Heather du Plessis-Allan: Life is different. Will next year be normal?

Ayesha Verrall, former health minister, speaks to the crowd of people protesting the Govt's move to repeal smokefree legislation. Photo / Azaria Howell

OPINION

It feels like we’ve crawled to the end of every recent year hoping that in the next year, life would go back to normal.

But every year since the pandemic it hasn’t gone back to normal. The next year has just brought a different challenge.

Last year our borders finally opened again and we thought the Covid struggles were behind us and life as we previously knew it would return. But this year slammed us with persistent inflation.

2023 ends with signs that we might be slowly beating that inflation but now it looks like we’re about to be slammed with culture wars. Protests over race relations, outrage over whether we’re doing enough for the climate and disagreement over paternalistic smoking policies.

The election symbolised the same. It was supposed to bring change. Getting rid of the Labour Government and its whacky policies was supposed to take us back to normal.

It should be dawning on anyone hoping for a break that they’re not getting one.

Throwing out Labour and its whacky ideas will not erase the past six years. We’re not going back to the happier days of peace and prosperity when Sir John Key was PM and the ABs were unbeatable.

Life has changed.

It’s probably not just next year that will be different. It’s probably not just the next term of government. It’s probably several years or a few decades.

There is a school of thought that we’ve already lived through our halcyon days. We’ve had decades of relative peace since World War II , which meant fighting never really touched the vast majority of our lives.

We’ve had stable economic prosperity since the 1970s.

We’ve had political agreement since the 1990s. Since then one government after the next has not been too dissimilar from the the one before it. The difference between the Helen Clark Labour-led Government and the John Key National-led Government wasn’t as big as voters think.

But now, we’ve swung from the most left-wing government of recent times yet to the most right-wing. Arden drove farmer protests. Luxon is driving Māori protests.

We’re fighting inflation and a global economic slowdown at the same time.

There are two significant wars underway in the Northern Hemisphere.

Even if all of this stopped tomorrow, the unhappiness that drives future division isn’t stopping. We’re creating our future problems right now.

Young people across the developed world are getting seriously grumpy that they can’t see how they will ever afford to buy their own houses. They only see a life where they die poorer than their parents.

Generations don’t agree on the way the world should work. Older people do not value climate change or indigenous rights or social justice in the same way as their kids and grandkids.

Members of our own Parliament don’t even all agree on the merits of democracy anymore.

Technology is on the cusp of threatening jobs. Geopolitics is heating up. Conspiracy theories are creating alternative versions of the world.

The pandemic didn’t cause this. But it either sped up what was already happening or it made us grumpy enough to begin to notice what was happening.

Either way, next year won’t take us back to the way the world was. Nor will this Government.

That kind of stability is probably a few summers away yet.

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.