Feature
Year of two halves
by Rebecca Macfie
2008: it was the year we worried about the world financial crisis, the price of cheese and petrol and losing our jobs. Credit became harder to get, violent crime shocked the nation – and the US got its first black president.
The year started with the death of a hero and ended with the central banker making heroic efforts to breathe life into a sickly economy.
In between, markets gyrated, titans were humbled, and we worried about whether economic Armageddon had arrived. For a while, it became necessary to arrange a bank overdraft in order to fill up the car at the pump. The price of cheese became a matter of urgent national debate. So did light bulbs, and whether busybody politicians had the right to tell us to change them.
One bunch of politicians decided we needed to do our bit for climate change and brought in the world’s most ambitious emissions trading scheme; another bunch shelved it and decided to head back to the drawing board for a good old chinwag about what, if anything, to do about climate change.
After spending the past few years spraying mortgage money around like there was no tomorrow, the banks rediscovered prudence and started asking homebuyers to put down a 20% deposit. (Yes, this was news. Could there perhaps be a connection between the abandonment of such caution and the development of the housing bubble that burst in 2008?)
The dollar hit post-float highs, then fell in thumping great increments.
Parents had to explain the meaning of two long-forgotten “R” words to their children: recession and redundancy.
Amid all this were a few rare moments of clarity and unity. When Sir Edmund Hillary died on January 11, New Zealanders were clear about what they had lost. The then Prime Minister Helen Clark put it nicely: “He was a heroic figure who not only knocked off Everest, but lived a life of determination, humility and generosity.”
Thousands turned out to see Sir Ed off and hundreds of thousands watched his state funeral on TV, basking in the glow of qualities we liked to think were quintessentially Kiwi: modesty, courage, resourcefulness, understatement. It was noted that, world famous though he was, Sir Ed was accessible to anyone who wanted to look up his number in the phone book and give him a bell.
The royal family caused minor indignation when they snubbed the funeral (Prince Charles was otherwise engaged with the Mutton Renaissance Campaign in Yorkshire) in favour of a private service in the UK. But nobody really cared: a proud New Zealand gave Sir Ed a good send-off (knowing he would have hated such a fuss being made of him).
And there was barely a voice in the land that wasn’t shouting for Mahe Drysdale on August 16. A million Kiwis tuned in that night, hoping for the best from the big man who had led the New Zealand team into the stadium for the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. Drysdale had already proven himself as rowing’s greatest, winning three world championships and coping stoically with a comeback challenge by Rob Waddell earlier in the year.
But a bad case of Beijing belly struck him down in the days before the race: he led for the first 1500m but crossed the line third, depleted, vomiting and unable to walk unaided. “I put everything out there, and it wasn’t good enough,” he said after the race. Yes it was, Mahe: that bronze was worth its weight in gold. Even the head of the Australian Olympic Committee was so impressed by the Kiwi’s grit and determination that he was out of his seat screaming for victory for Drysdale.
Which, coming from the Aussies, is saying something. If Drysdale had won, they would probably have claimed him as their own. They claimed record numbers of other Kiwis as their own this year. Nearly 48,000 went west across the Tasman in the year to October and only 13,200 came east, marking 2008 down as the year of the biggest transtasman brain drain.
No need to remind the last person out to turn off the lights – this winter, yet again, lake levels fell and the lights threatened to go out all by themselves.
Yes, it was a discombobulating sort of a year. The big story was the economy, and how it all went suddenly and dramatically pear-shaped.
Who’d have thought it, over that blissfully long, hot summer? Even the experts couldn’t pick it. Westpac’s economists, for instance, were predicting in February that “New Zealand can weather the storm”: 2008 would be a “great tug of war between massive counteracting forces – high interest rates, high petrol prices and the housing correction on one side; very strong wage growth, a wall of dairy cash, and the carrot of tax cuts on the other. We believe the income story will win.”
The US subprime crisis was but a distant, convoluted phenomenon back in those lazy days of summer. We had no need to fret about what was happening in the market for collateralised debt obligations and credit default swaps. The world economy would keep on growing, Australia and Asia – the twin props of New Zealand’s future well-being – would keep ploughing along, and the biggest worry was inflation, the economists told us.
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