Kia ora John,

One of the real honours of being Party President is meeting the amazing people within our movement who have taken the huge step and put themselves forward as candidates to become MPs.

It’s a significant undertaking: the work of MPs is extensive and hard. But the sense of public service which these candidates have within them, their determination to make our country even better, and to help within their communities, is inspiring.

This morning, we took one of the first formal steps as a Party in the 2020 General Election: publishing our Party List - our ranking of our potential MPs.*

I couldn’t be prouder of the exciting line-up of new candidates we unveiled, bolstering our already experienced caucus with diverse new talent.

The list includes people like:

• Dr Ayesha Verrall, an infectious diseases specialist who led the work to improve the Government’s contact tracing programme to protect New Zealanders from COVID-19
• Vanushi Walters, a human rights lawyer and a senior manager at the Human Rights Commission, who sat on the board of Amnesty International for six years
• Ibrahim Omer, a unionist and community advocate. Ibrahim is Eritrean, with a refugee background. He worked as a cleaner for Victoria University before joining the Living Wage Movement and working full- time while studying Politics and International Relations
• Naisi Chen, the director of a business consultancy firm specialising in employment relations and HR matters, and Vice President of the youth wing of our Party.

And that’s just some of the team. You can read the full list and ranking here. Some of the names may already be familiar to you. Some of them may not be. But what unites them all is a shared belief that New Zealand can rebuild even better in the aftermath of COVID-19. With the skills and experience they bring, I am excited for many of them to become an MP in the next Parliament.

Now, the next step is for us to get these great candidates elected! You can help do that by signing up to volunteer, or chipping in what you can to help fund our campaign to get as many of these great candidates into the next Parliament.

Thank you,

Claire Szabó
Labour Party President

*As you may know, under MMP, some MPs enter Parliament because of winning their electorate seats, and others enter from the ‘list’ - taking the representation in Parliament of all parties to the level which matches their share of the Party vote. That’s why the Party vote is so important to us: a larger share of that vote means we get more MPs into Parliament.