Reporter David Fisher and visual journalist Mike Scott are on a nationwide road trip to ask New Zealanders: What matters to you?
It's a quick 90 minutes from Tauranga to Hamilton on a sleek expressway. The Bay of Plenty disappears behind the Kaimai Ranges and Waikato unfolds like a great, green carpet to the horizon and beyond.
This is one side of The Golden Triangle, with Auckland the third point to the North. In the engine room of the New Zealand economy, this is a critical cog.
It includes about half of New Zealand's population and is predicted to account for two-thirds of New Zealand's future growth. Covid-19 is a spanner in the works of monumental proportions.
At this point in New Zealand's Covid-19 journey, all talk is of the success of the first lockdown and the surprisingly slight economic damage suffered compared with the predicted devastation.
In the Herald's journey from Bluff to Cape Reinga for The Road Ahead series, the discovery of Covid-19's second incursion is still a day away. We're unwittingly in the eye of the storm, seeing nothing but blue skies far into the future. We're wrong, although don't know it yet.
For the past week, those speaking from the 1pm briefing have tried to arrest the complacency that has crept across the nation. There's talk of a "National Mask Day". Community testing for Covid-19 has plummeted, border testing will soon be revealed as hopelessly ineffective.
The Road Ahead
• The Road Ahead: Black Power members - 'We want to do the best for our community'
• The Road Ahead: Inside 'The Beltway' - where the real world meets politics
• The Road Ahead: What's really happening in the engine room of NZ tourism
• The Road Ahead: What matters to you?
• The Road Ahead: A call for change in the south - what matters to Kiwis right now
• Age of Reality - a journey through New Zealand
• Greatest NZ Stories: Joy, wonder and heart-break
The warnings at briefings seem to have had some effect.
"In the last week, we've noticed the return of face masks," says Kathleen Comins, 43, who owns and works at Comins Pharmacy in Cambridge.
"For a long time, masks weren't selling at all."
Our response seems to have been binary. When the Covid-19 alert shone red for danger, we stayed at home, wore gloves and masks, kept our distance from others. Then we returned to normal life even though the threat never truly went away.
From Cambridge across Waikato, our roads are transformed. In many places around New Zealand, they continue to curve with the landscape, producing those odd corners and strange twists that slowed commerce, caused crashes, cost lives. On those roads, the path ahead revealed itself incrementally.
Now, the new roads of The Golden Triangle cut through the landscape, whisking traffic between Auckland, Hamilton and Tauranga in a matter of hours.
Living with Covid-19
On the outskirts of Hamilton, shuttle bus driver Dave Orr will tell you Covid-19 is a disease nobody wants. It attacked his body and then it finished off his business.
"I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy," he says, offering a hand to shake. There's a moment's hesitation in taking it, which isn't lost on Orr, or unfamiliar.
"A lot of people have never met anyone who had the virus. I very quickly say 'I'm clear now'."
In the days leading up to the first lockdown, Orr was busy shuttling returning international travellers from Auckland International Airport into Waikato. For 12 years, he had built up the shuttle company, formed partnerships and expanded where possible to the point where he had around 30 drivers and a half-dozen office staff.
"Air conditioning creates a wind in the terminal. As they've learned more about [Covid-19], they now know it is [spread by] aerosols as well."
It is Orr's belief that he contracted the virus standing in the public arrival area waiting for clients.
It left him exhausted. It put his wife, Heather Logie, in hospital. That was the personal impact. The wider impact was the death of his passenger transport business.
It took 12 years to build.
"It evaporated in two days," he says.
"I don't know if I will ever have staff again. It was just too hard writing all those termination notices … having to sack your friends."
Orr is back behind the wheel. He's got one van and he's his own boss. He has pieced together work to replace some of what once came from airport transfers. It's not as it was but enough "to rebuild another business and not go on a benefit".
North of Hamilton, the once-familiar crawl through Ngāruawāhia and Huntly is gone with a new, majestic and sweeping highway. It rolls past the infamous Waikato Wool Scourers at Rangiriri, still on State Highway 1 but no longer a landmark that had motorists hold their breath against the stink.
We move, as does everything on this section of highway, like greased lightning. Travel to Auckland seemingly happens by itself until, up and over the Bombay Hills, it grinds to a familiar halt.
The Queen City
It's a typical Auckland downpour. Torrential. The traffic is also typical, crawling up the Southern Motorway, brake lights glowing red in banks and rows into the distance.
