The Not-so Team of 5 Million

Hi y’all (can you tell I’m running out of intro ideas?),

As we enter our fourth month in lockdown, it’s hard to ignore that the wellbeing and mental health of the Auckland population has gone unnoticed during this period. For me personally, being stuck at home all day every day, with a young child, for weeks on end… has started to take a toll.

I have found myself getting angry and experiencing a rage I’ve never felt before. Why?

We are not a team of 5 million. In fact, I would even say our population has never been so separate and divided to each other.

If I’m wrong, can someone please explain to me how New Zealand is a team right now?

Long gone are the tight-knit kiwi communities, where you are friends with your neighbours, your family lives down the road, and your friends are over every weekend. Let’s be honest - we are all fending for ourselves without that much-needed community.

Living in the UK gave me a lot of perspective on my home country. Despite what people say, I’ve found that New Zealand can be particularly difficult to find a supportive community. In the UK, it came naturally. People welcomed us into their homes. Cultures mesh, mingle and intertwine.

There are an endless amount of people supporting the closure of New Zealand’s borders, and I get it. We are terrified of Covid and scared of not being in control.

But overseas there are thousands of people desperate to get into the country. People who have every right to live and travel to New Zealand. People who are desperate to see their loved ones, friends, and even children. People are literally locked out of their own damn country. The one country in the world that is meant to welcome them in.

If we hadn’t come back to NZ before the borders shut, my partner who isn’t a New Zealand citizen would likely still be in England. We wouldn’t have bought our first home and our 7-month old son definitely wouldn’t exist.

We are the lucky ones.

Think about how many thousands of people overseas did miss out. Missed out on birthdays, weddings, births, deaths, buying first homes, having children, being near family.

And yes, many New Zealanders have turned against them, too.

“Shut the borders. Not our problem. Out of sight out of mind. We matter more than they do.”

Not only are we divided against kiwi’s living overseas, but also the ones who are living in the same country.

I recently read comments on a news site about Auckland being in lockdown. People living elsewhere in NZ were throwing Aucklanders under the bus without a second thought. These comments were in the hundreds, saying Auckland should stay in lockdown forever, borders should be closed and never re-opened, and other hatred-filled sentences that I wouldn’t dare repeat on here.

That doesn’t sound like a team you want to be apart of, does it?

Those comments made me angry. Really f-ing angry. In Auckland, after four months of lockdown, there are businesses failing everywhere. People struggling to feed their children after they have lost their jobs. Emergency housing is full to the brim with people who can’t even afford a roof over their heads.

Tall poppy syndrome (TPS), is another dangerous pandemic that has run rampant our nation for years. TPS seems to be getting worse by the day, and unfortunately there is no vaccine for it.

The mere idea that a kiwi would choose to leave New Zealand seems incomprehensible for some long-termTPS sufferers. According to them, anyone who absconds New Zealand doesn’t deserve to be let back into the country (unless they are famous, or a rugby player, of course).

God forbid there could be an entire world outside of New Zealand… a world with other cultures, people, and scenery to be explored? Surely not! Let’s punish those deserters and not let them back in!

TPS and Covid seem to be two pandemics that bounce off eachother, and I can’t quite work out why.

There is also a mental health crisis going on.

607 people committed suicide between June 2020 - June 2021. Imagine if our daily 1pm update instead said “Another suicide happened today. That’s 50 people dead this month from mental illness”. If that isn’t a pandemic, I don’t know what is. $62 billion has been put into NZ’s COVID-19 fund, versus $1.1 billion over five years for mental health. Where are the billions of dollars to save kiwi’s who are dying everyday, in every town, across the country?

We may be coming out of the four month lockdown, but some Aucklanders will be paying the price for years to come.

Does the team of 5 million really not care that thousands of people are locked out of their own country?

Do they not care that people in Auckland have lost their jobs, houses, dignity and livelihoods?

Unfortunately, it seems that way.

Liv x