I'll be on Oct 4th as well. You can book rt Latam for less than $300 if you really want to go to NZ.

I got AKL stopover but wish I had thought of BNE, MEL, ADL, OOL, MCY, CNS, and possibly even PER (which would be a super mileage booster) other than Sydney. By the time I figured out this is for all of NZ's Australian points, I tried another same booking with BNE for outbound and it was gone when I went to final pricing, I'll need to book another cheap flight to BNE from SYD, though not sure if I'll be ready for that after almost 20 hours of flying+transit.

I didn't test PER, if it was in the deal it would nearly give you *A Gold from a few carriers. The timing/window of was crazy, I think it was between 9am-10:30am EST (Ben at OMAAT posted around 9am which is the first I saw). Someone managed to get RAR stopover with 1 weekly service to LAX.

p.s. It was CDKing and honzeek_cz only because their main focus was on Cook Islands, most of us wanted Australia and NZ and had to make some compromise, CDKing has 4 days in RAR and was able to find the only weekly nonstop to Sydney by NZ.