During the first lockdown, the motorways opened up. Traffic was down to as much as 40 per cent some days as we speculated about the changes lockdown life had wrought, and how we wouldn't go back to normal.
This was normal. Windscreen wipers fighting the rain, cars crawling amid freight carriers blocking out any ability to see how far the traffic stretched, or how far it had built up behind.
For all the angst of traffic, these cars and trucks are the lifeblood of a city that is the pumping heart of our nation's economy. Covid-19 crushed Orr's business, which once worked these roads. How to stop it crushing our economy?
Throughout National's nine years in government, Aucklander Steven Joyce was the "Super Minister" known as "Mr Fixit". He carried enormous workloads as if they weighed nothing, and was as comfortable down in the weeds with details as he was at the top of the policy tree looking generations into the future.
So how would Mr Fixit fit this?
Mr Fixit speaks
"I think we're well-positioned overall," he says, "although I worry that we are in denial with some of the issues. We're spending a lot of borrowed money to sustain where we are now."
Joyce uses the term "Potemkin Village" to describe New Zealand. The term comes from Grigory Potemkin, lover of Russian Empress Catherine II. As they sailed the Dnieper River to Crimea, Potemkin had fake, portable buildings temporarily erected on the banks, peopled by his soldiers, to impress her with the quality and wealth of the country Russia had just annexed.
It has come to mean the construction of a national facade, intended to convince observers that a country is in better shape than it might actually be.
The issue Joyce has with our national response is that the money spent seems to have been spent on, effectively, treading water. While a degree of that needed to take place, there's little sign of money going into forward motion.
The money is such - at a billion dollars a week - that actual numbers defy meaning. "It's very real," he warns, "and ultimately it will need to be paid back."
Though some might argue that now is not the time to worry, Joyce says the debt will claim a price. The question is, who will pay it.
"It's hardship today versus hardship tomorrow. There's no freeway through it. That money will have to come from somewhere else down the track."
So what's the immediate cost, as he sees it?
"It has hijacked the next 10 to 15 years in terms of government's ability to do things."
Look to the 1970s and 1980s, he says, and how long it took to contain massive debt.
"We aren't used to having these debts because we have had a period of 20 years of strong fiscal management on both sides [of politics]. There's a whole generation or two who aren't being used to being told this thing or that thing can't happen because there's too much debt."
The constraint of possibility is unusually limiting. In recent decades, our vision as a society has lifted from the path we are walking to the road ahead. Services that were "near enough" became "good enough" with expectation we would evolve into a new New Zealand.
Where is the plan?
The "bounceback" depends on those who fuel the economy - the small, medium and other businesses who pay staff, produce goods or offer services. How, asks Joyce, do you lead those people "who create and grow business to get on with it"?
It comes down to having a plan, he says. And, he says, where is the plan? Where are the ideas? Where are the systems needed to remove the constraints from possibility?
Look at the corollary, says Joyce, and what happens when there is no apparent plan. Take, for example, the access granted to offshore workers needed to work on the Provincial Growth Fund's synthetic racetrack.
Government says decisions on access were made by officials while critics noted the closeness of NZ First and its determination to push PGF funding even as others had essential workers declined.
Joyce says it leads to perceptions that who you know is more important than the systems developed for all.
"It's very 1970s - if you can get someone to back you then they'll get it through."
To the contrary, the recovery needs a clear framework that business can work with. "At that level, there is no plan."
Joyce might be seen as a political player - he was a pervasive figure throughout the fifth National government - but he was only willing to offer perspectives if we stayed away from politics.
In offering his views, whatever his post-politics alignment, nothing is coloured so as to sway political allegiance. He does hold the view that centre-left governments do not seem as close to business as those identifying centre-right.
To make a plan, Joyce says government needs to improve the input it gets from outside Wellington's bureaucracy, which can suffer from a "bunker" mentality.
That includes advisers from the country's business community, as Australia has done with its rolling National Covid-19 Commission Advisory Board.
"Here it's [former Air New Zealand chief executive] Rob Fyfe. Poor Rob is carrying the expectations of business."
Joyce pauses, qualifying his criticism by saying the Australian commission doesn't have "all the answers". "But it does bring a perspective."
Regardless, a Commission of Inquiry into New Zealand's response should happen and soon.
"It's not about this one. It's about the next wave or the next one. We have to come up with a system that allows us to operate in a much better way for the next pandemic."
