Sri Lankan-born HR lawyer Vanushi Walters elected to NZ parliament
October 18, 2020 09:56 am
Sri Lankan-born Human Rights lawyer in New Zealand, Vanushi Walters, has won the race to be Upper Harbour MP in northwest Auckland at the New Zealand’s general election.
Walters claimed a narrow victory over National candidate Jake Bezzant, a former tech company chief executive and cricketer for Hamilton, receiving 14,142 votes to Bezzant’s 12,727.
She is taking over from the retiring National MP, Paula Bennett.
During the campaign, Walters, a board member of Amnesty International, said she was passionate about the electorate because of its “diverse” and “warm” communities.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern won a landslide victory in New Zealand’s general election Saturday, leveraging success battling Covid-19 to gain an unprecedented outright majority and the chance to implement her reform agenda.
The new Labour Party caucus is far more representative of contemporary New Zealand than National, says a Massey University sociologist, with more than half of Labour’s 64 MPs being women, while having 15 Maori MPs, one in six MPs a Pasifika and a good mix of other ethnicities.
-With inputs from agencies
