It is hard to remember a year in which New Zealand was so repeatedly in global headlines, writes Kamahl Santamaria, a Kiwi journalist based in Doha.

Time zones are a strange thing. You go to sleep, and then for eight hours or so, you miss out on everything happening on the other side of the world – just by virtue of the fact the earth turns while you snooze. Of course years ago this wasn’t a problem, but in our now-hyper-connected world the FOMO can take over.

But it’s even stranger when your home is on that other side of the world, because that first bleary-eyed scroll through Twitter at around 6am can result in some pretty rude awakenings.

And so it has been for the past 12 months. New Zealand – that “rugged individual, glistening like a pearl, at the bottom of the world” – has made global headlines in ways and in frequency it hasn’t before. I can’t imagine how challenging it’s been for all of you back home – but I assure you from where I sit, eight time zones westward, some of those 6am wake ups have been pretty jarring.

Grace Millane

It should have been a name the world never knew. Grace Millane should have come to New Zealand, enjoyed herself, and gone back to the UK when she was good and ready. Instead her parents had to repatriate her 21-year-old body after she was killed by a man whose identity, for some reason, is still protected. She became the unwitting poster-child for the threats faced by women everywhere, and though much has been made by the media and courts of her sexual preferences, that is absolutely no reason a bright young girl should have lost her life on our fair shores – or any shores, for that matter.

The #HerLightOurLove hashtag, although brief, was a lovely way to see people connect with Grace. Sunsets and sunrises filled my timeline, with people posting the most thoughtful and uplifting messages during a time of grief. Hashtags don’t always make a difference – they are symbolic by their very nature – but sometimes a sense of community is all we need.

There was also something incredibly moving about the way Jacinda Ardern addressed Millane’s death by saying, “On behalf of New Zealand, I would like to apologise to Grace’s family. Your daughter should have been safe here and she wasn’t and I’m sorry for that.”

In no way did she need to offer the apologies a nation for the actions of one man, but she did. As someone who has the job of reporting the news and views of the world’s leaders every day, I was struck by the compassion and and humanity she showed – qualities sadly missing in so many of her counterparts. Not only that, it reinforced our international reputation as a good and humble people.

Of course she didn’t know it then, but the prime minister was to face an even tougher test only three months later.

The Christchurch mosque attacks

On March 15, all I was looking forward to was, for the first time in seven years, seeing a friend from the BBC who was visiting Doha. I went to check her flight status, but instead the 6am social scroll said things like #PrayforChristchurch. My immediate thought was, “God not another bloody earthquake,” but it soon became apparent this event was going to be a very different challenge.

The mosque attacks were surreal to watch from afar. Because as we all “knew”, these things don’t happen in New Zealand. Only now, they do. One of my colleagues asked me, “Why would they attack a place like New Zealand?” And my simple answer was “because they can”. In hindsight our quiet little country, tucked away from the rest of the world, was an easy target.

But once again, we stepped up. I was so impressed by the many New Zealand reporters I saw not only on Al Jazeera but on many international news networks, telling the story calmly and clearly. The response from the public, who put love and inclusion over hatred and anger, was inspiring. And without wanting to turn this into a PR piece for Jacinda Ardern, her response was truly inspiring. Some world leaders ban Muslims from entering their country; our leader literally wrapped herself in their culture and embraced them. You don’t get your image projected onto the world’s tallest building for nothing.

It was a surprisingly cold afternoon in Doha that day, but as I welcomed my friend to the Middle East I proudly sat outside wearing my black New Zealand t-shirt. It was a tiny defiant stand from 14,000 kilometres away, against the cold evil winds that had swept through Christchurch. I shed tears for my country that day, but a lot of them were tears of pride.

The cricket world cup final

Is a sporting defeat worthy of consideration in this review? Of course it is trivial measured against tragedy, but we’re New Zealanders, it’s going in. And once again, it’s because of the way we – in this case, the team – conducted themselves.

