No-one in any sort of governance role, that is. Here, from Jacinda down to local councils it's instead business as usual; indeed, as usual but on steroids, as they all rush to "kickstart" business "back to normal".
New Zealand First is dog-whistling, backing "shovel-ready" traditional projects while demonising the Greens "for the sake of the economy".
It's populism for the denialists – whether folk recognise it as such or not.
Labour is at this point indistinguishable from National, given the narrative they're spouting is straight out of the neoliberal songbook: infrastructure, jobs, growth, support for business (whether good or bad), blah blah blah.
Has the pandemic caused them all to forget about climate change? Evidently so.
If you're suffering rising blood-pressure in outrage, tell me ONE significant change the government has made, or signalled it is going to make, to deal with that far larger crisis.
Just one. No? No.
Bruce Bisset: "The world as we know it is going to end, soon, unless we all have the courage to undertake major system change."
Oh, sure, some tinkering round the edges: an emissions trading scheme that has gone from toothless to one denture; waterways regulations that finally put some national standards in place, albeit insufficient ones; a rebate scheme for electric vehicles – no, wait, they scrapped that.
Tinkering is the same as doing nothing. A look-good, but in no way a solution. Greenwash, in short.
Just because the "team of five million" are so good at eradicating disease doesn't make us immune to the global catastrophe of climate change. We can close our borders, but we're still stuck on the same planet.
Doing nothing is not an option. Regardless of whether you believe the science, the world as we know it is going to end, soon, unless we all have the courage to undertake major system change.
And really, that's all it takes: courage. Something severely lacking in our current crop of politicians, because not one of them is telling this truth.
They're not telling it because it is a truth so large it requires us to completely reform civilisation as we know it.
And they think you, the voters, aren't ready to listen to that truth – so they'd lose your votes. Which of course is a Catch-22; if you're not told the truth, you can't listen and vote accordingly, can you?
So we remain stuck in "business as usual" - even though it's killing us.
At heart you may know the truth the politicians leave unspoken, but if no-one has the courage to lead the charge our votes are useless, since they won't affect real change.
That change must be based around communities, not businesses; around need, not want; around health and welfare, not profits.
We need to drastically reduce consumption, in part by trading our throwaway-gadget approach for building robust devices that can be repaired.
We need to eliminate unnecessary packaging, make and buy local, and phase out all fossil fuel use as soon as possible.
And that's just the start of the list.
Bottom line, we need to replace capitalism with conservation, growth with "degrowth", greed with good.
But is any politician talking about that? Not so far, no.
Yet thanks to Covid-19, countries are now making spending decisions that will eat the next 10 years worth of budgets in one gulp.
And that 10 years, til 2030, is the timeframe scientists have given us to seriously redress climate change or face inevitable extinction.
