The New Zealand Initiative

In this episode, Michael talks to Oliver Hartwich about his new satirical novella The Martian Audit, in which two alien auditors arrive in New Zealand to assess it for invasion, only to find themselves defeated not by weapons but by the country's regulation and bureaucracy. There are no villains, just a country full of friendly people trapped in systems that don't work, from leaky homes and hospital waiting rooms to view shafts you can't legally stop to admire.

In this episode, Michael and James talk with Sarah McLaughlin from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. They discuss attacks on free speech internationally,  with governments from Washington to Beijing using deportation powers, financial leverage, and anti-terror laws to silence critics. They analyse the censorship impulse across the political spectrum, the threat of social media age bans to internet anonymity, and the failure of even strong legal protections to protect free speech fail when citizens fail to defend their own rights.

The guns have paused in the US-Iran conflict but Oliver Hartwich and John Howard argue New Zealand should take little comfort from that.

All parties are struggling to find an off-ramp, damage to Qatar's refineries alone means a two-to-three-year rebuild, and New Zealand still lacks the energy strategy promised in 2024. Singapore, a city-state the size of Lake Taupō, has built the fuel resilience we have not.

Bob Davies joined the New Zealand Army at 16 and served 31 years, rising to Sergeant Major of the Army. He deployed to Vietnam in 1968, took shrapnel wounds, caught malaria twice, and was exposed to Agent Orange.

His infant son Geoffrey, born with spina bifida linked to that exposure, lived three days. Bob used his compensation to establish the Geoffrey Davies Memorial Prize at Victoria University of Wellington.

On Anzac Day, Bob talks to Oliver Hartwich about what service cost him and why New Zealand's honours system fails its soldiers. Bob makes the case that New Zealand recognises its military personnel far less than comparable nations, and the numbers he cites are damning.

In this episode, Michael speaks with Professor Elizabeth Rata about the history of New Zealand's school system. The conversation challenges the contemporary narrative of 19th-century schools as authoritarian and oppressive. They discuss ways in which teaching was knowledge-rich and aligned with what we now understand from the science of learning before late 20th-century ideological shifts reshaped education, sidelining knowledge and teacher expertise.