Mike Williams
The year in politics was a particularly gruelling for almost anyone involved and while watching Parliament, I was struck how many of the MPs on both sides of the aisle looked weary.
When asked to sum up 2021 in a word, Prime Minister Ardern said "hard", and deputy PM Grant Robertson said "challenging".
The resurgence of Covid-19 via the more infectious Delta mutation threw the county back into lockdown and meant that a third of our population was trapped behind borders for almost four months.
It seems to me to be misguided politics to attack the Labour Government on its management of the pandemic, as the National Party has repeatedly attempted.
The key international measure of pandemic success is Covid-19 deaths per 100,000 of population. According to Washington Post statistics, New Zealand emphatically leads the group of countries with which we are usually compared.
That number for the USA is 242, the UK is 219, Canada 80 and Australia 8.3.
The rate of Covid deaths per 100,000 of population in Aotearoa is currently less than one.
Equally successful has been vaccination rollout this year. Jacinda Ardern nominated 2021 "the year of the vaccine" and her prediction has been justified with 90 per cent of the eligible population now fully vaccinated and 94 per cent with one dose.
This puts us ahead of the USA, the UK and even Israel, the early leader in the vaccine stakes.
The anti-vax brigade may be noisy, but the statistics confirm the research that finds that vaccine doubters are fewer than 3 per cent of the population.
The double jabbed eligible population of the Auckland DHB area is now clocked at 95 per cent and still rising.
Throughout this hard and challenging year, the Labour Party caucus has demonstrated close to prefect discipline, a tribute to the leadership skills of Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson.
Despite the diversions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, this Government has not shied away from key challenges and major changes are underway in health, the three waters and the resource management regime.
The sixth Labour Government will cast a very long shadow if it achieves a fraction of the reforms it plans.
National, by contrast, had a forgettable year and will be hoping for better with Christopher Luxon as its new leader in 2022.
Judith Collins was inevitably replaced but, true to form, managed to destroy her rival Simon Bridges' chances of regaining the party leadership on her way out.
Bridges would have been a safer choice.
Luxon comes from the conservative faction of National and amounts to a swerve to the political right at a time when world politics seems to be heading in the other direction with the Social Democrats leading the new coalition in Germany and Labour leading in the polls in Australia and the UK.
National will, however, have a more relaxed barbecue season this year as the only post leadership change poll showing a 7 per cent uptick in National's party vote.
Though this can be taken as encouragement, this improvement was almost entirely at the expense of National's putative coalition partner, the Act Party.
We should also be aware that leadership changes almost always produce an immediate poll bounce for the party with the new leader.
Luxon's 7 per cent jump was matched by the 7 per cent generated by David Cunliffe who went on to lead the Labour Party to its worst ever defeat with 27.5 per cent of the party vote in 2014.
The change from Simon Bridges to Todd Muller gave National a short lived 9 per cent uplift and Labour's switch to Jacinda Ardern in 2017 was worth 13 per cent which was to stick.
I watched Luxon at his first encounter with the PM and was unimpressed. He got tongue-tied with his first question which he'd surely practised a dozen times in the mirror and proceeded to ask the same question four times.
The question concerned the number of intensive care beds and whether they'd been increased in response to the pandemic.
This was surely barking up the wrong tree given that the Government's successful strategy has meant, as the PM pointed out, that the use of IC beds for Covid patients peaked at 11 and as I write there are just two Covid victims in IC beds.
Christopher Luxon's strategy was the same as that pursued by the three National Party leaders that went before him and which did not succeed.
Voters will need to see some fresh ideas from Luxon if National is to get back the cohort of New Zealand electors his party bled across the political spectrum in 2020.
I wish him luck!
I'm going to name two "politicians of the year" and for me they are Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson.
These are close friends who have morphed into a dynamic duo which could steer this country well for many more moons.
Mike Williams grew up in Hawke's Bay. He is chief executive of the NZ Howard League and a former Labour Party president. All opinions are his and not those of Hawke's Bay Today.