A friend of mine just moved to New Zealand from the UK and she documented her first day in NZ on Instagram.

She's a vet, and owns several pets, and one of them is a cat whose favourite hobby is having an accident.

Somewhere around midnight, the cat ran away from my friend's house and decided to have a collision with an incoming car, he emerged unscathed, obviously since he's a cat, but my friend had a heart attack.

All's well that ends well except my friend also said somebody called the police on her because, I'm quoting, "they thought it was weird that somebody was walking around at midnight".

Right.

Now, I'm gonna give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she lives in a rural area where everybody knows everybody else. Maybe they don't trust foreigners. Even though it would take a special kind of courage for a New Zealander to call a Brit a foreigner.

Or maybe they were having a bad day and just wanted to sleep.

And yet, whichever way I look at it, this doesn't sit well with me.

Because the way I see it, she's now living in the sort of place where you can't walk around without risking somebody calling the cops on you.

And bear in mind we're talking about a young, good-looking woman. If they called the cops on her, what would they have done had they seen an old, ugly, big man instead of a slim, lithe woman?

The problem, I'm afraid, is Covid highlighted a division that was already there. It split the world several different ways. Among other things, we've learnt that there are people, and therefore countries, that are absolutely okay with giving the government more power, especially when it comes to surveillance.

People happily downloaded government apps that tracked their movements. I understand they had to do it because, in some cases, there was no other way. But it shocked me that so many people were happy to do it.

Remember, research shows that nearly one in three Gen Z favours the government installing surveillance cameras in homes

That's the sort of person that calls the cops on you when you're just minding your own business.

I don't want to live in a world like that. And in fact, I don't.

I moved from a country where government intervention was average, to a country where it is minimal.

Here, no one would ever even dream of calling the police on somebody just because they're walking in the streets at midnight.

But hey, those who think that's okay should maybe move to New Zealand and be happy.

That'd be great, because NZ is so far away from anything else we'd happily forget about them.