We can’t let our guard down now

This time last year, our final cover for the year featured a poster by artist Izzy Joy expressing hope for the new decade and celebrating the things that bring us together as New Zealanders.

Coming after a truly awful 2019 – a year that began with a deadly act of terrorism, and ended with the Whakaari/White Island eruption – I think we all expected 2020 would be better.

We know what came next.

2020 has been a year of upheaval and grief; grief for the lives that have been lost – not just here but around the world, where many of us have friends and family; grief for a world where human contact is dangerous; grief for the jobs that went and businesses that failed, and grief for the families kept apart by the closure of international borders.

So when we pulled out that image from 2019, it felt like 2020 had thrown it back in our face.

And yet there is still much about it that resonates and holds as true today as it did then. Joy’s image showed hands of every ethnicity laid over each other to tend a growing fern. The image spoke of togetherness and community and the nurturing of our unique identity as a country.

It might seem like a cliche now, but that’s what the team of 5 million has been all about.

When the country went into lockdown in March, we pulled together, stayed home, and did what we had to do to stop Covid in its tracks. It’s what the rest of the world knows of us as well, as it watches us celebrating simple acts like having a Christmas meal together.

To get here, some of us had to make bigger sacrifices than others – like the many grieving families who couldn’t be with their loved ones before they died.

Then there were the many workers who became the new frontline – like check-out workers, more often than not young and poorly paid, who risked their own health to turn up to work each day, even while copping abuse.

And we found new heroes – scientists, epidemiologists, public health officials and the hotel workers who staff our managed isolation facilities. Who would have thought a year ago that the rock stars of 2020 would be names like Ashley Bloomfield, Michael Baker and Siouxsie Wiles?

But as 2021 rolls around with hopes of a vaccine returning life to normal, we shouldn’t forget how easily our hard-fought victories can be lost.

The new, more virulent strain of Covid tearing through Britain has already made it to Australia. It would take only one border breach for it to be among us. Yet as the crowds of Boxing Day shoppers showed yesterday, we are ill-prepared. Few people bothered scanning the QR codes on display, and even fewer wore masks.

As we head into a new year, let’s remind ourselves not to put at risk everything we gained in 2020. Because what we gained was priceless. We only have to look around the rest of the world to see that.

So cheers, New Zealand. Here’s to us. And let’s keep it up.

It would take only one border breach for the new strain of Covid to be among us. Yet as the crowds of Boxing Day shoppers showed yesterday, we are illprepared.