At this point, it would be more efficient to just keep a state of emergency in place all the time.

Craig Little saw the ominous spectre of pronouns and DEI as authorities tried to get his disaster-prone district ready for Cyclone Vaianu. As every council nearby issued state of emergency declarations to give their civil defence staff extra powers, the Wairoa mayor resisted. “We’re becoming woke as a country when it comes to states of emergency,” he said. Little thought his colleagues’ anticipatory declarations were jumping the gun. “We didn’t need a state of emergency,” he contended. “When you make a call like that it means you’re under the pump.”

A week later he got his wish for a non-woke disaster response. Wellington was hit with flash flooding after a thunderstorm developed so fast, authorities didn’t have time to declare a state of general unease let alone emergency. One person died in the disaster that sent torrents of water through properties, damaged roads and set off a multitude of landslides.

Maybe the mistake was less that authorities declared a state of emergency for Cyclone Vaianu than that they ever called one off. New Zealand has vacillated between cyclone, tornado, drought and flood for the better part of a decade. The cycle has accelerated recently. IAG’s Wild Weather Tracker shows the nation has been hit by a storm every eight days for a year. The insurance giant is pleading with the government for systemic action to address climate resilience after seeing its customers’ claims triple in number thanks to the barrage of disasters.

Fat chance, suckers. The government already dismantled the dedicated $6bn climate resilience fund set up by the last government, and now it’s under pressure to save its cash for roughly 4000 other crises hitting the nation simultaneously. It currently takes about four years to get an appointment with a GP, which admittedly does create some cost savings as patients either die or get better during the wait. But our health system is still in urgent need of extra investment, as evidenced by the fact many emergency departments are now almost permanently overloaded.

Then there’s the intractable cost of living reality. Donald Trump’s genius plan to replace one ayatollah Khamenei with another ayatollah Khamenei has heaped yet more financial pressure on a populace already cowering before $30 blocks of butter and mince. Thanks to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a tank of diesel is now about the same price as just buying a new car. The Reserve Bank is tipped to add to the pain by putting up interest rates to bring down the inflation that’s happening during the economic slowdown it caused the last time it put up interest rates to address high inflation.

At a certain point people might humbly ask the government to deliver more support than a $50 tax credit for some Working for Families recipients. Good luck, losers. All of our pipes are spewing poo everywhere and the nation’s infrastructure deficit is going to cost $1 trillion over 30 years to address. People are freaking out about the first bill they’re getting for water repairs in Wellington. Similar cost jumps are happening in places like Waikato. Surely the government will get to picking up more of the tab straight after it builds a $20 billion highway to Whangārei.

Then there’s the energy crisis and the productivity crisis, which have apparently combined like transformers into a super crisis, along with the ongoing housing crisis. This omni-polycrisis is playing out in a country that’s expected to face more frequent and intense weather disasters, even as it struggles to deal with the intensity and frequency of its existing weather disasters. 

Little was wrong with his fears about woke. States of emergency are useful for saving lives, homes and businesses, and we really could have used an early one in Wellington this week. But they also feel a little redundant in the current age, like turning on a siren in a house filled with blaring alarms, bells and air horns. We don’t just have a state of emergency, we have a nation of emergency. Extraordinary measures may be needed to address the situation beyond giving extra powers to Civil Defence. Instead it may be necessary to extend that authority to the people who are proposing a rethink of the settings that got us into this predicament in the first place.