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PoliticsDecember 15, 2022

A turbulent 2022: The Bulletin World Weekly year in review

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The Bulletin World Weekly is a newsletter by Peter Bale exclusively for Spinoff members, covering and analysing the most important stories from around the globe. In this special edition, a look back at a tumultuous year.


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Russia changed the world in February

In a sense 2022 started not on January 1 but on February 24, when columns of Russian armaments moved into Ukraine, marking the beginning of what the Kremlin clearly expected to be a rapid invasion of its neighbour and the decapitation of its leadership.

The invasion was predicted by a remarkable flow of US and NATO intelligence – much of it made public by the US – and it’s now clear that Kyiv had been preparing for the military attack for some time, rejigging its entire military strategy away from old Soviet methods towards agility and dynamism.

It is hard to overstate the impact of the invasion of a sovereign European nation in the 21st century. Among the flow-on effects this year were that energy prices spiked globally; NATO swung into action to support Ukraine with equipment and training (even New Zealand sent highly skilled intelligence and logistics and infantry officers to Europe); China tried out what might happen if it invaded Taiwan – and appeared to think better of it; Sweden and Finland decided to join NATO; and the US and its allies are sending tens of billions of dollars of arms, training and aid.

With Russia now clearly using winter as a weapon and Ukraine seemingly trying ever more bold strikes using innovative – sometimes even homemade – weaponry, it seems the conflict will stay at a high intensity with missile strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure, daring morale-building spectaculars by Ukraine, and World War One-style trench standoff on the frontlines.

Ukrainian servicemen fire with a French self-propelled 155 mm/52-calibre gun Caesar towards Russian positions at a front line in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas on June 15, 2022. (Photo: ARIS MESSINIS/AFP via Getty Images)

Expect fatigue in European capitals as energy prices spike over winter, and increased talk about some sort of ceasefire or peace talks based on the borders that prevailed before the invasion – a prospect that Kyiv will find hard to swallow. President Volodymyr Zelensky has urged a Christmas ceasefire as a first step, but Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov replied: “No, no such offers have been received from anybody. This topic is not on the agenda.”

To stay on top of the story until the World Bulletin comes back in January, I recommend:

Ukrainecast – the BBC’s daily podcast on Ukraine features a remarkable line up of guests, including frontline reporters and everyday Ukrainians, and skilled analysis.

Battleground: Ukraine – a well-reported weekly podcast from veteran war correspondent Patrick Bishop and military historian Saul David.

Thinking about… Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s newsletter/blog includes his latest thoughts on Ukraine and much else. I also cannot recommend highly enough one of his many books, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.

People hold blank pieces of paper in protest at Covid restrictions and authoritarian rule on November 28, 2022 in Hong Kong, China (Photo: Anthony Kwan/Getty Images)

China faces Covid challenge and an uncertain 2023

Having evidently buckled on its zero Covid strategy after the success of the remarkable blank paper protests, Beijing faces a surging crisis as the year turns. This comes even after a year in which Xi Jinping cemented his control of the Chinese Communist Party – or thought he had.

It is hard to get a clear handle on the situation given the controls on media in China but it appears the Covid testing process has broken down and that infections are sweeping the country. Eventually, that will combine with the low level of vaccinations and the relative ineffectiveness of the locally developed vaccine China insisted on using to create a national health crisis. The knock on effects on the economy, society, and Xi himself can only be guessed at so far.

“The government has left the public to fend for itself,” was how The Economist (paywall) put it.

As Reuters reported: “On Nov. 21, Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, in charge of China’s war on Covid-19, said infections had to be brought down to zero as they emerged. Nine days later, she said the Omicron strain of the virus had “weakened” even though new cases in the Chinese capital hit a high. Last week, in one fell swoop, China cut away most of the tenets governing its stifling zero-Covid policies, effectively ending its war on the pandemic. It has since turned to re-educating people on the harmlessness of Omicron and pushing the idea of self-care, a dramatic U-turn from quarantine camps and crushing lockdowns that sparked recent, rare public protests.”

Recommended listening:

Drum Tower – a new weekly podcast from the Economist about China, co-hosted by its Beijing bureau chief and its chief China correspondent

Russian President Vladimir Putin meets French President Emmanuel Macron on February 07, 2022 at a very, very long table. (Photo: Kremlin Press Office/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

The world in pictures in 2022

From the crowds returning to Times Square in New York after the peak of the Covid pandemic to the war in Ukraine, the Winter Olympics, and that ridiculous long table Vladimir Putin used to keep his distance from Emmanuel Macron, CNN offered an elegantly curated and presented collection of images of 2022.

