Larry Williams Drive

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 eco