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Pattrick Smellie, who has been a regular contributor to this show, is back from his long European sabbatical - and he reckons we need to cheer up in New Zealand.

He's written a piece for BusinessDesk saying that the headlines he’s seeing here at home suggest we’re as miserable as we were back in the early 1990s during Ruth Richardson's recession.

And he points out that all 9 countries he visited actually had the same problems - race relations, violent crime, failing infrastructure, countless crises, countries going backwards, but they were dealing with it without the same sense of fatalistic despair that we have over it.

Now I've thought about this a lot overnight, and I agree that we're extremely gloomy. And I would be the first to tell us to give ourselves an uppercut if I thought we were being unreasonably miserable, but I think we’re justified in feeling like we do.

Because- and I can't speak for other countries - we have gone through a massive shift in the last few years. We went from being the rockstar economy, prosperous and riding the wave of Chinese demand to three recessions in two years. 

Name me another country that we compare ourselves to that has had three recessions in two years. That's a tough thing to go through.

Pattrick himself admits it’s bad. He points out that we've slipped in a comprehensive UN measure of everything from life expectancy and education to economics. We've dropped 7 places in one year, that's how fast things have gone backwards for us.

We've gone from being the safe place you want to raise your kids in to having 11 to 12 homicides in the North Island in just over a month - including a body found burnt out in a car somewhere today.

I think what’s made us gloomy is the size of the shift. Others may also be experiencing what we are, but I suspect not with the swing from one extreme to the other that we have - which makes the bad feel so much more bad because it was so good.

So yeah, we’re gloomy. And yeah, like Pattrick, I'm looking forward to us coming out of this. But I don't think we're being dramatic in how we feel, I think it’s justified. And I think it’s good, because it means we don't accept it - and we're motivated to change it. 

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