There's no point pretending any more. New Zealand's happy. We are. We're happy. Game over. Southland's won the shield and all's well with the world.

Heaven alone knows how this has happened. It's completely out of character. We shouldn't be happy. We're not usually happy. We don't like being happy. Misery is our default position, our favoured mire.

Naturally, journalists are doing their level best to get us back in it. As you'd expect. Ladling out daily dollops of gloom and despond has worked for years.

But not any more. Things are so bad in the "things are so bad" industry that the wee pets have even stopped banging on about that great cataclysm of the ages, global warming.

And rightly so. The moment we realised saving the planet meant we had to have an ETS that was going to cost us heaps of real money in addition to all those other taxes we were already paying anyway, we lost interest.

The gummint's still pretending to be worried, of course. They must. That's the price you pay for going to the UN and getting housing allowances larger than the GDP of Vanuatu.

But they know we've gone cool on it. They know what we think about their onerous ETS thingee.

We think the ETS should be like Christmas decorations. Something you put up for a while to keep the kids happy, but take down and stow away in a cardboard box under the stairs as soon as the Copenhagen season's over.

Which is very likely what the gummint plans to do. They just can't say so, that's all. They have to look like they're taking it seriously, as you did in the fifth form when the Head told you off for putting anacondas in Alvis Paisley's sandshoes.

Sorry, Alvis.

But we're not the gummint. We don't have to take anything seriously. So we don't. We're happy. We don't care. For some strange, collective, subterranean reason, we've chosen not to worry, no matter how often and how loudly the scribes yell "Fire" in the theatre of our anxieties.

Well, let 'em! It's not working. No matter how strident these poor hoarse men of the apocalypse become, we just smile a goofy smile and shrug a silly shrug and ask the great New Zillun question; "So?"

Everything's a ricochet, a flesh wound, a glancing blow. It might plunge us into a slough of indifference but that's as bad as it gets. We don't care.

At least, not about the things we're supposed to care about. Like global warming - or teachers getting tetchy about going back to basics.