DAVID KIRK COMPENDIUM

• Chair of ASX- and NZX-listed Kathmandu Holdings and Forsyth Barr.

• Co-founder and chair of Bailador Technology Investments.

• Degrees in medicine from Otago University, and in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford University.

• Awarded MBE in 1988 for services to rugby.

• Attends an All Blacks test match once or twice a year.

• Chairs the Sydney Festival. “Great writing or theatre ‘ takes you there’, makes you feel and experience another place, another time, another situation,” he says. “It also sends you inside yourself. It challenges you to think, to wrestle with the moral and practical trade- offs and dilemmas the artists and their characters wrestle with. Who can read or see Hamlet performed without being forced to think about lines such as ‘ There’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so’? Great art also contains an element of newness, of innovation, of making you see or hear or feel or think differently. We all need that.”