Te Pāti Māori have told supporters to give them their electorate vote and send their party vote elsewhere. Oliver and Damien ask what happens if National voters start doing the same, and whether MMP survives it. Read more
In this episode, Nick talks with Oliver Hartwich about how the 2026 election could break MMP from two sides. Oliver's latest research note traces Te Pāti Māori's call for supporters to split their votes, why current polling could leave National with an overhang, and how the absence of compensation for overhang seats in New Zealand, unlike the German system it copied, could produce a Parliament that does not match the popular vote. Read more
In this episode, Oliver talks to John Howard about New Zealand's changing security environment, from the firing of Defence Minister Chris Penk to the Semtex drone at Leipzig Airport and the SIS threat assessment naming China. John argues New Zealand does not need to become fearful, but it does need to become more alert, better prepared and more serious about protecting sensitive information. Read more
One day after Christopher Luxon survived a confidence vote, Oliver and Damien ask whether he has finally shown the country who he really is. Next, they discuss Chris Penk's departure from politics and what it costs National. Read more
Free to Disagree is a new weekly podcast produced by The New Zealand Initaitive. Join Oliver Hartwich and Damien Grant as they talk about New Zealand politics and economics. Read more
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. Read more
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. Read more
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. Read more
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. Read more
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. Read more
In this episode, Michael talks with Doug Blackmur, former chief executive of NZQA, about the qualification model developed in the late 1990s and how it became NCEA. Their conversation ranges across the changes the model underwent, grade inflation in schools and universities, the argument for moving assessment to independent bodies, and the new system set to replace NCEA. Read more
In this episode, Michael talks with Ben Stallworthy about the war in Ukraine and what it reveals about the changing character of modern warfare, from the near disappearance of tanks and armoured vehicles to the rise of drone swarms and the first signs of drone-versus-human combat. They discuss Ukraine's strategy of trading ground to grind down Russian resources and pressure Vladimir Putin, the strikes on Russian oil, semiconductors and the supply routes into Crimea, and what the conflict means for a rearming Europe and the wider contest between autocracies and liberal democracies. Read more
In this episode, Oliver talks with retired Major General John Howard about a crowded few weeks in global security, from the NATO summit in Türkiye and Trump's renewed comments about Greenland to Russian pressure on Poland's border. They focus on what China's submarine-launched ballistic missile demonstration on 6 July and Australia's new security agreement with Fiji mean for New Zealand, and why our national security system is not moving at the speed of relevance. Read more
In this episode, Oliver talks with Michelle Palmer, Executive Director of the Retirement Villages Association, about the retirement village business model and the debate over how quickly operators should repay residents and their estates once a unit is vacated. They discuss the Consumer New Zealand petition, the Government's proposed 12-month repayment rule, and why applying changes retrospectively to existing contracts could raise costs for residents and put pressure on smaller operators. Read more
In this episode, Oliver talks with Nick Clark about the Government's Head Start process, which asks councils to put forward their own reorganisation proposals or have changes imposed on them. Nick draws on his report Head Start Done Right to question whether the amalgamation the process points towards would deliver the efficiencies the Government expects, and argues instead for subsidiarity, keeping decisions at the most local level rather than consolidating them upwards. Read more