While editing Sarah Newey and Simon Townsley’s feature story about the surge of methamphetamine and HIV in Fiji (page 50), I read a Rapid Assessment report from a team commissioned by the United Nations. They spent weeks in Suva in 2025, interviewing dozens of men and women who inject meth. In their own words, these people tell of the sharing of equipment, including needles; the makeshift ways in which they mix up their fix; the illness and poverty and violence that coalesce around addiction and so often drive it; the shame.
“The judgmental looks,” says 35-year-old Aliyah. “The eyes. The Fijian eyes that judge you…”
The researchers also convened talanoa, group conversations, with leaders in health, law enforcement, churches and the civil service. In these transcripts, one religious leader calls addiction “demonic”. He says his own daughter has been affected, and that most families stay silent on the matter because of shame. The report notes that such stigma, together with the country’s fragmented officialdom and law enforcement, is a barrier to the fixes that seem so obvious from here: clean needles, prophylactic medication, education in safer drug use.
New Zealand has our own national shames. Equally fixable. Equally stymied by the desire to cleave to the cultural status quo. Very often our leaders don’t come right out and say that’s what’s going on. But let us here, as Kiwis love to do, call a spade a spade.
Agriculture accounts for about half of New Zealand’s planet-heating emissions, yet after the 2023 election, the incoming government reversed plans to include it in our emissions trading scheme. Read: they did not want to annoy anyone in Red Bands. Likewise, in the face of explicit advice from the Climate Change Commission, the coalition resolved to go easy on methane. On this front we have not come far since 2003, when a tax on methane emissions by livestock was first proposed by Helen Clark’s government and scornfully shot down by, it seemed, the whole country.
Ratepayers can’t get to grips with the realities of actually paying enough to keep things ticking over, so local governments have instead drop-kicked the infrastructure can, and millions of litres of raw human sewage, into Wellington Harbour.
After a brief hiatus, officials are, inconceivably, once again inviting international companies to prospect for oil and gas at sea and on land. But good keen men need good keen jobs and it’s really very easy, and lately very Kiwi, to look only at such ordinary short-term needs and not at the existentially urgent imperative to stop burning things.
Our climate policy, right now, is short-termism writ large. On which: in February the government announced its support, and likely significant financial backing, too, for a billion-dollar terminal in Taranaki touted to help plug a gap in the national energy supply. It would process liquefied natural gas, an expensive fossil fuel we’ll have to import using—more fossil fuels.
As a country we abhor red tape. Enter the fast-track-approvals regime, which means you can get your coal mines and sand mines, your quarries and your sea-level property developments up and running lickety-split. The irony is that this legislation is precisely the sort of gear-change the country needs, were it to prioritise projects that will take us rapidly forwards. Solar. Wind. Resilient pipes and roads. Imagine.
Instead, in the face of multiple, escalating crises, we are dithering and obfuscating and putting dangerously outdated cultural biases above clear and compelling evidence.
We can fix it, all of it. But we have to get over ourselves first.