I see no point in rehashing the details of the Black Caps agonising loss to England in the Cricket World Cup final. It’s up there with Emirates Team New Zealand’s loss in San Francisco in 2013, and the All Blacks’ knockout defeats in the World Cups of 1999 and 2007. We just don’t need to go there.

But the character shown by Kane Williamson and the team in not actually losing the match but still not winning the trophy was exemplary. I work with people from all over the world – 70 different nationalities at last count – and anyone with even a passing interest in cricket has massive respect for New Zealand, and the way we play the game.

Whakaari / White Island eruption

There’s been much disbelief about how this could happen, with many asking me, “why would you be visiting the crater of an active volcano?” A fair question, and one I didn’t really have an answer to. All I can remember of White Island is that it seemed to always be gently puffing away, and that it was pretty normal.

I think, in this instance, New Zealand and its leadership have reacted in a manner anyone would – with a commitment to recovering the bodies and to finding out what warnings were missed. Goodness knows by the end of this year, the police and political leaders should be well versed in how to keep the public informed and the media sated.

Maybe that’s the legacy of the past 12 months. An ability to react quickly to a crisis, and to do so both in an empathetic and humane manner, and in the the knowledge that the rest of the world is watching. Because there’s nowhere to hide in this world anymore – not even at the bottom of the South Pacific, where the only thing beyond you is ice.

I haven’t lived in New Zealand for nearly 20 years. But let me tell you, I’m still damn proud to be a Kiwi. And every event which has thrust the country onto the world stage this past year – even the ones which have left us hurt, confused, or desperate – has made me even prouder, because of the way people have responded.

Kia kaha New Zealand. #SoProud.

The second and final report of Te Uepū Hāpai i te Ora, the Safe and Effective Justice Advisory Group, contains nothing we didn’t know 30 years ago. Yet generations of politicians have ignored the same advice, writes Laura O’Connell Rapira.

Between the 1950s and 1990s, New Zealand experienced seismic social, economic and political shifts. Māori were displaced from their tūrangawaewae by government neglect, forced to migrate from rural areas to cities in search of freedom and work. 

The second wave of feminism meant more women and mothers were entering the workforce and our political institutions. Women’s liberation movements were forming around everything from art to religion to equal pay and income support for solo mums.

The Māori renaissance was blooming as the chorus of calls for the return of Māori land, language and culture from government to iwi, hapū and whānau grew. Dame Whina Cooper was marching, Dalvanius Prime and Ngoi Pēwhairangi were smashing musical ceilings with the banger Poi E, and Matiu Rata set up the Waitangi Tribunal. 

Queer folks were rising up for their (our) right to love who they love, and an increase in migration meant there was more religious diversity being practised in Aotearoa than ever before.

Wherever you looked, New Zealand was evolving from being a place dominated by white male heterosexual Christianity to include more women, Māori, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Hindus and queer folk in the public domain. 

During this time, people in government also made decisions that had huge ramifications for people’s ability to provide for their whānau. In 1984, Labour introduced Rogernomics, which began a long period of flattened wages, eroded benefits, high housing costs and rising food prices. National cemented this punitive economic approach introducing the Mother of All Budgets in 1991 which foolishly believed that if you cut support for people doing it the toughest they’d miraculously be well. 

Crime rates started to rise as more and more people were pushed into poverty by government failure. Distrust among our communities grew as many of our elected leaders failed to support initiatives for social cohesion, opting instead to stoke fear and division as they had a few years earlier with the racist dawn raids.

Over that same 40 year period, the state took 100,000 children into state ‘care’ (I prefer state custody because it was anything but care), the majority of whom were Māori and many of whom were abused emotionally, physically, sexually and spiritually. Professor Tracey MacIntosh traces the formation of gangs in New Zealand back to this time. 80% of the young boys in state institutions were Māori, and their removal from their whakapapa, whenua and whānau pushed many into what is described by academics as the ‘state-care to prison pipeline’. Only it’s less like a pipeline and more like a gauntlet where the folks forced to run through it by people in government are almost always Māori. 

