In this episode, we speak with Hema Sridhar, Deputy Director of Koi Tū, the Centre for Informed Futures, and former Chief Science Advisor to the New Zealand Ministry of Defence.

Hema comes to housing not as a housing expert but as someone whose career has spanned science, technology and public policy, and whose work now focuses on how technology reshapes society and how governments think – or fail to think – about the future. Her central challenge to us is that New Zealand has become very good at admiring the problem: we have the data, the analysis and decades of reports, and almost nothing new left to learn about what’s wrong.

What’s missing, she argues, is a theory of change – a clear sense of what good actually looks like – which is why the country keeps moving sideways instead of forward. We talk about her scepticism about the role of artificial intelligence in democracy, her concern that the country has no capability of its own in that space, and why she describes a stable home as part of the connective tissue of a healthy society, rather than just bricks and mortar.

We’d like to thank Hema for taking the time to speak with us for this episode.

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The CHA Hub Podcast is sponsored by our Founding Partner, Westpac New Zealand.