Photo opportunity

A photo from last year’s visit by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. US submarine cable vendor TE Subcom invited Pacific Fibre along to an American Chamber of Commerce event in Christchurch, and Pacific Fibre CEO Mark Rushworth and I went along. Thanks for that.

Our time with Secretary Clinton was necessarily very short – a quick word and photo opportunity. All in all a very professional show and a pleasure to see the world’s top diplomat at work. It demonstrated to us the strength of the desire of the USA to get the cable built, and their ability to get behind a key potential vendor.

On my right is Ambassador Huebner, the US Ambassador to New Zealand. We’ve met him twice now, and he is a fan of the project, which kicked off shortly after his arrival in New Zealand.

We are lucky to have Ambassador Huebner in NZ. He is an experienced lawyer, and a Yale Law alumni, as is his boss Hillary Clinton. (I popped into a Yale Law lecture once – it was scarily impressive).

So there you have it. No time to talk politics, and as this was just after the mid-terms there was no real desire either.