Lunch with … David Kirk: Former All Black and top businessman’s concern for NZ education, wish for country’s progress

As he sat in the Whanganui motel room, on the eve of the biggest rugby match of his fledgling career, 21-year-old David Kirk’s mind was racked with doubt.

It was 1982 and his South Island
team had been written off in the media as “good old boys”, classed as no-hopers against an All Black-studded North Island side in the annual inter-island encounter.

“That’s the only time I ever felt I couldn’t cope,” says Kirk.

“I remember just getting so out of my depth. I don’t know if I can cope with this, the pace is going to be too hard, they’re too big. What happens if I make all these mistakes?”

He called his parents – in those days on a crackling landline – just to hear some reassuring voices.

The following day, Kirk and the South Island team beat the northerners 22-12.

“It was the most anxious I’ve ever been in a rugby game, and I’ve always looked back on this – I’ve held it up as a standard.”

A little over a year later – Kirk having now graduated from Otago University medical school – a patient died of a suspected heart attack at Greenlane Hospital, where Kirk was working as a young doctor.

It was left to Kirk to contact the patient’s wife with the devastating news at 2am.

“And of course, they’re disbelieving – ‘How can this be? I saw them this afternoon, they were great’.

“Having to have that conversation, it makes you realise that with sport and other things in business, you can keep them in perspective.”

Those two anecdotes have perhaps helped lay something of a psychological foundation for one of New Zealand’s most successful sporting and business careers over the next 41 years – a legacy that so far includes lifting the very first Rugby World Cup, securing a famous $750 million business deal, working as chief policy adviser for the Prime Minister, launching his own businesses, chairing a swag of others, and studying at Oxford.

That’s aside from marrying the woman he met at a beach on New Year’s Eve in 1986 – she had no idea he was a young All Black at the time – and the couple going on to raise three boys.

And while there were nerves before test matches in later years – “everyone gets anxious; you get scared, too, you’re afraid of losing” – that debilitating, anxiety-fuelled experience in the Whanganui motel room never happened again.

“I knew [after we won] I belonged at that level. I knew I could make decisions quickly enough; I could operate under pressure, I could execute.”

Today, David Edward Kirk MBE is still operating under pressure, still executing.

“I feel like everything is being judged today,” jokes Kirk, as he scans the wine list at Auckland’s Cibo restaurant, before settling on a Te Mata Elston chardonnay.

It’s a renowned drop, albeit – he reassures me – at the “lower” end of the price list. He knows I’m shouting lunch today.

“I know about the media struggles,” smiles the former CEO of Fairfax Media in Australia. “I have lots of sympathy for the media and I want to see media do well.”

I relay a story about how it took the Herald on Sunday a year or two to make money after its launch in 2004, and the newspaper’s staff promptly went out the following week to celebrate, drinking the profits.

Different days.

Kirk is limiting himself to one glass of wine over lunch, on account he’ll be going straight from here to a three- or four-hour Zoom board meeting, as chairman of KMD Brands, owner of Kathmandu, Rip Curl and Oboz.

Kirk lives full-time in Sydney but makes about 10 trips to New Zealand each year. He’ll be staying on for a few days this visit; he and his wife Brigit own a stunning homestead in Hawke’s Bay and once business is wrapped up in Auckland, he’ll head there.

Having spent much of 2020, during the first Covid phase and lockdown, at the Hawke’s Bay property, the couple were apart for a big chunk of 2021; David at their Sydney home; Brigit in New Zealand.

“New South Wales was much more focused on keeping the state moving, they were focused on mental health and getting people out and back working. Their focus was not ‘we’re going to lock you down to keep you safe’ – it was ‘we’re going to open up to keep you sane’.”

The New South Wales state officials still wanted to keep people safe, he says, and not overwhelm the health system, “but the bias was always to ‘how can we open up rather than how can we keep shut down?’”

Kirk, a former chief policy adviser for National Prime Minister Jim Bolger, makes no secret of his centre-right political persuasion – he says the way we handled Covid in New Zealand was opposite to NSW.

“If you’re a socialist, you’re someone who believes that collectivism and centralisation is the best way to run economies as this Labour government has shown – they’ve centralised the polytechs, they’ve centralised the health system, they’ve centralised the management of water.

