New Zealand: A Safe Place?

The Collins Dictionary states that safe means 1. Giving security or protection from harm, 2.Free from danger 3.taking or involving no risks. Can any country give total security or protection from harm? Is anywhere free from danger? Is it possible to live anywhere without taking risks? The simple answer to all of these questions is no. It is impossible to be completely safe, ever. The very nature of life is unsafe! However, is New Zealand a relatively safe place to live, compared with other destinations? Would we be wrong in believing we live in a country which has less risks associated with it than other nations?

Crime. On average 100,000 New Zealanders are convicted of some sort of crime each year. Much of this may be petty crime, such as graffiti or vandalism, or theft of something like a handbag or bike. However much of the crime in New Zealand is malicious, and intended to hurt others, and the rates of this are increasing. How often are we now hearing on the news about a murder, rape, physical abuse, grievous bodily harm? Another innocent person who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time? However, though our crime rates are higher than we might want and increasing, they are not necessarily that bad compared to other countries. Take South Africa for example. It is widely acknowledged that in Johannesburg, you can’t just walk down the street without being at risk. People live in compounds behind barbed wire and multiple security gates. So when you compare our crime to this sort of situation, it begins to seem rather insignificant.

New Zealand is also free of a lot of problems which make other countries unsafe. New Zealand is a relatively safe place to live in regarding your health. It is not perfect by any means, but when you compare us to other places, you realise how lucky we are. HIV aids is ravaging Africa. Malawi, a small country in southern Africa is believed to have over 1 million aids sufferers. A report suggests that 70% of hospital deaths in 2000 were AIDS related. The epidemic has heavily affected children. At the end of 2005, an estimated 91,000 children in Malawi were living with HIV, and over half a million children had been orphaned by AIDS. So is New Zealand safe in this respect? Very. Due to New Zealand’s isolation we are also less at risk from any possibly impending pandemics, such as bird flu which is creating much hype among medical professionals in the last few years. We aren’t completely immune, but the fact that we are so far away from anyone else, does make it easier to manage.

Another way in which New Zealanders are living in a safe environment is when looking at the case of international conflict. Terrorism. The Trade towers, the Madrid bombings and the London bombings. People overseas are afraid to use public transport, to work in large buildings or to go to huge public gatherings because of the risk of a suicide bomber or chemical gas attack. New Zealand is again, largely separated from this kind of activity. We have a foreign policy based on non-intervention and we did not take part in conflicts such as the War in Iraq. Therefore we are less of a target for violence. Our isolation also makes us safer in the case of foreign wars, or world wars. Neither WWI nor WWII ever got here, simply because we were too far away from the main battlefields of Europe. Our citizens were never under the attack of air-raids or living with the threat of chemical warfare. So again, in this respect we are better off.

Basically I think it comes down to, New Zealand may not be as safe as we night like to think it is, however nowhere is ever going to be completely safe and what we have in new Zealand is definitely a whole lot better to what you might find elsewhere in the world. We are certainly not crime free; in fact we are far from it. But we are still relatively safe in our homes and in most areas, 99.9% of the time you will be perfectly fine if you just go for a walk down the street. So in the end, I believe we have it relatively easy. On most occasions we can live our daily lives without interruption and we are not living in constant fear. And this, I believe, constitutes a safe country.