The New Zealand Initiative

In this episode, Oliver talks with Dr Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, associate professor of history at the Australian Catholic University, about why the West has largely lost the ability to think meaningfully about its own past. She calls this the ahistoric age and argues that the statues we topple and the national days we fight over are evidence of it rather than signs of real engagement with history.

In this episode, Oliver talks with John Howard, senior fellow at the New Zealand Initiative, about why he sees no negotiated settlement over Iran in the next 30 to 60 days, and what prolonged disruption in the Strait of Hormuz exposes about New Zealand's fuel and fertiliser supply.

They also ask whether the increase in defence spending from 1.1 to 2 per cent of GDP is being converted into actual hardware and personnel, and assess Defence Minister Chris Penk's opening months in the job, including his $300 million announcement on attack drones.

In this episode, Michael talks with Dr Helen Walls, who served on the ministerial advisory group on literacy and numeracy. Helen is generally supportive of New Zealand's primary literacy reforms but warns that pre-planned programmes, overuse of decodable books, slideshow-led lessons and pedantic grammar teaching can crowd out meaningful reading and writing. She argues that handwriting and knowledge-rich teaching will do most to narrow the educational gap between richer and poorer children.

In this episode, Eric talks with Adam Jarvis, an Emergent Ventures fellow, about what happened when Anthropic held back the public release of its most powerful AI model, Mythos, and the US government then effectively banned non-US citizens from using the version it released instead, Fable. Adam argues that New Zealand is unusually well placed to host hyperscaler data centres, and that the binding constraint is not power or bandwidth but the country's inability to give investors a fast and certain answer.

In this episode, Michael talks with Oliver Hartwich, Executive Director of the New Zealand Initiative, about two new reports, New Zealand by Comparison and New Zealand by Numbers, which chart how New Zealand measures up against 28 other countries and how it has changed over recent decades.

They discuss why a country that attracts migrants from around the world keeps losing so many of its own people, how Australia matches New Zealand on almost everything but the economy, the Eastern European economies closing in, and wellbeing rankings that still sit near the top of the world but are slipping.