Well in fairness, what choice did they have?
On this route they were competing with a heavily subsidised government airline. They are also restricted in how many people/services they can take out of Tahiti.
We have a government in NZ that is more interested in maintaining a dogma, if you like, of free unrestricted trade and they will not treat other countries how we are treated by them. So consequently ATN has unrestricted to the NZ market while ANZ gets the scraps. And we sit there and take it in the ass
What we need is for the pollies to sit up and take notice that the world does not always work in the touchy-feely ideal that they keep dreaming of.
It just makes me livid to think of all the **** we have taken from the French with no effort to make things even.
Cue some french bashing maybe?