New Zealand is going through the sort of post-crisis upheaval that generates huge societal changes
Photo: AFP
It's just over a year since the WHO (World Health Organisation) called an official end to the Covid-19 emergency, and nearly two years since our own borders fully reopened.
But it feels like we're still suffering from a covid hangover.
People still seem to be in a bad mood, kids are not turning up to school, mortgage rates are still horribly high, our best and brightest are leaving the country in droves, businesses are failing, and toxic social media is driving everything along.
How long will we be suffering from this malaise?
The short answer is, economically things will get better next year. The long answer is far more complicated, as New Zealand, along with the rest of the world, goes through an upheaval sparked by crisis.
On The Detail today to discuss it are economist Shamubeel Eaqub and Massey University sociologist and Emeritus Professor Paul Spoonley.
Spoonley says the way New Zealand dealt with the pandemic has attracted migrants who come for lifestyle reasons - but inside our own community we've seen a degree of grumpiness, including the rise of online hate.
"The growth in the last five to seven years in the degree of scepticism, in the buying into conspiracy theories (and quite extreme conspiracy theories), believing what is said by QAnon, has grown at quite a rate. There is good evidence to suggest it is double the rate of Australia and triple the rate of Canada, of people accessing Far Right, in this case Facebook, sites.
"I would characterise social cohesion in New Zealand as dropping to a new low. You can see it in the decline in trust - trust in the media, trust in politicians, trust in our government. So there's definitely a sort of post-Covid disengagement that's occurred where people are deeply sceptical and suspicious."
As an example, Spoonley says we saw it last year with low return rates of the Census, where people were not prepared to share information with the government because they were highly sceptical of both the government, and what that information would be used for.
"There's no doubt that internally, the dynamics of this country have changed."
Shamubeel Eaqub says New Zealand is in a period of change, a society that's shifting very rapidly - including our values, and boundaries of what's acceptable, which are all up for grabs.
"The ground rules have shifted. In terms of how people think about what's right and wrong; the boundaries between what's acceptable and not acceptable….
"We are all dealing with that at the moment. I don't think anybody knows where those boundaries are anymore because those boundary lines have been re-drawn. And they got particularly re-drawn during the Covid period and affected I think people very differently. For some people the lockdowns, the whole Covid period was very very troubling and traumatising. And for other people it was actually okay."
Eaqub compares this time to two other upheavals of change in New Zealand history - post World War II, and the Muldoon era where the country nearly went bankrupt.
He predicts multiple changes in government, and messy coalitions, as we try to respond to this discontent formally - and says hopefully that discontent will fade.
"Are we going to go back to where we were in 2019? I don't think so. But do we have to have such a disruptive way of achieving it? Probably not."
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