After down 8%, P/E still 28, too expensive, page-95

Agreed. Many New Zealand based shareholders prefer DRP's for a number of reasons. One of which is that it takes 2o working days for an Aussie cheque to be cleared when deposited into a NZ account. Several NZ banks for NZ drawn cheques the clearance is overnight. The irony is that the main NZ trading banks are owned by Aussie banks yet asking them to convert one their own cheques and then clear the funds is quite impossible.
Getting your dividend in shares and often at a discount preempts the above.

If a company is worried about leakage due to their DRP they can limit the DRP to holdings of less than say 25,000 or some other such 'mum & dad' friendly size.