“They’re just natural centralists. They don’t believe people are better at making decisions on their own behalf. The government needs to look after them, government needs to tell them what to do. That’s what socialists do; and these are pretty serious socialist-type people.”

There’s little doubt Kirk is worried about the direction of the country.

“I think economies need entrepreneurialism. They need people to risk their own capital. If you want innovation, growth and productivity, that’s the most important thing.”

He believes governments need to move away from centralised mindsets and constraints.

“You need to give people the opportunity to make mistakes and lose money, build businesses, actually be free to lead … and that goes on the social side, be free to lead their own lives, not to be weighed under by too much red tape and bureaucracy.

“All of that said, for a cohesive society, there needs to be protection for people who are out of work, people who are hungry.”

We need to build a society, he says, where individuals and businesses are prepared to invest in social infrastructure – through private or corporate philanthropy or environmental, social and governance (ESG) principles – rather than an over-reliance on taxes and inefficient government bureaucracy.

A market-based economy won’t solve everything, he adds, but it helps draw the country back to its entrepreneurial, number-eight wire roots.

He’s also particularly concerned with education standards.

“We’ve got major problems. I don’t think those major problems are new, but they’ve been exacerbated through the two terms of the government.

“I talk about problems like our continuing decline in educational performance in the OECD. Why should our writing and reading and maths be worse than other members? The Asian countries are bolting ahead as well; they’re not even in the OECD.”

Kids who could once read a particular type of book at the age of 11 were now struggling to read the same book at 15. “That’s shocking.”

Kirk chaired one of Sydney’s top private schools, Sydney Grammar School, for seven years.

He’s seen a deterioration in the likes of the New Zealand science curriculum, but “there’s no doubt for me that the most important thing is the quality of the teaching”.

“The issue is not demonising the teachers or demonising the teachers’ union; it’s creating an environment where they feel that there’s an opportunity to excel, and they’ll be rewarded for excelling.”

David met his future wife Brigit at Pourerere Beach, Hawke’s Bay, in December 1986.

Brigit was staying with family friends who, according to NZ Life & Leisure magazine, told her and her sister Tracey: “We’ve found two nice young men for you to meet, one is a keen sailor and the other is the All Black David Kirk”.

Brigit told the magazine: “We didn’t want to meet anyone and I said, ‘I don’t think David Kirk is an All Black’, as I’d recently watched a test match on television with David and I’d never heard of him.”

The pair did meet on New Year’s Eve and hit it off. Thirty-six years on, they have three boys – Hugo, Barnaby and Harry – and share their time between Sydney and Hawke’s Bay.

Once David returned to Sydney in 2021, he and Harry conjured up regular international meals during Covid.

“We went through 25 different countries. We’d nominate the country, then go through online, through cookbooks and find an amazing dish from that country. We’d cook that together and we’d play music from that country. We had a lot of fun.”

Back in 1986, as a young house surgeon, David Kirk made his rounds at Auckland Hospital.

A patient in the endocrinology ward greeted him enthusiastically.

“Oh, you’re the captain of the All Blacks! It’s great to see you – wow, that’s amazing. Great!”

As Kirk and a senior colleague moved through the ward, she whispered to him about the patient, “Oh gosh, he’s not well today, he’s very delirious.”

“I said to her, ‘oh, no – actually I am the captain of the All Blacks’.”

It was in the days before rugby was professional.

The All Blacks all had jobs. Kirk, the doctor; John Gallagher, the cop; John Kirwan the apprentice butcher.

Typically, the team would take three days off work for a test match – gathering on a Wednesday, a big training run on Thursday; a captain’s run on Friday. An afternoon test on Saturday.

You could have a drink or two in the build-up. Some even smoked.

Rinse, repeat.

Kirk played 34 matches for the All Blacks, including 17 tests – 11 of those as captain. It was a relatively short, illustrious, and somewhat tumultuous All Black career – by 26, he’d retired, needing to get to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar before a deadline expired.

In 1986, Kirk – along with only one or two other frontline All Blacks – refused to tour South Africa with the rebel Cavaliers team. It caused rifts among the players that took a good year or so to heal.

