What I find particularly frustrating is when I see all the naysayers out there who look at this purely as a cost and say ‘well I can’t afford to pay the cost of positioning this country as a global leader in terms of trying to enhance our environment’.

We can’t afford not to invest in creating and sustaining and enhancing that perception around the world. Otherwise we have very little reason for being. We become irrelevant.

In my business which is clearly tourism and the airline business, I love competing against airlines that are only interested in cost. We’ve actually focused on creating a proposition for our customers that they are prepared to pay a premium for, and many of our customers in domestic and international are prepared to pay a premium because they prefer to fly Air New Zealand.

In many cases the product is better but it’s because they relate to our values. They value the fact that we are trying to minimise the impact on the environment, they value the fact that we are innovative, and genuinely believe in what we are doing and why we are doing it.

Those things truly matter to our customers and justify a premium. That is an intrinsic and inherent part of our strategy. We are a subset of the New Zealand economy and a lot of what you see in Air New Zealand – the small airline operating on a world stage from a remote destination - that applies to the country as a whole and most businesses that operate from this country.

How does New Zealand move this forward? It does require enormous leadership. I look at our journey at Air New Zealand. When I arrived seven years ago, it was a company that had lost self confidence in the wake of the Ansett collapse and the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

This was a company on its knees which had just had an infusion of cash from the government to prop it up. Now our employees have great pride in what they do and New Zealanders increasingly have great pride in the airline and we are recognised as one of the leading airlines in the world. That came about from a strong belief that we could transform this airline.

In the first few years it felt like we were making no progress at all but step by step, employee by employee, customer by customer, you slowly build a critical mass of people that progressively come on board and start to share your vision and enthusiasm for what’s possible.

For the first three, four or five years, it’s a tremendously draining process. You put far more energy in than you get back and you feel through the early phases that if you step away from the challenge, all the energy would dissipate and you would be back at the start line. But at some point you reach this critical mass where it starts to become self sustaining.

We’ve passed that point and now the thing is self sustaining. There is so much energy, far more than I could ever generate. It has a life of its own. Yes we need leadership, we are right at the start of that journey here with cleantech and we have some people with the passion, the vision and the self belief and confidence that if we pursue this path, we can create tremendous value for New Zealand.

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