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I think that generally New Zealand is respected for the positions it takes because it thinks them through.

This is the difficulty about talking about it without sounding big-headed, but you cannot speak of New Zealand now without my involvement in what it has become.

I have more engagement with New Zealand than people might think. Unlike the impression I have of the American president, who sits in the Oval Office and people come to them.

I see the great continuities in New Zealand history as being decency and common sense and up until now when we've confronted these things we've been able to talk them through, and I'm sure we will with this issue as well.

So I think that we're in a very heightened and somewhat unusual period of politics and polling around the countries that New Zealanders take close interest in.

There's a very go-to kind of attitude in New Zealand that stems from that psyche of being quite isolated and not being able to rely on the rest of the world's infrastructure.

It's fair to say that, for much of my lifetime, New Zealand certainly was a property-owning democracy and working people, ordinary people, had assets.

As New Zealanders, we've been in on the United Nations from the very beginning, played a role in the drafting of the charter - it means a lot to us that those processes are followed.

An interesting thing about New Zealand, you know, literature is that it really didn't begin in any real sense until the 20th century.

I've never been to New Zealand before. But one of my role models, Xena, the warrior princess, comes from there.