Changing a Flag is Expensive

Changing the flag of a country isn’t as easy as it might look like in the first place and it’s also really expensive.

So first of all there has to be a reason for changing the flag. In the case of New Zealand there is a pretty obvious reason, for changing the flag and thats the similarity to the Australian flag. Those two flags can be easily confused. The only differences are the number of stars and the shape of those.

After that there has to be a concept for a new flag. Important about the concept is that it should be appreciated by the majority of the country. And to determine which concept is the most appreciated there have to be votes.
The concept with the biggest support goes against the current flag in a final election. For that election most political parties are going to advertise what would be best in their opinion. All the political pre-election stuff and the votes to determine the winner concept will cost a lot of money.
In the case of New Zealand everything before the elections and the elections were around $26 million.

If the flag would have been changed the costs would be even higher. All the driver licenses, ID’s, passports, flags on airplanes, flags in buildings, military use of the flag,… would have needed to be changed. That’s a lot. Repainting a little flag on a plane isn’t that expensive but re-issuing 4,5 million passports, ID’s and and driver licenses is. To change all of that would probably go far over $26 million.
According to New Zealands first the cost of re-issuing only the passport would be around $450million. So and that’s only a part of it.

Would it be really worth it to waste so much money just on changing a flag?

I don’t think so. In my opinion it’s good that it failed because the money should be better used for more important things, like fighting water pollution or environmental pollution.