massive, damaging overreach. Will the United States see a similar correction in 2024? That depends on how much faith you have in the Republican Party to not screw up a golden opportunity.