Likewise, Reuters has created a series of spectacular 2022 images in categories from fashion, entertainment, space, protest and many more.

Novelist Hilary Mantel wins the Man Booker Prize 2012 for her book ‘Bring Up The Bodies’. (Photo: Ben Pruchnie/Getty Images)

Hilary Mantel wins the Man Booker Prize 2012 with her book ‘Bring Up The Bodies’ at The Guildhall on October 16, 2012 in London, England. (Photo: Ben Pruchnie/Getty Images)

Some we lost in 2022

It’s sobering to look back and consider people we’ve lost in 2022. Most readers’ thoughts will likely go first to Queen Elizabeth II but I thought I’d call out a handful more whose lives were described so beautifully in The Economist by the unbylined obituaries editor Anne Wroe. I will also link where I can to an equivalent from The Guardian which, unlike The Economist, does not have a paywall.

Abe Shinzo, 67, former Japanese prime minister: shot dead on July 8 with a handmade gun allegedly by a man who objected to Shinzo’s connections to Korea’s Unification Church.

“His main concern…was that Japan should assert itself in the world. For too long it had trod nervously, cringing in atonement for its crimes in the second world war, clinging to a constitution written by the American occupiers that required it to be pacifist and to rely for its defences on the United States,” The Economist wrote in its obituary, closing with this: “His simplest wish was that Japan should no longer be haunted. He did not believe in ghosts.”

“Few other Japanese leaders in living memory have left as deep an imprint on their country as Shinzo Abe,” The Guardian wrote, using the anglicized structure of Japanese names.

Hilary Mantel, author of the Wolf Hall trilogy, died on September 22 of a stroke, aged 70.

“It was a late flowering but a glorious one, her triangular form shimmering through literary festivals, then stage and screen, in blue and silver and immense black capes lined with silk…,” The Economist wrote of her physical and psychic presence in an obituary titled: “Hilary Mantel saw things that others couldn’t”. “Fame was gleeful, because she had laboured so hard, against such odds, to earn it.”

“The impulse to write grew out of her sense that something was seriously wrong with her,” The Guardian wote. It turned out she had a long history of undiagnosed endometriosis.

James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia theory of environmental interconnectedness, died on July 26, aged 103.

“A hypothesis so all-embracing threw up question after question, which he tackled with delight,” The Economist wrote in its obituary headlined: “James Lovelock changed the way human beings look at the Earth”.

“Lovelock reckoned that, according to standard physics, the planet’s surface should have boiled with the increasing heat, rather than remain cool. The only explanation, he decided, was that the Earth was a self-regulating system that had found a way to preserve its equilibrium: and that the organisms on Earth had kept their environment stable,” The Guardian wrote in its obituary of Lovelock.

Carmen Callil, publisher and feminist, died on October 17, aged 84.

“She championed hundreds, if not thousands, of women writers,” The Economist wrote of the founder of Virago Press. “But if she could take just one book with her…it would be ‘Maurice Guest’ by Henry Handel Richardson, whose real name was Ethel. Richardson was Australian, as was she. The novel is set in 1890s Leipzig, and is suffused with many of the things she adored: music, art, sex and a certain émigré cosmopolitanism that came from being the child of a Maronite Christian and an Irish Catholic whose forebears had made a new life on the other side of the world.”

“Virago aimed to provide a mass-market publisher for 52% of the population – women – at a time when they were permitted neither mortgages nor bank loans,” The Guardian wrote.

For more on those we lost this year, The Guardian’s Sunday sister paper The Observer has a 2022 obituaries section. Reuters also has a beautiful set of pictures of notable people who died during the year.

Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva speaks after being elected president of Brazil over incumbent Bolsonaro by a thin margin on the runoff at Intercontinental Hotel on October 30, 2022. (Photo: Getty Images)

… and a few resurrections

As well as those we lost in 2022 there was the odd resurrection of sorts. None was more spectacular than the return of long-time Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who won re-election having been counted out under corruption allegations and bitter opposition.

With the help of extreme right-wing Jewish parties, Netanyahu rose again, prompting this rather harsh headline in the liberal Israeli newspaper, Haaretz: Netanyahu’s Lust for Power Revealed in All Its Sickening Glory.

In the New York Times, former Palestinian negotiator Diana Buttu predicted that the Palestinians would bear the consequences of Netanyahu’s return, writing: “As the prime minister-designate, Benjamin Netanyahu, finalizes the formation of Israel’s most extreme right-wing government to date, I, along with other Palestinians in Israel and in the occupied territories, am filled with dread about what the next few years will bring.”

