One of the more irritating aspects of our national character is our chronic insecurity — the notion that the rest of the world is in thrall to plucky, innovative, No.8 Wire New Zealand and can’t stop talking about us (yet also sensing, fearing that they might not be). It’s why we have ‘What the Overseas Papers Say’ round-ups after every rugby test. It’s why we’re obsessed with putting New Zealand on the map. And it’s why we crave overseas approbation, but circle the wagons and go Full Rabies whenever we’re criticised by a Greenwald, a Snowden or a Cleese.

And so… to flags. ‘The overseas papers’ have mocked us soundly, and the chosen four reflect the tension between our desire to fit in vs. the knock-kneed schoolboy’s need to be noticed. By tying ourselves to the All Blacks, the greatest team in the history of the minority sport half of us love, we think we’re making a bold statement. We’re not. Instead we’re just flaunting fear and a lack of imagination. Worse, an absence of national identity and purpose. And ‘path’.

By tying ourselves to the All Blacks, the greatest team
in the history of the minority sport half of us love,
we think we’re making a bold statement.

The big questions have been touched on by Keith Rankin, Rusty Brown et al so I’ll just focus on a triviality: the fact our flag is similar to the Australian one. It is, of course. And so Prime Minister John Key has bored, banged, blathered away on this (David Farrar’s focus groups doubtlessly reminding him that there are easy runs to be scored kicking the Convicts). It’s a pity the Jocksniffer-in-Chief has no concept of history, because then he’d know that our flag came out first — and those accursed Australians copied us! What votes there’d be in a Pavlovian anti-plagiarism campaign.

Our fretful obsession with Australia is, of course, a large part of the problem. I’ve written about this in another post, but I want to look briefly here at the narcissistic conceit that we’re the only ones with an uninspiring flag that people sometimes mistake for someone else’s. We’re hardly the lone rangers, starting with the neighbours…

The resolution’s crap but you get the point. Lots of Union Jackage. Pity poor Victoria whose flag is really just ours with a comedy crown blu-tacked above the stars.

And now have a look at the flags of Europe. Not a massive difference between the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Hungary (which is itself a bit Bulgarian). Poland and Monaco are cut from the same cloth (and now spot the difference between the money-launderers and Indonesia). The horizontal tricolours would vex most vexillologists — try to pick between Belgium and Romania, France and poor forgotten Italy (Italy just a smudge off Ireland, themselves the flipside of Ivory Coast).

The point? John Key’s war stories about how he’s sometimes seated under the wrong flag at Very Important International Conferences are dreary and self-aggrandising. Stuff like this happens all the time. It’s not interesting. It’s not important. And it’s a non-reason to change a flag.

DISCLOSURE:

I’ve got skin in this game. The flag at the top of this post was one I submitted to the Flag Conciliation Committee. I thought it was a flag for all seasons — a nod to our new colonial masters (thus delighting property speculators), but one that’d also win over unreconstructed socialists like myself. A friend pointed out that the rugby ball inside the star was like the Illuminati symbol (snaffling the conspiracy theorists’ vote); another likened it to the Eye of Sauron (locking up the nerds and LOTR bores). I worked on an enhanced version with the Egyptian cat goddess Bast flanking either side of the crest, but poor Microsoft Paint skills meant I couldn’t flip the cats outwards. Symmetry is important. Not that it really mattered.

The ‘People’s Republic of Aotearoa’ was knocked back on ‘divisiveness’ grounds.

So in a frenzied hour of petulance, spite and procrastination I sent one, then two, then a third flag in. I wrote the flakiest, wishy-washiest, One Nation bilge ever recorded, leavened with buzzwords like ‘bold’, ‘strong’ and ‘striking’. That my designs were, in turn, marginally-modified reworks of, respectively, the North Korean flag, the flag of the International Brigades, and the West Papua Morning Star mattered not. The Flag Construction Congress liked what they saw.

I was in.

For a time anyway. Incredibly — outrageously— none of my Three were deemed good enough to make the Top Four. Instead John Key’s vexillologist chum, Julie Christie, plumped for John Key’s pollster, David Farrar’s flags. Who would’ve thunk!