The daily spectacle of televised briefings was not unique to New Zealand, and it may simply be the case that Ardern thrived when given the opportunity to speak to the public directly—in other words, that she was better than others at it. Alternatively, we could say that her rhetoric found in the pandemic the ground on which to turn into concrete action. Either way, the benefits we derived in terms of lives saved from the remarkable extension of that social license are literally incalculable.

Putting prisoners and their unfree labour back into the historical picture not only tells a more realistic story of the past. It also tells us a lot about capital accumulation and its reproduction through related forms of labour—free and unfree, waged and unwaged.

Usually, when we say that a politician has immense charisma, it is taken to imply that they have no substance, which wasn’t true of Key just as it isn’t true of Ardern. You don’t occupy the centre of politics just by flashing a smile. You occupy it by articulating a set of values in which the social bloc that determines the outcome of elections wants to see itself reflected.

In its depoliticised form, ‘mental health’ can be used to explain just about anything. Most recently, New Zealand MP Andrew Falloon was caught sending pornographic images to several young women and invoked his grief at his friends’ suicides as the cause. Perhaps unusually, this time the excuse failed to work.

This feels like a formative moment of consciousness – the realisation that we are all now more vulnerable, and that this is the time to form broad and deep networks of our own while also demanding the full protection of the state we have contributed to. Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, engari he toa takitini – your strength does not come from you alone, but from the strength of many.

These unusual circumstances reflect the difficulty our political system still has in adjusting to mixed proportional representation – a difficulty echoed by today’s Australian headline ‘NZ shock: losers take power’. We are a full 21 years and eight elections into the current constitutional arrangements, but the thought that the party with the second highest vote might be better placed to form the government still baffles some.

Queenstown’s economy and population have been exploding for years. Houses outside of the centre are being built quickly in an attempt to meet the demands of this growing population. Even with this construction boom, real estate prices have skyrocketed over the past few years. The roughly 35,000-person town is on pace to be the most expensive place to live in the entire country – if it’s not already. That’s even more expensive than Auckland, New Zealand’s global metropolis, or Wellington, the nation’s capital.