In Brazil, the former left-wing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – who served prison time on corruption charges that were later quashed – staged his own remarkable political resurrection to defeat right-wing leader Jair Bolsonaro.

It seems another expert in resurrection was part of Lula’s motivation to go into politics. According to The Guardian, “had it not been for a chiding from Fidel Castro nearly four decades ago, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva might well have abandoned what would prove one of the most storied political careers the region has ever known.

“’He gave him a bollocking,’ Lula’s biographer and friend, Fernando Morais, said of the moment the Cuban revolutionary took the Brazilian unionist to task for considering throwing in the towel after failing in his bid to become São Paulo’s governor in 1982.”

Keep going!
Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

PoliticsDecember 15, 2022

Ten days that define 2022 in NZ politics

Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

At the tail end of a year that seemed to defy the laws of time, we dust off the dates in the calendar that capture the thing as a whole. 

Tuesday March 2: Parliamentary protest ends in flames and violence

Was the pivotal day February 6, when the anti-mandate convoy, inspired by events in Canada, set off from either end of the country? Or February 9, when police attempted to shepherd protesters off parliament – an effort ultimately abandoned, despite arrests, allowing the encampment to bed in? Or Trevor Mallard’s Manilow and sprinkler mini-festival?

It could be any of those, but there is one of the 23 days of parliamentary occupation most deeply engraved in memories: the last. For three weeks, the lawn of parliament had turned into a protest camp and the roads around the complex moats of protest vehicles. Many hundreds of protesters, whose number ranged from the disgruntled and distressed through to the conspiratorial and insurrectionist, were united in anti-vaccine, anti-mandate demands. It ended in violence and fire, with a group igniting gas bottles and tents. There was an attempt to burn down Old Government House.

It was the worst day of ugly division in Aotearoa, but not the last. In the shadow of both the unprecedented disruptions from the pandemic response and the riot at the US Capitol, it set a tone that we haven’t yet fully shaken off.

A rioter throws a desk on to a fire by the parliamentary playground at the end of the parliament occupation, March 2, 2022. (Photo: Marty Melville / AFP via Getty Images)

Monday March 14: Cost of living pressures prompt fuel tax cut 

This set a tone, too. No one was debating any longer whether cost of living challenges amounted to a crisis. Fuel prices had surged against a backdrop of Covid-induced supply chain disruption and geopolitical instability stemming from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Amid that “wicked, perfect storm”, the prime minister announced that cabinet had decided to cut fuel excise by 25 cents a litre. Public transport fares were simultaneously halved. It would all cost more than a billion dollars.  

Tuesday March 15: Simon Bridges quits

I had to double-check this one – surely it was earlier than this? But no, there it is, March 15. And the Tauranga byelection that Bridges’ resignation triggered was June 18, which seems even more impossible. In any case, the former National leader’s decision to quit politics to spend more time with his podcasting career (yes, yes, among other things) was a blessing in disguise for his party. 

Christopher Luxon’s appointment of  Nicola Willis to the finance portfolio Bridges vacated was the best decision he made all year. While Luxon continued to suffer the wobbles through the second half of the year – lapses on detail and a sprinkling of malapropisms – Willis used her many years of political experience (as MP and staffer) to provide some ballast. Grant Robertson has proved a formidable finance minister, but it’s taken this long till he’s encountered someone with the judgment and discipline to give him a proper run for his money.

Tuesday May 31: Jacinda Ardern at the White House

For two pandemic-enforced years from March 2020, Jacinda Ardern’s passport stayed in the drawer. This year it got a workout; from April 18, the prime minister has spent 55 days abroad. Among the summitry, trade delegations, tourism promotion and the big state funeral, the most critical moment was the meeting with President Joe Biden at the White House – the first such visit for a New Zealand PM since John Key in 2014. 

It came at a time of geopolitical delicacy. As well as the war in Ukraine, there has been a lot of attention on China’s efforts to grow its influence in the Pacific. In her White House meeting, and in diplomacy since, Ardern has successfully managed to balance relationships with both Beijing and Washington.

Monday June 13: A major minor reshuffle

For all the spin doctors’ efforts to tease a “minor” cabinet reshuffle, this looked major at the time and even major-er in retrospect. Not just because of the personnel shuffling, but the way the announcement (it took Ardern a not-minor seven-and-a-half minutes to get through it) traversed the fault lines the government has confronted across the year – as well as exposing a lack of ministerial depth.

Kris Faafoi had wanted out before the election, but now he was properly escaping, leaving others to clean up policy programmes in various states of shambles – the media merger, the hate speech laws, immigration. He might be about as far from Machiavellian as you could imagine, but he nevertheless would go on to personify New Zealand’s loosey-goosey approach to parliament and lobbying. 