With the Cavaliers banned for two All Blacks matches, Kirk led the “Baby Blacks” to an astounding 18-9 victory over France, the Five Nations champions, at Lancaster Park.

His leadership credentials were firmly established although Andy Dalton was named captain of the All Blacks for the inaugural World Cup the following year.

When Dalton injured himself just before the tournament, Kirk – the vice-captain at that stage – stepped up again, and into folklore.

I watched this week some of the highlights of the 1987 Rugby World Cup final. A bloody-faced Kirk, with his loose-fit, white-collared All Black jersey, leading the charge, scoring a try in the 63rd minute of the final, to extend the All Blacks’ lead to 19-3.

After crashing over the line, with Kirwan on his shoulder, Kirk thumped the Eden Park turf, knowing at that moment that the first World Cup was secure for the All Blacks.

It would take an excruciating 24 more years before the All Blacks could repeat the feat again – beating the same country on the same ground. (As the final whistle blew in 2011, the injured and exhausted captain, Richie McCaw, fell to his knees, thumping the turf, reminiscent of Kirk’s own actions in 1987).

Kirk is confident the All Blacks can lift the Webb Ellis trophy for the fourth time, this October, as they head to France for the 10th edition of the Rugby World Cup.

“Mentally, we’re in a good place and I think physically as well.”

Aside from an injection of innovation – and inspiration – in the All Blacks’ game this year, Kirk was encouraged by the second-half performance against the Wallabies in Dunedin last week, as they adapted the game plan to a back-to-basics approach.

“They focused on the scrum, on going direct, one or two passes, take it up and they just smash and smash away. They played the game at the right end of the field and then the points came.”

Kirk has been full of surprises in his career, a patchwork quilt of incredible roles and experiences, across a broad range of industries and disciplines.

There he was in 1987, the try-scoring, World Cup-winning captain, only to suddenly retire from the game at the age of just 26. There he was, as a talented young doctor, a medical career that went hand-in-glove with rugby early on but changing course as he headed to Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, to study politics, philosophy and economics.

A stint at McKinsey and thereafter a political turn – first, an unsuccessful bid to be the National Party candidate in Tamaki (Clem Simich won the nomination) followed by several years as Prime Minister Jim Bolger’s chief policy adviser.

And then a glittering business career, including three years as CEO of Fairfax Media in Australia, during which he was the architect of the then barely believable $750 million purchase of Trade Me in 2006.

Ice cool at the base of the scrum, ice cool in the boardroom.

Kirk identified the Trade Me opportunity within a few weeks of starting at Fairfax (he’d previously been CEO at printing firm PMP).

Fairfax’s key competitors, Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd and Kerry Packer’s Nine, had strong digital footholds in the digital market for real estate and jobs.

Network economics – the momentum of more sellers equals more buyers and vice versa – meant it would be difficult for Fairfax to break into those markets in Australia, so Kirk looked across the Tasman, to his old stomping ground.

The $750 million Trade Me price tag was viewed as astronomical at the time. One senior New Zealand business journalist wondered if the “0″ had been mistakenly added to the press release.

Kirk says Telecom had tried to buy Trade Me earlier but could offer only about $300m.

“I always feel uncomfortable when you’re the buyer because you always think that maybe I could have got it cheaper,” says Kirk.

“But I knew that was the price you had to pay – I just knew it was a great business. It had revenue of like $30m and Ebitda of $25m – 85 per cent growth margins. That’s a freak business.”

The investment paid off for Fairfax, which took about $300m in dividends over time – and then sold it for double what it paid.

Kirk and Trade Me founder Sam Morgan have remained good friends: “We’ve done quite a bit of tramping over the years; he’s very fit and loves the outdoors”.

Kirk points out he “did a lot of other things” at Fairfax, citing the launch of news websites in Brisbane and Western Australia to try to break the shackles of News Ltd. (Fairfax was already well established in Sydney and Melbourne.)

“In those [new] markets, it was partly having an alternative journalism voice but it was also establishing a nationwide advertising network.”

Kirk left Fairfax in December 2008. “It was a frustrating end because the board lost their kind of mojo in terms of pushing on with the things we were doing, taking risks like buying Trade Me and a variety of other things.”

