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Gone but not forgotten (Image: Tina Tiller)
Gone but not forgotten (Image: Tina Tiller)

SocietyAugust 4, 2021

RIP, Bernadino – you were disgusting and we loved you

Contributing writer
Gone but not forgotten (Image: Tina Tiller)
Gone but not forgotten (Image: Tina Tiller)

As the news breaks that the spew-inducing spumante of her youth is being discontinued, Emily Writes reflects on the end of an era.

This post was first published on Emily Writes Weekly.

The year is 2001. You’re wearing a denim mini from Glassons with the waistband cut off so you look like Mariah Carey. ‘Heartbreaker’ came out two years ago but you live in New Zealand so it took a while for the look to get here.

You’ve got a matching denim jacket and a satin pink handkerchief top and you’re wearing Ecko skate shoes even though you’ve never used a skateboard in your life. Your hair is perfect, with two slick slut strands sneaking out from an extremely severe ponytail. You’ve got your G-banger pulled high over your hips and popping out of your clear plastic handbag with the wooden handles is a bottle of sophistication – Bernadino.

Life is good. You’re ready for a huge night out.

I can’t even begin to tell you how many teenage nights I spent absolutely rat-arsed on Bernadino. In my clique it was the drink of choice. It’s true, it wasn’t as classy as Aquila or as cool as Alizé – but it would definitely fit in a pump bottle so you could drink it at the movies while Dan tried to grope your boobs with all of the finesse of a gorilla learning sign language.

It was a drink you could convince your friend’s creepy older brother to buy for you. It was a drink made for those under the age of 18. There wasn’t one scenario where it wasn’t the perfect liquid companion – 15th birthday, 16th birthday, Friday, Christmas in the Park, getting finger-banged at the school dance, church camp… the list goes on.

And now, it’s gone. And with it – the final vestiges of our youth.

Lion New Zealand confirmed the death of the near-toxic fizzy. The sparkling garbage drink of choice for turn-of-the-millennium kids, Bernadino is now flushed away, like so much sweet vomit.

I remember the first time I drank Bernadino. It was joyous.

I remember returning to it in my 20s because I wanted to taste that nostalgia. I wanted to return to my teen years. It didn’t taste like youthful freedom though. It tasted absolutely like what I imagine piss tastes like. How did we ever drink this shit? (I thought to myself before chugging down some Lindauer Fraise).

I am now almost an adult and so I drink rosé like the cliche that I am, and prosecco if I want to be fun (which is rare). But my memories of Bernadino linger. Just like the vomity aftertaste after a night on the Bernies.

It was a time when everything felt possible but also nothing was actually possible. We were young and dumb. And absolutely full of… teen angst. Bernadino was the place we turned to when our parents were being fucking bitches or the after-hours was closed and we really needed the morning after pill. Bernadino was our friend when Shanna didn’t invite you to her birthday even though you were meant to be best friends. Bernadino was there when The Big Kumara had a new bouncer who didn’t believe you were a Russian 42-year-old called Svetlena. Bernadino was there when you failed Year 12 maths. Bernadino was your companion, gently thrusting you into New Zealand’s problem drinking culture.

And then suddenly, you just stopped drinking it. And probably never thought about it again.

Did we suddenly realise what it tasted like? Did we suddenly have money? Whatever the reason, once Bernadino left your life it didn’t come back unless you were pulling the labels off bottles of it and replacing them with other labels to put on the tables of family you didn’t like at your wedding.

We progressed. Time marched on. No longer did we fill buckets with Bernadino and red cordial and call it punch. We took our steps toward a brighter future.

Of pinot gris.

Of “bubbly” that was $4 more expensive.

Of red wine at some point but I’m not there yet.

Of becoming someone whose entire personality is that they don’t drink any more.

No more Aquila, no more Passion Pop, no more Bernadino.

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Goodbye to our youth. Hello to drinking in probably exactly the same way but now we get hangovers.

We have just memories left (sort of, it’s all a bit hazy).

Farewell, Bernadino, and rest in peace. In all fairness, we probably won’t miss you.