Jacinda Ardern and the reshuffled. Clockwise from left: Priyanca Radhakrishnan, Trevor Mallard, Kris Faafoi, Chris Hipkins, Willie Jackson, Poto Williams. (Image: Tina Tiller)

Poto Williams was removed from the police portfolio at a time when law and order was roaring into headlines. Ardern put it down to “the narrative”. Williams – who in recent days announced she will stand down at the next election – was replaced with fix-it man Chris Hipkins, but the issue of crime would remain firmly in the foreground for the rest of the year. 

Not a minister, but thrown into the announcement mix was the departure of Trevor Mallard’s, moving from the speaker’s chair to a diplomatic seat in Dublin, and ending a remarkable political career that went up and down about as often and sporadically as a Beehive lift. 

Sunday July 23: James Shaw voted out of leadership

This took almost everyone by surprise. The Green co-leader was jettisoned from his seat at the party AGM, with more than 25% of the 107 delegates who voted demanding nominations be reopened. Paradoxically, it wasn’t all bad for Shaw and the party, as he packed his knapsack and travelled the country to talk to members. When he came to face his nemesis Ron (reopen nominations) again, Shaw won comfortably – backed by 97% of delegates – which most likely forestalls any internal challenge before the election. It has been a strange old term for the Greens, with a toe in government and the rest outside, but they’ve remained polling close to 10% throughout, which is not a shabby base ahead of election year.

On which point, though I have no obvious day to which to attach it, Act under David Seymour similarly ends the year sitting pretty in polls. Predictions that a dream run would come to a thudding end as National became functional again have been disabused. Another prediction has proved wrong, too. After years of a one-man caucus, the odds on some new MP or other disgracing themselves could hardly have been shorter. The reality is the opposite: a disciplined group, and a number of MPs (among them Brooke van Velden, Nicole McKee and Karen Chhour) emerging as highly competent and values-driven.

Monday August 8: Sam Uffindell’s history of violence revealed

Reports of a vicious high school assault, perpetrated by the newest National MP, Sam Uffindell, shone a light on the party and its processes, on politics and our culture more broadly. The MP for Tauranga was reinstated to caucus after a Maria Dew inquiry failed to substantiate further bullying complaints. Luxon handled the episode as well as could be expected. Just as importantly, the party seems to have sorted some of its selection woes, the evidence of which was best expressed in the Hamilton West byelection. Tama Potaka handsomely won the seat vacated by Gaurav Sharma and seems destined for much greater things than the guy who won the Tauranga edition. 

Friday September 9: Queen Elizabeth II dies

This deserves a place in the defining moments of the year not for reasons of sentimentality, but because our literal head of state died and a new one (her son, apparently?) was sworn in. 

Monday September 12: Covid lights switched off

Another elastic time mindwarp: it was just a few months ago that the plug was pulled from the traffic light framework and mask wearing requirements went the way of mandates – all (with a tiny handful of exceptions) gone. The year had begun with a third of the country bleary eyed having just emerging from lockdown, and the team of five million was already well splintered. Domestic restrictions and border controls had been loosened across 2022. But this was the day that more than any represented “a return to normal”. Normal, maybe, but certainly not “post-Covid”. The virus is currently killing around three times as many people in New Zealand as does influenza. 

Saturday October 8: Local elections

Mayor Wayne Brown might have been interviewed less often than a random Queen Street busker but his victory – comfortable in the end over Labour and Green enforced Efeso Collins – evinced more than anything a disgruntlement with the Direction of Things. It wasn’t quite a triumph for the centre-right, especially in light of Tory Whanau’s Wellington win, but it was broadly a kick in the teeth for incumbency. 

The other unmistakable message to central government: people didn’t and don’t like three waters. Also: a bad day for disinformation spruikers, and the turnout of both candidates and voters sucked.

Wednesday November 23: The Orr report

Fans of counting will note that this is the 11th of 10 defining moments. Error? Or a deliberate and clever allusion to the pervasiveness of inflation across our politics in 2023? You decide. 

Announcing the last Monetary Policy Committee decision of the year, Reserve Bank governor Adrian Orr put firmly to bed the nonsense that he was somehow in political cahoots with the Labour government. Not only was the base rate going up by a record 75 points, but the outlook for 2023 was, you know, pretty shite. Sticky inflation, the return of unemployment and a gentle dipping of the bow into the (hopefully) shallow waters of recession. It was the day that very much set the scene for election year. See you then.


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