The year of living absently

Photo: Marlborough Express

Days of brilliant summer sun will take away the hangover haze of a blank year only rarely enlivened by the likes of MP Hone Harawira, below.

Photo: Far North Photographic

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THE YEAR went by so quickly, but what was the rush? New Zealand in 2009 didn't bother getting all dressed up. It knew it had nowhere to go. It was broke. It drank at home and read Dan Brown. Its bum looked big in a recession – McDonald's registered record sales. It filled the supermarket trolley with cheap tins of Home Brand and Pam's. It suffered mutton dressed as All Blacks. It denied climate change. It said: "Whatevs." It wanted the year over and done with. New Zealand in 2009 was missing, but not in action, just missing, absent, in limbo.

Reports of its absence reached the ends of the Earth. I went to Antarctica in January. It's an amazing place and I hated every second of it. But food always takes my mind off things, so I mooched into the Scott Base kitchen for tea and cake at 3am one night as summer's permanent sunlight glared through the windows, and I saw a week-old copy of the Christchurch Press lying on a table. The front-page headline read: MORE JOBS TO GO. It was even more depressing than the view of the frozen sea in broad daylight at 3am. I thought: I may as well stay in Antarctica. It's just as blank as New Zealand.

More jobs did go. That was very often decided in a head office across the Tasman; it was as though Australia had foreclosed on New Zealand. The recession was like a plague. Actually, it visited more homes than the promised great plague of 2009, swine flu, which flew in from Mexico in April, and provoked oinks of panic. Cases were confirmed. Schools were closed. The only good news was that government minister Nick Smith put himself in quarantine.

Already inflamed with anxious visions of the recession tearing the social fabric into tiny pieces, I kept myself up to date about the possible impact of swine flu by reading Daniel Defoe's classic work, Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1722. It's a terrifying account of the bubonic plague that laid London to waste in 1665: "The work of removing the dead by carts grew so very odious and dangerous that sometimes bodies lay several days unburied, till the neighbouring families were offended with the stench, and consequently infected ... " Well, that sounded a bit on the alarmist side in 2009. Defoe also wrote about the signs nailed to church doors telling the sick to clear off. In downtown Auckland, a notice appeared on the doors of public places; this mean little document advised anyone who suspected they had flu-like symptoms to clear off.

The official swine-flu death toll in New Zealand reached 20 by November. Who knew the true figures of recession flu? Unemployment, liquidation, bankruptcy, mortgagee sales ... gloomy statistics measured a rise in gloomy statistics. You could read all about it just by looking at your phone. Text from a friend in March: "Got made redundant today. Your shout?" In September, a Treasury report declared the recession was over. Hallelujah! Text from another friend, two weeks before Christmas: "Got made redundant today. Buy me a drink?"

The new government gaped on the sidelines. Bill English borrowed overseas credit and fleeced the taxpayer. In his first full year as finance minister, his most dramatic influence on the economy was to claim a housing allowance for his "primary residence" in Dipton, Southland, despite living up the road from parliament with his wife and their 753 children in a shotgun shack in Karori.

With bad grace – he can come across as a sour and patronising kind of rooster – English bowed to pressure, and returned the money. Good idea. As the ruling party, National's most appealing virtue is that it just wants to get on with it. But get on with what?

Its calendar of non-events included the Jobs Summit in February. To counter the distress of fewer people in work, the summit advocated a new distress – the nine-day fortnight, which delivered less pay to cram in the same amount of work.

Then, in July, the government appointed Don Brash to head a taskforce charged with closing the income gap between New Zealand and Australia. The taskforce set about its special ops mission in earnest. It set its jaw, spoke in low voices, pointed a stick at maps. It announced its masterplan this month. With a flourish, it unveiled a dinged and dusty antique – ye olde Rogernomics, recommending deregulation, privatisation, a lowering of the minimum wage, etc. Thanks, said English, but no thanks. Poor old Brash; the rejection made him look like a butler scuttling around in an empty mansion.

Labour, meanwhile, looked like ghosts. That was inevitable. Defeat at last year's election robbed the party of its biggest pair of balls. In Helen Clark's absence, Phil Goff's soft, pale physog wafted in and out of view for most of the year until he captured attention with his speech about nationhood, which he then said wasn't about nationhood, and attention drifted. On an afternoon in November, I called in on a Labour MP. I was out of town, and just happened to be passing his South Island electorate office; I'd not met him before, but admired his furious performances in parliament as a government minister. Now the fight had gone out of him. I could tell the fight had gone out of him because I asked how he was doing, and he said, "I'm bored shitless."

Prime Minister John Key whistled a merry tune all year long. He passed new bills at midnight without due process, got Rodney Hide to do his dirty work, and kept up appearances by presenting himself as a harmless goober on Letterman. In private, he submitted to his only interesting emotion – petulant, impatient rage – when he dismissed that romantic sap, Richard Worth. No one minded much. Key's silent assassination once again played as just wanting to get on with it.

