THE COUNTDOWN IS ON… What does it mean to be A KIWI?

First things first. What does it mean to you to be a New Zealander?

We're a nation of pioneers. You know, every single Kiwi, whether you came here a few years ago or a few centuries ago, you or your ancestors have traveled further to give their kids a better tomorrow than anyone else in history. And you can test this. Just look on the map. So we are a pioneering society and we love that stuff about the Kiwi can do attitude. The number eight wire and Hillary Clay climbed Everest and Blake won the America's cup, and Kate Sheppard led the world for feminism. You know, I mean, we, we love all that stuff. My concern is that the way we've gone in the last 15, 20 years is that we've kind of become a country that says no too much. And I think what's essential if we're going to solve some of our bigger challenges is that we rekindle some of that original DNA that can do attitude. It's not there right now, but it hasn't gone away. We can replenish it.

What does it mean to be a Kiwi? What does it mean to you?

I don't think I had a terribly good sense of what it meant to be a Kiwi until I left the country. You know, the sense of kind of seeing what I was by what I was not.

As a, you know, a white person who speaks English. Then, you know, there's a lot of other countries where there are white people who speak English.

But it became very quickly apparent, you know, to me.

That my values are shaped by the country that I'm from, that.

The. Although I'm not Mori, the relationship that we have with Mori in this country shapes those of us who aren't as well. So even in really minor ways, like the use of certain today words that we kind of just drop into day to day conversation.

As kind of, you know, the fact that you say kia ora or you talk about your puku or you go get some kai or, you know, that kind of stuff is.

You know, just provides a little bit of a sense of like, oh, yeah, that's right. Not everybody who looks like me talks this way and that. The values that we have, I think, are very shaped by our natural environment, because although the vast majority of us live in cities, we are quite connected to.

Our forests and our wild spaces in a way, in my experience, that people in other countries aren't as much.

I think we're shaped by our location in the Pacific and the fact that we're a long way from anywhere.

I'll ask you what does it mean to you to be a New Zealander? Yeah, I mean, I think being a Kiwi has defined my whole life, actually. I am incredibly grateful and blessed to be a New Zealander. I think it's given me a perspective on the world and who I am and what I'm about and a way of being that I think has served me incredibly well, I think leaving here as a boy. I was born in Bishopdale, Christchurch. I had young parents, had Left school at 15, 16, I went the first of my family to go to university. I joined a big global company, Unilever, and I got to see and experience the world. And as I took as a Kiwi kid, you know, going out in the world, I learned to go to Australia and you had to harden up and be a bit tougher and a more direct to deal with Australians. So it's not personal, but they're just a bit more direct and straight up. When I got to England, it was slightly different. It was all about the intellectual underpinnings of your argument and making sure you had good rational justification for what you were doing. And there was some intellectual besting that would go on in the culture there. And then I went to America and of course, it's a place that just prioritizes execution and getting things done. And so, you know, and each of those places have real strengths and real.

Things that they don't do so well either. You see the good and the best, the good and the bad of both, of all those country systems and the cultures, but you actually take those little bits from your experience and put it into your own kit bag as a leader. But keeping my New Zealandness at the core and being able to be successful in those places was actually really important. So I think as Kiwis, we're really grounded. We've got good general skills, we're deeply relational often. And so the things that you try and learn and pick up as I learned about the importance of process, I learned about the importance about giving and receiving good feedback. Some things that we don't do so well sometimes as well, 100% get a.

Sense of what does it mean to be a Kiwi. So if you ask me as a, let's say, an immigrant to New Zealand, what does it mean to be a Kiwi and what's New Zealand about? It's, you know, the outdoors. You know, it's the outdoors. It's nature, but it's people and it's community and it's that. That sense that people will rally together and what we're missing up here is what's that social cohesion bit? You know, we haven't defined it. And of course, you know, we have the treaty sitting here and we have this sort of slight struggle over our identity. You know, we had the flag referendum, you know, So I think, what is it? And that's not a question for me to answer, it's a question for us to discuss. You know, you look at the citizens assemblies in Ireland at the moment, they're doing great work, and they do a big one around drug reform at the moment. And maybe that's what we sit down and we discuss those issues, because we need to bring in the 30% of people who are not born in New Zealand and then their descendants. You have obviously, Tangata Whenua, and then you have others who have been here for a decent amount of time. And so if you think what, you know, if you ask people from outside, well, what do you think of when you think of New Zealand?

You think.

Think of 100% pure. So you think of nature. You think of kind of the All Blacks. You might think about the Haka. You might think, oh, it's just a cool place. People are really nice and friendly, and it's like a sort of. It's a package.

There's.