John sits down with Mathias Cormann, Secretary-General of the OECD and a former Australian senator, for a wide-ranging conversation on the pressures facing advanced economies, from rising debt and ageing populations to housing affordability, migration and trust in institutions. They trace the OECD’s origins in the Marshall Plan and ask whether globalisation can be fixed rather than abandoned, before turning to the energy transition, defence spending and the war in Ukraine.Cormann warns that debt you do not pay down now means higher taxes or deeper cuts later, and urges governments to rebuild their fiscal buffers. He argues that Australia, once a leader on competition policy, is now in the middle of the pack, with regulation and corporate tax settings among the areas to fix. It is a candid conversation about the hard trade-offs leaders face, and why those choices only get harder the longer they are put off.Mathias Cormann is the Secretary-General of the OECD, a global policy forum/international organisation which groups 38 countries and works with more than 100 countries, promoting policies to improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world. He was Australia’s longest-serving Finance Minister (2013-2020), having also served as the Leader of the Government in the Australian Senate.