And while Fairfax’s battles with Murdoch’s News Ltd are legendary, Kirk came to know Rupert Murdoch and son Lachlan reasonably well. He played tennis for a time with Lachlan, and the companies met occasionally – without breaching anti-competitive laws – to discuss how they could collaborate and share costs, and infrastructure such as printing plants.

Kirk later went on to chair Trade Me for several years.

Nowadays, Kirk has a number of board roles, most notably the chairman of Forsyth Barr, KMD Brands and charitable organisations including food-rescue agency KiwiHarvest.

Kirk will return to Auckland in two weeks for a special panel discussion, alongside Nick Farr-Jones and Sarah Hirini, as part of a KiwiHarvest Goodness gala fundraising dinner on Saturday, August 26.

The event, featuring a four-course meal designed from rescued food by celebrity chefs Peter Gordon, Michael Meredith, Brent Martin, Kylee Newton and Alfie Ingham, will help raise money for the charity as it strives to help feed an estimated 170,000 Kiwis.

“This cause is extremely close to my heart and I am thrilled to be part of such a meaningful event with a real, tangible goal of nourishing those who are doing it tough,” says Kirk. “I’m excited by the prospect of having so many unique voices together in the room and am delighted to have Nick and Sarah by my side to explore their own stories and what led them to where they are today.”

Kirk is also president of the New Zealand Rugby Players’ Association and has been chairman of the Sydney Festival for the best part of the past decade. This summer’s festival will be his last.

And he continues to chair the business he co-founded in 1999, Bailador Investments, a growth-stage investor of technology-based businesses.

He loves being on growth boards, looking for opportunities.

“It would just be the death of me sitting on a bank board because it’s too much just administration and the status quo. I’m a growth person – I want to go through a business where we are thinking about what’s next, where do we take the business?”

He also plays a delicate balancing act with some of its roles – obviously balancing the demands and desires of shareholders, managing costs in tough times, but also wanting to build teams.

“My bent has been, how do we build a team from which we can build a business?”

He equates it to building an All Blacks team, performing to the highest standards, and winning with a vision and understanding that everyone buys into to become the best rugby team in the world.

“You got to think about how to win.”

Kirk is a rare soul, in the way he has been able to bridge sporting, business, arts and philanthropy interests. He is, as two colleagues said to me in quick succession this week, a true Renaissance man.

He has no regrets about the course of his career, no regrets about leaving rugby early or not pursuing a political path.

He is a beautiful writer, too, contributing columns about rugby and the arts to the likes of the Herald and Stuff over the years.

He wrote a regular column for the Herald for the 2003 Rugby World Cup. One that stands out for me came after the semi-final loss to the Wallabies in Sydney.

“The ferocious will to win that has characterised the All Blacks for 100 years is an amalgam of self-belief, ambition, cunning, aggression, bitterness, courage and bile. All kept in check and marshalled by love for the team, the jersey and an appreciation of how lucky we are to be in that jersey at that moment, representing our country.

“For those familiar with Shakespeare, it is Richard III and Henry V rolled into one. It is Richard’s blind naked desire to win, to stop at nothing to get the crown and keep it, and it is Henry’s vision of the glory that awaits his ragged band of war-worn soldiers if they go once more into the breach, dear friends, once more.

“I don’t care to analyse much further why it is that New Zealand rugby teams do not contain enough of the ferocious will to win that they once did. I don’t wish to go down that route because I think it leads to a hollow core that is frightening.

“Take your pick of modern ‘isms’ – populism, socialism, me too-ism, not fair-ism, free ride-ism – they all add up to mediocrity and that’s exactly what we got on a warm Saturday evening in Sydney as the dream of a second World Cup crown slipped away.”

Over lunch today, we have each had the crayfish omelette – perhaps the tastiest dish I’ve enjoyed in my 10 lunch encounters so far this year. And for mains, two delicious fish dishes.

As we share an Uber back into town, Kirk runs through a list of sports journalists he used to encounter in his time as an All Black. He has not a bad word to say about any of them.

David Kirk – former All Black, doctor, businessman, Rhodes Scholar, and all-round nice guy.