Turning the page on a difficult year

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

Every year has some sort of significance by which people can remember it and 2023 will live in people’s memories as the one where it never stopped raining.

Most people throughout New Zealand but especially in this district and Hawke’s Bay, will have little inclination to look back on 2023 with anything approaching a fond memory.

It was the year when the sound of rain on the roof produced a feeling of anxiety that almost resembled the dogs in Ivan Pavlov’s cruel experiments.

That feeling of unease was still strong in the latter part of the year, with Juken NZ closing its mill here and prices for New Zealand’s main farming exports disappointing, while more broadly the cost-of-living crisis continued.

It was a year of three prime ministers — something that last happened in 1990 when Geoffrey Palmer, Mike Moore and then Jim Bolger all had a turn at the top.

Bolger went on to lead the country for seven years, something that Christopher Luxon would like to do but will find much harder in the present fractured political scene, as opposed to the two-party one in which Bolger, aka the Great Helmsman, ruled.

Race relations remain a potential boiling point with one sector of the new Government intent on revising what the Treaty of Waitangi means for the country constitutionally. If that leads to a referendum it will likely be a divisive disaster similar to Australia’s Indigenous Voice poll.

Gisborne District Council faced a difficult year and has a long list of challenges still ahead, most notably funding the recovery works needed without seeing the rates balloon out of control. The suggestion of 11 percent rates rises for the next three years would be unaffordable for too many people.

The sporting world was no better than politics. The greatest disappointment was the All Blacks’ narrow loss to the Springboks in the Rugby World Cup final.

The holiday period started with the usual fatal accidents and drownings.

One thing that 2023 has shown yet again is the need for a local newspaper.

This one will mark 150 years of production next Friday and remains just as relevant now as it was more than a century ago — more so perhaps in an era where misinformation and deliberate disinformation is rampant.

There will be challenges ahead both for The Herald and the district as a whole, as well as New Zealand itself.

Let us hope that the spirit of those European pioneers and the Māori who preceded them can be found again to meet the challenges of today and build a better 2024 for Tairāwhiti and for Aotearoa New Zealand.