Commission of Inquiry
"I'm disappointed we don't have a bunch of businesspeople and epidemiologists in a room designing what that looks like."
For government, the levers to pull are "not that complicated". Recovery lies in skills, investment or bank finance, market access, access to resources, access to innovation and technology and infrastructure to link all together. Then, each of those areas needs to be extrapolated across each industry.
Talking business does not mean a lesser value on life. Lives versus livelihoods is "a false argument", says Joyce.
"There's a bunch of people who are outside politics now saying it's not about that, it's about both."
Joyce talks of "opening the border" but says "we have to be really careful". It's a discussion that's not happening now and probably won't until after the election, he says.
"I would like New Zealanders to have that discussion, at least, to determine that attitude. I would hope that now we have had this experience, we would set something up that is actually pretty clever and allow us to safely do more.
"If you really don't want any risk, you have to hermetically seal the border and then you're North Korea."
Our national prosperity - unequal as it is - is reliant on international movement and trade. Without some freedom of movement, Joyce says "you would have to get used to a much lower standard of living, a lower level of health services, lower level of education".
Joyce muses on public behaviour and response. It doesn't matter, he says, whether it is driving, drink-driving, or any other pattern of behaviour that creates risk.
"Unless it's a clear and present risk, the public aren't going to change."
That was Tuesday afternoon, about eight hours before Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern held a 9.15pm press conference to tell the country the virus was back. Didn't behaviour change overnight with the return of "a clear and present risk"?
'The virus will return'
Of those we met on the road, there weren't any who were confident the virus would be kept out of the country for good. And yet people spoke of feeling secure, their relief New Zealand was not being ravaged as other countries, and then went about their lives as if Covid-19 had never visited.
At Albany Mall, Jude Lim, 33, was finishing her day running an early childhood centre.
"I feel we are back to normal," she says.
She was on parental leave in South Korea with daughter Charlotte, 6 months, when the first lockdown arrived.
Everyone wore masks, she says, and all are conscious of an ever-present threat. Television news would highlight New Zealand's fortunate position.
"They are very jealous."
Her colleague, Rashika Prasad, 40, had a similar perspective - her native Fiji had just handfuls of cases, yet is still under curfew.
"We have passed 100 days," she says. "It becomes more evident there is no Covid in the country."
Extraordinarily, while the rest of the world is trying to get into New Zealand, Courtney Watt, 18, of Kumeu, was stocking up on gloves, masks and sanitiser in preparation of leaving.
The day New Zealand went into a new lockdown, Watt caught a plane to the United States where she's taking up a sports scholarship playing hockey.
What a decision. Family lobbied her to stay, but Watt's thoughts were on her mum, who died in February.
"She really wanted me to see this out. I know she would be proud."
'What's my dream?'
"There were many thoughts about it but it came down to what's my dream, what do I want?"
And what she wanted was to study teaching at the University of Vermont while playing hockey.
Vermont, where she was headed, has a hearteningly low Covid-19 rate.
"That's one of the reasons that really helped me decide."
And so she went. As Auckland went to level 3 and the rest of the country moved up to level 2, Watt flew out of Auckland International Airport to realise a dream. She went alone, a solitary exit, with family unable to see her off.
We also met Bernie and Trish Watt, 65 and 66, who shared Courtney's surname but weren't related. In a city of 1.5 million people - what are the chances?
Back in January, the couple got off the Diamond Princess cruise in Tokyo the day it was boarded by a Covid-19-carrying passenger who went on to spread the virus aboard the ship.
A close call but not one that imbued the couple with a sense of self-preservation.
"I feel there's been a lot of hype over the whole thing, to be perfectly honest," says Bernie Watt.
He ticks through his objections; the original death projections didn't pan out, Ardern moving off the pandemic guidelines (developed for a different type of virus) and $16 million was spent on the Covid-19 advertising campaign.
" 'Be kind'," he says, "all these slogans come from that."
Trish Watt sees the pandemic response as purely political, and raised the new push of Ministry of Health advertising calling on the public to take precautions.
"They are using that for this election."
And didn't the Prime Minister just say this would be a Covid-19 election?
"I think we're in a pretty good place now. We're not walking around with masks on."
That was late afternoon, the sun setting on the lines of slow-moving traffic shuffling out of Auckland central along the Northern Motorway.
In just a few hours, Ardern would interrupt New Zealand's evening. Covid-19 was back and it was spreading.
