2020: What just happened?

It was a time of plagues and conspiracies – summed up by the prime minister as ‘‘horrendous’’. Could we make sense of it? By

Acouple of weeks ago, a reporter at a press conference piped up with a question. Could the prime minister summarise 2020 in just two words, he asked. Too easy. She only needed one word: ‘‘Horrendous.’’

Jacinda Ardern said it with a smile though. A smile that said it could have been worse. A smile that said it’s nearly over. A smile that said we will take something away from this shared experience. One word and one expression said a lot about the year we just had.

She seemed less upbeat when she offered a variation of the same answer in August: ‘‘2020 has frankly been terrible.’’

Of course, I may be in danger of overthinking it. journalist Charlie Gates and I were trying to extract as much meaning as we could out of these and other small, sometimes overlooked moments in the hope of finding the shape of a year unlike any other.

The video 2020: What Just Happened? is a high-speed search through the archive of the year and a follow-up of sorts to our much weightier earthquake series,

that we put online in September. It soon emerged there were four clear themes. They were woven within each other, or sometimes ran parallel. There was climate change, there was Covid-19, there was Black Lives Matter, and there was the war between truth and fiction.

The scene was set on the first day of the year, when New Zealand skies turned orange due to bushfires across the Tasman during the ‘‘black summer’’, as our Australian friends grimly but accurately called it. Here we got the mere echo of a greater disaster, but it still looked like an omen or a sign, like seeing a comet in a medieval tapestry. What kind of year were we in for?

It turned out it was so medieval it even included a plague. The first appearance of the dreaded word ‘‘coronavirus’’ in a newspaper was on January 19, 2020, when it was reported that three US airports would start screening passengers arriving from central China because of ‘‘a new virus that has sickened dozens of people, killed two and prompted worries about an international outbreak’’.

That seems now to have been a slow start, or even a late appearance from what feels nearly 12 months later to have been the dominant narrative of the year. But it reminds us of the waiting game as we watched the virus move through other countries – China, Italy, Iran – and wondered if distance would save us.

Our first Covid-19 case was confirmed a little over a month later. That was a woman in her 60s who had recently returned from Iran, and who went on to recover. Another month passed before a woman in her 70s became our first Covid19

death. By then it was late March, and we were all in level 4 lockdown.

How could we illustrate those months of waiting? We focused on the trivial stuff before the lockdown. People worried about the cancellation of the Auckland Santa (like other 2020 protagonists, the bad Santa has his own surprising narrative arc). They danced at the Splore Festival as though nothing else mattered. They queued for burgers and it was only much later that they realised they were practising to queue at supermarkets or to have something stuck up their noses.

Unless you were an essential worker, you spent the six weeks of the level 4 lockdown at home in your ‘‘bubble’’. Impending disaster never seemed so relaxing. We baked cakes and bread. We set our watches by the 1pm briefings from Ardern and Ashley Bloomfield, directorgeneral of health.

We were permitted one daily walk around the block, giving neighbours a wide berth and polite wave. We became a nation of happy introverts.

It was the end of the world as we knew it, and we felt fine. Yet we need to avoid appearing smug. Twenty-five people died of Covid-19 in New Zealand, and we had 2121 cases by December 21, making us the world’s 164th most infected country. While we have given up on masks and even forgotten about QR codes, the virus is still raging elsewhere, though imminent vaccines offer some hope.

Economic armageddon was also avoided. The Warehouse, Ryman Healthcare and the Briscoe Group are among the companies that agreed to pay back wage subsidies from the Government that helped businesses through the lockdown.

Along with a lower than expected unemployment rate, and fairly resilient

GDP, that exposed one of the fallacies of the Covid era: that you had to choose between saving lives and saving the economy. Perhaps we could do both.

The way in which New Zealanders mostly worked together in a crisis, including curtailing travel and sometimes taking pay cuts, could even persuade you we might make similar sacrifices for climate change, the constant emergency that was pushed into the background by Covid. But we need to get over the collective apathy that usually grips us.

But one thing we did import was Black Lives Matter activism, as protests drew thousands to rainy New Zealand cities in June. The movement was seven years old but had been spectacularly reactivated after the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May.

Protests were about the past as well as the present, and statues of colonisers and slave owners were targeted in Australia, the UK and the US, as well as here, where a statue of Captain John Hamilton was removed from Hamilton’s Civic Square.

Mayor Paula Southgate explained that ‘‘at a time when we are trying to build tolerance and understanding between cultures and in the community, I don’t think the statue helps us to bridge those gaps’’. Hamilton, a British navy commander killed fighting Ma¯ ori at Gate Pa in 1864, had no direct connection with the city that later bore his name.

Justice was also served when the Christchurch terrorist was sentenced to life without parole in August. The sentencing did not become a platform for hate as many feared.

Instead,it was focused intensely on the experiences of victims and their families. That offered some sense of closure, in contrast to the long-awaited release in November of the Royal commission’s report into the mosque attacks, which revealed gaps and failures.

While the Government’s success with Covid-19 made an election victory inevitable, no-one could have predicted the scale of it. Labour’s share of the party vote hit 50 per cent, a record in the MMP era. But National was in disarray, with the team of Simon Bridges and Paula Bennett dropped for the Todd Muller and Nikki Kaye double act, who were then replaced by older hands Judith Collins and Gerry Brownlee.

Collins’ famous sass breathed some unpredictable life into the election, and delivered the year’s best political quote, when she schooled reporters in the art of comedy: ‘‘When my eyebrow goes up, it’s a joke.’’ Yet so many gaffes and debacles hit National in 2020 that some of them risk being forgotten. Does anyone still remember the bizarre story of Michael Woodhouse and the homeless man?

As National wilted and NZ First faded, ACT picked up votes on the right of politics. Leader David Seymour is a conviction politician who knows how to wring the most out of a populist cause, but his success with the euthanasia referendum was admired across the political spectrum. While that referendum passed, a parallel bid to legalise cannabis narrowly failed, meaning New Zealanders can choose to die, but they still can’t get high.

The story of Covid-19 became inseparable from another thread of 2020, the war between truth and fiction. Conspiracy theories have always been with us, even in the pre-internet age, but the combination of social media and lockdown sloth meant they spread like wildfire in 2020. The general thrust was that the Covid-19 threat was a hoax that enabled politicians to seize greater control. It was less a pandemic than a ‘‘plandemic’’.

The epidemic of paranoia produced a local star in blues musician-turnedpolitician Billy Te Kahika, who teamed up with former National Party boy wonder Jami-Lee Ross to lead the doomed Advance NZ Party. A paltry 1 per cent of the party vote showed that Facebook views don’t necessarily translate into political success in the real world and that, sometimes, reason prevails.

The same could be said about politics in the US, finally. Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in November felt like a reset to a time before 2016, when the game of politics was played according to established rules and norms and people roughly agreed on what was true and what wasn’t.

Despite pre-election anxiety about a stacked Supreme Court and white supremacists fighting in the streets, the Trump era ends with a president ineffectually tweeting misleading stories about a stolen election while everyone else patiently waits until Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021, and hopes for a better year ahead.

2020: What Just Happened? can be viewed at stuff.co.nz