Wherever you looked, people in government were responding to the changes in our society with exactly the wrong answer: punishment and paternalism.

In the late 1980s, experts informed by lived experience tried to sound the alarm and point our country in a different direction. Sir Clinton Roper, Moana Jackson and John Rangihau released reports calling for an end to mass incarceration, institutional racism and the use of prisons. They called for decisions to be made by Māori, for Māori. 

But these experts were ignored in favour of bad ideas from the United States. People in government adopted failed punitive approaches to reducing drug use in our society (commonly referred to as the War on Drugs which we know is actually a war on brown people) and the number of Māori locked up by the state in the cages we call prisons increased.

At the same time, working New Zealanders struggled as people in government made decisions to push jobs overseas and diminish collective worker power by eviscerating unions. Disenfranchisement among the populace grew, and a lack of bold solutions or an alternative vision put forward by politicians led to a citizens initiated referendum on justice in 1999 in which a whopping 82 percent of New Zealanders voted for punitive approaches. 

Fast forward 20 years down the track of failed justice and economic policy and there has been a lot of talk about needing to reduce our reliance on prisons and stop putting people into a justice system that creates more problems than it solves. 

Read more: Restoration, not punishment, is key to criminal justice reform for Māori

For the past 16 months, Te Uepū Hāpai i te Ora Safe and Effective Justice Advisory Group, chaired by former police officer and National MP Chester Borrows, have been travelling the country to speak with thousands of New Zealanders about what changes they think need to be made in our justice system. On Thursday, a report called Turuki! Turuki! which is the result of this huge undertaking of community engagement was released. 

Like the reports of 30 years ago, it calls for an end to mass incarceration, institutional racism and a shift away from prisons. Like the reports of 30 years ago, it calls for decisions to be made by Māori, for Māori. The question is: are politicians finally ready to listen?

In 2040, it will be 200 years since Te Tiriti o Waitangi was first signed. Between then and now, New Zealand will undergo a huge shift in demographics changes where Asian, Māori and Pasifika people will make up the majority of the population, and Pākehā will become a minority for the first time since 1860. The working population will be younger people of colour supporting an older generation of Pākehā retirees’ superannuation with their taxes. The year 2040 is also when the seminal report Matike Mai calls for us to finally live the promise of Te Tiriti o Waitangi with constitutional transformation. That is the Crown finally sharing power and resources equitably with Māori as was always meant to be the case in Aotearoa. 

In te ao Māori, there is a well-known whakataukī, ‘Ka mua, ka muri’ which means walking backwards into the future – the idea that we should look to where we’ve been to inform where we are going. As was the case a generation ago, New Zealand is about to undergo huge changes over the next 20 years and we have the power to decide how we respond to those changes. Will we heed the calls of experts including those with lived experience and move away from justice and economic systems based on punishment to ones based on wellbeing and compassion? Will we choose manaakitanga over the fear and division that some people in politics will stir up in order to gain and maintain power? 

As was the case three decades ago, we know that children and young people from communities with a lack of resources or who have been in state custody are more likely to be swept into our prisons as adults. We know that successive governments have prioritised policies that help the already well-off (think: property speculators) over struggling whānau and as a result, too many people are under-resourced, overstressed and unable to thrive. We also know that there are genuine alternatives to these outdated models of justice and economics that belong in the past. 

As a community, we need to support all communities who are doing it tough and stop using prisons to punish people who have been denied the opportunities and resources they need to thrive. We need to support policies and parties that are committed to ensuring everyone in Aotearoa has a warm dry home, a liveable income, access to education at all stages of life and great services to help people to be mentally, physically, emotionally, socially and spiritually well. 

Report after report have been telling us what needs to happen for the past 30 years, now is the time for action.