New Zealand’s youngest MP is now 26 and has set her sights on the economics portfolio
Everything below her eyes is covered with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles face mask, but the few passers-by on the near-empty streets of Auckland still recognise Chlöe Swarbrick. New Zealand’s largest city is under a second lockdown to quell a resurgence of Covid-19 and Swarbrick, who became New Zealand’s youngest lawmaker since 1975 when she took office in 2017, at 23, is out for her permitted daily walk for an oat-milk coffee, the Guardian accompanying her by video call.
“This is wear I wash my clothes,” she says, stepping into an empty laundromat. Swarbrick, who is spending the lockdown in her small central city apartment , has been a familiar face on these streets for years, as a philosophy and law student, business owner, alternative radio journalist, and as a candidate for the city’s mayor, aged 22, just before she headed to parliament in the capital, Wellington. When she steps back out into Auckland’s blustery wind, another “Hi Chlöe!” is audible.
Continue reading…New Zealand’s youngest MP is now 26 and has set her sights on the economics portfolioEverything below her eyes is covered with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles face mask, but the few passers-by on the near-empty streets of Auckland still recognise Chlöe Swarbrick. New Zealand’s largest city is under a second lockdown to quell a resurgence of Covid-19 and Swarbrick, who became New Zealand’s youngest lawmaker since 1975 when she took office in 2017, at 23, is out for her permitted daily walk for an oat-milk coffee, the Guardian accompanying her by video call.“This is wear I wash my clothes,” she says, stepping into an empty laundromat. Swarbrick, who is spending the lockdown in her small central city apartment , has been a familiar face on these streets for years, as a philosophy and law student, business owner, alternative radio journalist, and as a candidate for the city’s mayor, aged 22, just before she headed to parliament in the capital, Wellington. When she steps back out into Auckland’s blustery wind, another “Hi Chlöe!” is audible. Continue reading…