Freed from “team of five million” pandemic strictures, our politics went full tilt into goblin mode for 2022.
As the Oxford Dictionary’s zeitgeist term of the year, “goblin mode” now signifies the opposite of lockdown spirit: selfishness and boorishness. It’s the unruly-tourist ethos gone global, with added butt crack.
Like other countries, we had our goblin-mode antivaccine-mandate protests. But this country was especially original in marshalling high goblinism against a proposal to better protect people against campylobacter, typhoid and other water-and-sewage-borne death threats. Three Waters was reimagined as a Māori and eco-warrior conspiracy theory by daringly creative goblinism.
The most courtly of politicians succumbed.
