Dr Liz Gordon: I’d rather be here

I moved to New Zealand as a sixteen year old in the 1970s, with my then boyfriend, who became my first husband and the father of my child. Then, I was escaping an unhappy family and scraping by in low-paid jobs that saw us with only enough for a pint of beer on a Thursday night after work and a lack of a bright future.

Here, we were immediately stable financially, putting money aside to purchase our first house (I was 18 when we did that).  After hippy London, Palmerston North was low on action but very safe.  Over the years, New Zealand has given to me bounteously. In particular, at the age of 24 I started university, which transformed my life, my outlook and who I am as a person.

I have spent my whole working life here. I became a citizen in 1983 (you might ask how I just sauntered into NZ on my UK passport – the answer is that there were no immigration restrictions on people from the UK in those days). I am a kiwi.

There is no time that I am happier to be here than this week.  With half a million cases of Covid a day around the world, there are none here in the community. England is about to go into lockdown for four weeks, and everyone knows four weeks will not be enough to quell the raging beast for long – perhaps just long enough to allow for a good Christmas, but perhaps not even that.

At the beginning of this week I am also poised between hope and fear about the US elections.  Will that vandal Trump get another term?  How could a nation elect him after what he has been revealed to be?  The hope is that those millions of early voters signal a huge surge of change.  Some say it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.  That’s a bit how I feel today.  I both dread and anticipate the US election results. The only sensible outcome is a Biden win and the loss of the Senate by the Republicans.

One of my favourite book series is the St Mary’s chronicles, about historians who travel in time to view events as they happened (author, Jodi Taylor, for those who are interested). In those books, set in the future, the USA is ‘closed’ – completely shut off from the rest of the world, with no news or information about what is happening therein. Under current settings, one could imagine a USA with closed borders and a civil war raging.  I hope it will not come to that.

The other hope I am currently holding is for an engaged and effective Labour Government.  If Labour does well this term, then the Greens are wise to have hitched their wagon, even though the prize they have been given is modest.  They have been given scraps, but done in a constructive and relatively respectful way.  Jacinda has a grace about her, even as an overwhelming winner.  She has shown character and compassion.

So the hope is for three years of a government that continues to unpick neo-liberalism and promotes alternatives. We know already this is likely to be slow, and probably much less ambitious than many of us on this blogsite want. There has definitely been a campaign of dampening down expectations because of Covid.  But hope springs eternal, and today I feel optimistic.  The various quiverings in my stomach region are primarily about what is happening in the rest of the world, not our domestic situation.

The new cabinet is a good one: diverse, interesting and with plenty of new talent. I am hopleful for good change here.

Have a really good week, everyone!

Dr Liz Gordon is a researcher and a barrister, with interests in destroying neo-liberalism in all its forms and moving towards a socially just society.  She usually blogs on justice, social welfare and education topics.