Why is there no talk about what’s next?

After a stuttering start, the election campaign proper is about to get under way – again. The 52nd Parliament has finally run its course after its adjournment was delayed by the new Covid outbreak. To be frank, it was a bit of a fizzer. After weeks of an on-again, off-again election campaign it’s been hard for many of us to sustain enthusiasm after a chaotic political year.

The politicians seem to be just as bone weary. And now they’re going to have to pick themselves up and campaign as though their lives depend on it.

They may find it difficult to cut through the fog of weariness that seems to be enveloping this election, however. Whether in spite of – or perhaps because – it’s being fought against the backdrop of one of the most turbulent and radical periods of change in decades, it feels like we’re exhausted by it already.

There are exceptions to this of course; count in anyone who inhabits that twilight world on social media where politics is a deeply tribal and visceral blood sport.

For the rest of us there’s ‘‘life’’ – and at the moment the prospect of summer is more alluring than the thought of tuning back in to a grinding stop-start election campaign.

Yet this election is shaping up as possibly the most important in a generation. So why is it so hard to care? Is it because the debate doesn’t seem to move beyond the immediate issue of managing the border? It seems to turn on an increasingly small dial, when you consider the major point of difference is whether you test people on arrival in New Zealand, or before.

The elephant in the room, meanwhile, is how to reopen the border – which seems to have become one of those third-rail issues no-one wants to touch.

Nor have we heard much about how much Covid’s legacy might reshape the country’s finances – can we expect radical change to the way government services are shaped and funded? Are new taxes needed? Will pensions be slashed? Will benefits be raised again? How do we avert generational unemployment? How do we fund essential services like schools, hospitals, and social service agencies? How do we repay the Covid debt monster? Can we? How do we grow the economy in new ways if we accept that international tourism and international education may never bounce back? And could we survive another earthquake, or a pandemic, or a blow to another major export industry such as, God forbid, agriculture?

Maybe the politicians have tuned into the general sense of ennui after all and decided there’s no appetite for rocking the boat. Or maybe change has come at us in such a rush they simply don’t have the answers yet.

But what we can’t afford is three years of drift. Or a government that will acknowledge and act on those questions only after it’s been elected.

New Zealand’s Covid response has been so effective in large part because as a nation we still fundamentally trust our elected and unelected officials.

That’s been earned by successive governments largely sticking to the mandate they were delivered.

We will take it on the chin if our politicians tell us there are some tough decisions to be made.

But the time to talk about it is now.

This election is shaping up as possibly the most important in a generation.