I am staggered by the suggestion that an "outbreak" in the USA could wreck profitability and that Asia should instead be the focus for growth.

I would have thought that the most likely outbreak is actually Asian Bird Flu and that the airline should be throwing everything at expanding the Transpacific and Transatlantic routes which actually hum with high yield premium traffic.

I would be looking at:

SYD-LAX (If SQ want to use an A380, why couldn't NZ fill a 777?)
SYD-SFO
AKL-JFK (supposedly in 7E7 range)

and especially at LAX-Europe, SFO-Europe and JFK-Europe.

I also maintain that the airline is surrendering the Business Class luxury Tahiti-USA-Europe market to Air Tahiti Nui, which is crazy because the rich American, British, German, Italian and French travellers who want to fly in Business Class to their $1500 per night bungalows would rather be accumulating useful frequent flyer points, which Air Tahiti Nui doesn't allow.

As the most expensive tourist destination on earth, French Polynesia really ought to be the focus of a grab for the Business Class leisure market, especially as Air New Zealand miraculously has the traffic rights. North America to PPT is a viable Business Class market, and although the New Zealand market could not sustain the AKL-PPT sector, the Australian market could, making SYD-AKL-PPT viable.

Really, PPT should not be serviced out of LAX at all, because a disproportionate part of the American overwater bungalow market lives in and around San Francisco / San Jose. If I were an Air NZ route planner I would be looking at a codeshare flight with Lufthansa as follows:

SYD-AKL-PPT-SFO-FRA

If ETOPS rules allow, this would be a prime candidate to be serviced by an all-Business Class Boeing Business Jet, just as Lufthansa and Swiss already use on similar high-end routes.