Jack Tame: a terrible year but I still feel grateful

In July of this year, my Dad almost carked it.<br />He went tramping alone in the bush in winter. He got lost. He fell.<br />He smashed up his body and fractured a vertabrae. He was hallucinating, hypothermic, severely-dehydrated, suffering serious muscle wastage and close to kidney failure, when the Nelson Marlborough Rescue Helicopter answered his emergency locator beacon and winched him out of the bush, alive. A few days later, his new granddaughter was born.<br />When the two of them sit down at Christmas lunch next week, there will be plenty of reasons for the Tame family to feel grateful.<br />I’ve been thinking a lot about gratitude, this week. I’ve been reflecting on all the stresses and challenges we’ve faced. 2021, maybe even more than 2020, has been dominated by the pandemic. For our last show together this year, I’ve been trying to put our experience in context.<br />The truth is, despite everything, I’m still grateful to have spent the majority of the last two years in New Zealand. Of course, there have been significant errors in our Covid response. I think we were woefully unprepared for Delta in New Zealand, despite all the warning signs. Sir John Key said ‘Smug hermit kingdom.’ I’d say complacent, or naive. We didn’t properly plan for a scenario where lockdowns weren’t enough to knock out the virus. It took community spread for us to inject urgency into the response. It took community spread for us to go to the secondary vaccine market, to introduce vaccine certificates and mandates.<br />I think, at times, we’ve treated New Zealanders overseas like second-class citizens. History will show, despite all the warnings from public health experts, we stuffed up elements of the response for Māori. We weren’t ready for at-home isolation monitoring. We didn’t increase ICU capacity. It took forever for saliva and Rapid Antigen tests to become available.<br />And yet... and yet... and YET. I still think, if you had to pick any major country in which to have spent the last two years, New Zealand would have t