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A student in Jakarta receives a Covid-19 vaccine on August 3. Covid is running rampant in Indonesia, which has full vaccination rates of just 7.6% (Photo: Kuncoro Widyo Rumpoko/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)
A student in Jakarta receives a Covid-19 vaccine on August 3. Covid is running rampant in Indonesia, which has full vaccination rates of just 7.6% (Photo: Kuncoro Widyo Rumpoko/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

SocietyAugust 4, 2021

Why we should share our vaccines

Guest writer
A student in Jakarta receives a Covid-19 vaccine on August 3. Covid is running rampant in Indonesia, which has full vaccination rates of just 7.6% (Photo: Kuncoro Widyo Rumpoko/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)
A student in Jakarta receives a Covid-19 vaccine on August 3. Covid is running rampant in Indonesia, which has full vaccination rates of just 7.6% (Photo: Kuncoro Widyo Rumpoko/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

This month, 7.4 million AstraZeneca doses will arrive in NZ. We should give them away, says Jo Spratt of Oxfam Aotearoa.

Three weeks ago our prime minister chaired an extraordinary Apec session focused on the coronavirus pandemic, declaring at its conclusion that “our discussions moved us beyond vaccine nationalism”. This government has regularly declared it is against vaccine nationalism. But when I look at how many doses we have purchased for New Zealanders, I’m not convinced.

While New Zealand remains precariously free from community coronavirus transmission, the pandemic continues to cost lives and livelihoods across the world. Delta shows us how dangerous this virus is when it mutates. We see this every day in our news feeds. Meanwhile, vaccine supply shortages allow this virus to circulate relatively unchecked, leading the way for even more dangerous mutations. Because pharmaceutical corporations have monopoly rights over vaccine intellectual property, and because they cannot make enough, they are able to charge high prices for vaccines. This gives wealthy countries, like New Zealand, an advantage when negotiating for vaccines. That is why New Zealand has vaccines, while people in countries like Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, and Fiji largely wait for charity.

The table below shows how many vaccine doses the government has purchased, or has the right to purchase, to vaccinate New Zealanders. When we put it all together, we have access to enough vaccine to fully vaccinate the New Zealand population over four times.

In May our government donated 1.6 million doses that we had purchased for our own use through the global Covax mechanism. Instead of being allocated to New Zealand, these doses were allocated to the least developed countries that Covax purchases vaccines for. We also said we would donate 250,000 AstraZeneca doses from our domestic supply. These have not yet been delivered because Medsafe had to approve them before we could donate them, and this only occurred on July 22. Besides that, we don’t actually have any AstraZeneca in the country, which is presumably why the government has announced it will purchase 100,000 AstraZeneca doses from Spain to donate to Fiji. But Cabinet is considering what should be done with the remaining 7.4 million AstraZeneca doses when they do arrive in the country, anticipated to be this month.

We should give them away. People in other countries need them now.

Indonesia, one of the world's most populated countries, and one of our close neighbours, has full vaccination rates of just 7.6% as the virus runs rampant, with over 39,000 new coronavirus cases and over 1,700 deaths on August 1 alone. In Papua New Guinea, only 0.1% of people have been fully vaccinated. There is limited testing going on and high levels of vaccine hesitancy due to misinformation; it is hard to know what is really going on, in a country with a barely functioning health system, and where the government regularly fails its people. Across the poorest countries, only 1% of people have received even one vaccine dose. Their governments cannot afford to bargain with pharmaceutical corporations to get the help their people need. For example, one dose of the vaccine in Uganda costs their government the entire amount it spends on each citizen each year to provide all health services.

We think of ourselves and our country as generous people who contribute constructively to world affairs. What better time to test this belief than in the midst of a global pandemic. And nowhere does it hurt people more than in countries that are poor and indebted, including in our own backyard. It would be wonderful to live in a world where people in poorer countries did not have to wait for the decisions of people in wealthy countries like New Zealand to get a vaccine. But until we do, the very least the New Zealand government can do is share vaccines we do not need. Only then can we start to claim we have moved beyond vaccine nationalism.

Society