Yesterday's motion responding to the March 15 terrorist attack and today's commemoration of the Whakaari disaster one year ago also brought up other memories of the last 18 or so months, from my own very close encounter with a highly disturbed member of the public on March 14 to the first of the major school strikes for the climate only an hour before the terrorist started his rampage on the 15th, to the follow-up school strikes in September that brought 170,000 citizens on to the streets around the country, demanding that we take bold action on climate change, to the shock of seeing our own skies turn orange as Australia burned over the summer. We have lived through extraordinary times. It reminded me of a passage by the former Czech poet dissident and president Václav Havel, who wrote, "I think there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended. Today many things indicate that we are going through a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were decaying, crumbling, and exhausting itself whilst something still indistinct were arising from the rubble."