Dr Oliver Hartwich joined Michael Laws on The Platform to discuss his essay "An Auction of Stolen Goods," arguing that election campaigns are essentially voters being bribed with their own tax dollars.

Oliver noted this pattern holds regardless of who's in power, pointing out that three years after voters decisively rejected the last Labour government, the current election is on a knife's edge. Evidence, he suggested, that voters respond to simple, memorable messages rather than considered policy debate. He also touched on New Zealand's productivity gap with Australia, attributing it less to differences in worker effort or skill than to New Zealand's comparative lack of capital investment in machinery and tools, with local capital tied up disproportionately in housing instead.