In Leaders Getting Coffee episode 38, our guest is the Executive Director of the New Zealand Initiative, Dr Oliver Hartwich.

Oliver Hartwich was born in West Germany and talks of growing up in the 1980’s in a country shaped by the two World Wars that had until that point defined it. As Europe reshapes its defence strategies in response to the Ukraine crisis, his surprisingly frank conversation about his youth offers a stark reminder of the long-term impacts of war.

But it is as an economist, specialising in thinking about government strategy, that he has made his career. That career has seen him working in the House of Lords and in think tanks in the UK, Australia, and ultimately, for the last twelve years, in his adopted home in New Zealand.

During the Leaders Getting Coffee podcast Dr Hartwich speaks to Bruce Cotterill about the state of New Zealand, a country which he says has so much going in its favour, and yet continuously fails to live up to its potential.

Using the extensive research base of the NZ Initiative as his base, he discusses the state of our housing market and explains in a simple and no-nonsense manner the reasons why such a small country at the end of the world has some of the world’s highest house process.

And while on the local themes, his insights regarding our education system, excessive centralisation, infrastructure and the opportunity for direct foreign investment are as refreshing as they are direct.

Dr Hartwich has made quite a name for himself as an international columnist, and his comments about the current state of the USA, Europe and the UK are so insightful that they should be regarded as compulsory listening for the millions who are relatively uninformed on matters of international geopolitics.

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