Bruce Bisset: Climate of debate lacking

No wonder we clutch at straws such as Winston, though if anyone out there knows where Peters really stands on climate change you're wiser than I, writes Bisset. Photo / Andrew Warner

Elephants of the political persuasion have a habit of making themselves all too visible at election time, but the Dotcom spy-ring circus has effectively hidden the largest from sight: apart from a few predictable lines from the Greens, no-one has talked about climate change.

Which is a shame because, whether we like it or not, the degradation of global weather systems will be the crisis which most affects New Zealand in the next few decades, with predicted impacts that will make the recent financial crisis seem like very small beer.

So it would have been nice to see some robust debate amongst the parties as to who recognises this and what they plan to do about it.

Because as important as all the other stuff is, at base it's a discussion about how we live our lives from day to day. Whereas climate change, and all the diverse impacts of mankind that contribute to it, is a discussion about whether our descendants will have lives at all.

But that's far too doom and gloomy when you're trying to win the hearts if not the minds of voters, isn't it. Best to drape a curtain over it and let it brood in the corner and hope some freak event doesn't remind everyone that it's there.

Overseas, governments are rising and falling according to their attitude to climate change and the measures they propose or oppose to deal with it. US President Obama singled it out as the most pressing issue for his second term in office, though little has since happened to back up his rhetoric.

Even the Australians, not known as caring intellectuals, had the wit to fight their last election campaign primarily around this topic. The fact Tony Abbott won unfortunately supports the casual bigotry in the previous sentence. But at least they took a stand, even if it may soon haunt them.

In contrast we Kiwis are sleepwalking toward the cliff's edge with our equivalent of an underarm bowling action not even bothering to debate it as we empower deniers like Craig's Conservatives and the make-money-because-there's-no-tomorrow moral bankruptcy of Act and National.

No wonder we clutch at straws such as Winston, though if anyone out there knows where Peters really stands on climate change you're wiser than I.

Labour deliberately parked any meaningful environmental debate by refusing to run in partnership with the Greens, while the Greens themselves have soft-focused on immediate tangibles like clean rivers instead of the scarier big picture. Not that they think it's less important; they're being pragmatic.

Fortunately, that pragmatism looks likely to translate into a caucus that rivals Labours', providing a stepping stone for the future of the planet to become central to decision-making - if not in the next government, then perhaps the one after.

Which will be not before time, because regardless of the continued falsification and cherry-picking of data by those who believe if you wish against something hard enough it will magically go away, man-made climate change is not only a fact but, by its nature, the biggest elephant in an Earth-sized room.

For now, as weirdly exciting as the sideshow attractions of this election have proven to be, it seems likely the result will favour business as usual.

But nevertheless if you look hard enough there are encouraging signs that just maybe, at this point in three years time, New Zealanders will have woken up sufficient to realise there is no Planet B.

Then the real debate can start. That's the right of it.

Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.