New Zealander Max Harris is on the ascendant: a Rhodes Scholar who, while studying public policy and law at Oxford University earned an All Souls Fellowship and returns home for the Festival to advocate a new politics. In his recently published book The New Zealand Project, he argues that academics and intellectuals have failed to deepen the political discourse, that politics is dominated by pragmatism, and that technocratic policies have replaced value-based ones. In this year’s Michael King Memorial Lecture, Harris calls for a strategic intervention – inspired by the tenets of care, community and creativity in an Aotearoa New Zealand context, and driven by the imagination and impatience of the young to create a better country.