New Zealand knew the feeling. It was broke; it had its hands full keeping the wolf from the door, it didn't have time to stop and discuss the finer details. Key was the power that loved our vacuum. Harsh to continue thinking of him as an empty vessel, a vacant lot. He displayed sound management skills. He was decisive. As the year closes, even his harshest critics must surely acknowledge Key as New Zealand's greatest Prime Minister since Helen Clark.

ANTIQUES AND ghosts, Dan Brown and Home Brand. New Zealand was put on hold in 2009, but it coped with characteristic humour and generosity of spirit. In his closing remarks in The Penguin History of New Zealand, Michael King – who remains a deeply missed figure on the intellectual landscape – wrote very sensible lines about the people of the land: "Most New Zealanders, whatever their cultural backgrounds, are good-hearted, practical, commensensical and tolerant ... They are as sound a basis as any for optimism about the country's future."

Yes, but King's list of our national qualities is rather ... dour. New Zealand, pop. four million virtuous dullards. We live here and put up with it. As 2009 collapsed into winter, other lines came to mind, from CKStead, when he reviewed King's history: "There is a tendency to romanticise pre-European Maori life but current knowledge ... suggests that Maori were hanging on with some difficulty in colder latitudes." Current events suggested that was all of us this year.

Or most of us. Mark Hotchin had no difficulty living the high life, ordering crystal glass for the shower doors at his new $30 million mansion in Auckland's Paritai Drive while his failed Hanover finance company owed about $500m to 17,000 investors. Hotchin, and his stupid house, were obvious targets of public loathing. It felt good to have someone so obviously appalling to throw stones at during the recession. John Campbell – on fire this year unless he was in the same room sucking up to Joe Karam and David Bain – held an exhilarating interview with Hotchin on Campbell Live. He got in Hotchin's face. He scoffed at him, quite clearly held him in contempt.

The media helps choose our villains; offence to basic moral decency does the rest. But hardly anyone joined in the media's campaign to lift the court order of permanent name suppression given to the "prominent entertainer" who admitted an indecency charge. Why the fuss? His name did the rounds anyway, and it turned out he wasn't especially "prominent".

It took something special to rile the public in 2009. It took Hone Harawira. In November, his famous email gave the public what it wanted: a good excuse to rise up and howl their dislike of Johnny Maori. Johnny Maori, uppity and in parliament; Johnny Maori, with their boring customs and their unreasonable demands to give Wanganui an h; Johnny Maori, worst of all, thinking they could bid for the Rugby World Cup. After I wrote a satirical column about novelist Witi Ihimaera and his lazy act of plagiarism, I received this email from an anonymous jackass: "Dude, no surprise. Whether they're engaged in the arts, politics, film, academia, etc – the odds are that Maori will just f--- up." Uh-huh. Next caller, please.

But public enemy number one this year was white, educated, apparently sane. Clayton Weatherston, right now in jail for the first Christmas of his 18-year sentence for the murder of Sophie Elliott, offended every precept of basic moral decency.

"His evidence," said Mark Sainsbury on Close Up, introducing Weatherston's first appearance at his trial in July, "is harrowing and graphic. Please be warned it may be difficult to listen to." Weatherston did the impossible. In court, in his own defence, unable to stop talking for those five incredible days, he managed to make his insult to Elliott's memory even more unacceptable than the injuries he committed with a knife.

The media racked its brains to come up with something ahead of the public's hatred for Weatherston. It succeeded. It placed an advertisement to kill him, by running stories based on the rumour that there was a contract out on his life. News websites honoured this ugliness with the headlines EDITOR'S PICKS and MOST READ.

For a brief while, in October, it seemed New Zealand harboured someone else who might be even more reprehensible than Weatherston – an Asian woman with a dog. She was reported to be the last person to see missing two-year-old Aisling Symes of Henderson. Police issued appeals for the woman to come forward. She didn't come forward. A description ("long straight black hair") was released; police received 111 calls of possible sightings; Korean, Cantonese and Mandarin translators were called in; police said it looked "more likely" that an abduction had taken place; there were "fears" Aisling had been "stolen to order"; border patrols went on high alert; there were "eerie similarities" to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in Portugal; Aisling's parents made an emotional appeal on TV for the safe return of their daughter.

It was horrible, unbelievable – who would do such a thing? No one. Aisling's body was discovered in a drain near her home. The circumstances were at once tragic and banal. She had wandered off. Not abducted, just gone.

It was the worst news of a dour, missing year. Get 2009 over and done with. Put it behind us. Bring in a new year, a new decade. Right now we'll settle for a long hot summer, the days bright with sunshine, sand in our hair, barbecue smoke rising over the fence, a cold drink within reach, tents and fish and family. Summer is the New Zealand dream, its nationhood, its presence in the world.

Don't miss two more Braunias Holiday Lectures in Focus on January 3 and 10.

- © Fairfax NZ News