Adjusting to life in a state of grief

Our daily walk usually extends as far as our grandchildren’s house, where they play in the front yard while we chat to the family from the street. The other day I said to the kids, “You’ll always remember this, for the rest of your lives.”

They gave me that look that says, “So what?” They’re coming up 6 and 9, they think they’ll remember everything for the rest of their lives.

With luck — which means somebody discovers a vaccine very soon — they’ll remember the 2020 pandemic as an odd but brief experience shared by their contemporaries all around the world, a reliable starter of amusing and rueful conversation in any company.

But I can’t help wondering whether their world is going to change. Will people still move around the world and mix as easily to have those conversations? Or will those kids realise how much has changed every time they write their birthplace on a form — Belgium for one, Singapore the other.

Their parents are Kiwis of the mobile generation that grew up in the last 20 years of last century and have been working for the first 20 years of this one. They met when New Zealand hosted the Apec heads of government meeting in 1999, their final year of school, and they were in a young observing group.

I showed some of the group around the Herald newsroom one evening. The young fellow who would become my daughter’s husband told me that night ,with the candour of youth, that New Zealand would probably be too small for his aspirations.

I couldn’t argue. We were still building a strong, open economy. We’d come through the pain of exposing industries to international competition and the benefits of goods and services at competitive prices were not widely appreciated.

The recession of the early 1990s still rankled but we had a budget surplus for the first time in a generation and a good exchange rate had made travel cheaper and easier. That young couple would take out student loans at university but they would also travel overseas in their holidays, which few students in my generation had done.

New Zealand at the millennium was becoming a pretty nice base for doing business with the world but we weren’t yet confident about that. Our young graduates continued to head overseas to live and work in bigger economies for another 10 years.

It wasn’t until the global financial crisis that we finally woke to our advantages. The Wall St follies, which our Australian banks had resisted, left the United States, the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe in a recession they have never really escaped. Meanwhile, New Zealand’s steady recovery was not halted, even by an earthquake in the South Island’s main city.

Since 2013 we’ve had five years of record net immigration as more New Zealanders returned than left or decided not to leave, and we’ve attracted our share of a worldwide migration wave as China’s newly released citizens set up homes and business in Western countries.

The population grew rapidly to almost 5 million. Tourism boomed and our schools and universities attracted foreign fee-paying students. With it all came the problems of international appeal: house prices, construction capacity, traffic congestion, crowded tourist resorts. How good those problems seem now.

Pandemics were always on the list of potential shocks to the global economy but governments didn’t take them seriously enough. Had they done so, they would surely have devised more sophisticated responses than national shutdowns and mass isolation.

Air New Zealand expects to emerge from this pandemic as a domestic airline with some international freight services. Chief executive Greg Foran told the Herald the “harsh reality” of life after the pandemic will probably be that most countries are cautious about allowing international tourism, including New Zealand.

Tourism, work permits, education, immigration will probably all be set back for a long time. Tourism has been our poster industry for an economy less reliant on farming alone. Its contraction was going to hurt us all, even without the wider shutdown that followed.

Now owners of just about all small businesses must be worried sick for their livelihoods and their life’s investment when they can return to work, whenever that might be. In the Business Herald, Pattrick Smellie called it “almost like a state of grief ”.

Grief is exactly what I’m feeling for the New Zealand we’ve built over 40 years and the global economy that a small distant country needs more than most. Probably I need to get over it, have more faith in the generation now in power.

They have travelled the world, worked in it and need to keep visiting it. Don’t let a virus get in the way.