The pandemic eventually caught up with Aotearoa, but 2021 was memorable for gender equality and Māori success stories
For eight months of this year, New Zealanders were so rude – or lucky, depending on whether you live inside or outside New Zealand – as to ignore everything that was happening across the world. Delta was washing over Europe in waves, confining much of the continent to their homes and neighbourhoods. Joe Biden was struggling to implement his progressive agenda, crashing against a Republican wall of legislative and judicial obstruction. It was a reminder for Americans and the world that the Trump era wasn’t a brief, violent blip – a temporary interruption to the second American century – but perhaps a permanent feature of their democracy. In Australia, a continent sitting pretty for much of the year, the virus let rip in New South Wales and Victoria, sending Melbourne into one of the world’s longest lockdowns.
For New Zealanders, this was a very distant, and “foreign”, problem. In April 50,000 New Zealanders packed out Six60’s gig at Eden Park. That moment, a reminder to the rest of the world that at least one country was living as if Covid never happened, went viral. Tributes were made to the genius of prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, whose tough measures against the virus in March 2020 meant that New Zealanders enjoyed a year more or less like any other. We worked from our offices. We ate out. Our children went to school. We went to birthday parties and funerals and all manner of mass gatherings without the virus threatening to spread at any given moment. We were on top of the world.
