No one knows how to manipulate and beguile the little brother syndrome NZ has with Australia than Key’s flag change vanity project.
Key’s argument has been that our flag looks too much like the Australian flag. That’s simply not true!
Our flag was established in 1869, the Australian flag was established in 1901! Our flag doesn’t look like the Australian flag – the Australian flag looks like OURS!
We created it first, yet Key plays to the cultural chip on our shoulder that we are inferior to Australia by ignoring our ownership of the design. If anything the Australians should change their flag!
There may be some really good reasons to change our flag, playing to the faults in our national psyche seems to be the least honourable one.
+100
“Our flag was established in 1869, the Australian flag was established in 1901! Our flag doesn’t look like the Australian flag – the Australian flag looks like OURS!”
…very good point!….why should we cede our flag to a convict settlement who copied our flag?
jonkey is gutless
Send John Key to a convict settlement…
We should also mention that it wasn’t officially blue until 1953 and that there was a red option for unimportant landlubbers to use. Everyone thought it was a bit communist to have a red flag so they bought in new legislation to fix it.
62 years later and Jon Key discards the black flag with fern idea because it looks too much like current number 1 enemy ISIS. Clearly Split Enz were wrong.
Our stars are red . Theirs are white. Easy.
Yeah, but Russell Crowe and Dragon were ours too, and the Aussies are bloody well welcome to them.
no Dragon and Russell Crowe are ours !…and so is the pavlova…and Phar Lap
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-11897482
http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/death-of-phar-lap
An excellent balanced piece of writing from Winston Peters on the flag referenda in today’s NZH.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=11551626
+100 MARY
I’m looking for Hekia Parata to institute the same sort of thinking of that Key flag mantra.
Key: “It’s too hard for people to distinguish the New Zealand flag from the Australian one. It is beyond people’s capabilities so we’ll get a simple one.”
Parata: “It’s too hard for kids to learn their seven, eight and nines times tables and some others so from now on they’ll only have to learn their two, five and tens times tables.”
I can see her getting up in Parliament and answer the question from some Govt. fool, “How successful has the revolutionary new times tables programme been in our schools?”
She will gush, gloat and smart about the wonderful success being due to the “Hard work of our world class professionals, the assistance of the Ministry of Education and communities through their boards of trustees.”
Implicit will be “The brilliance and foresight of the Minister of Education.”
They treat us like idiots and if we accept that we are indeed idiots.
The black flag with the silver fern may have also been abandoned because Silver Fern Farms owns the trademark I think.
..and now Chinese owned…irony?
Having now received my voting papers I note that I don’t just get to vote for the flag I want, that is if there was one, but I have to vote for flags I next prefer in an order. Why could we just not tick the flag we wanted and that is it (again, if there was such a thing)?
I am guessing this is STV and I’m very uncomfortable with Single Transferable Vote system as it is complex and has other factors at work to determine a final vote. In short it can be manipulated by the use of these factors.
Given this is the Key National government and this flag bullshit referendum has been anything but above-board the vote cannot be trusted and I wondered just how National was going to beat the system.I guess this is the way to do it.
Definitely better not to vote at all and not submit the voting papers this time around that just might be tampered with, and just wait for the final vote to ensure John Key doesn’t get his way.
After all, National has never ever honoured any other referendum!
National identity opportunity scuttled by petty partisan politics.
One of the great things about the ‘non-conservative’ side of politics is the yearning for nationhood: anti-nuclear, independent foreign policy and hopefully a replubican movement.
It’s so sad, it has degenerated into a low-brow vehicle for cynics and negative naysayers.
I wonder who is a ‘conservative’ and who is a ‘progressive’. Does it have any meaning in the New Zealand political context?
Today, the reformers are right-wing and those harking back to 1960-70s are the left-wing.
Maybe, the left-wing should be rebranded as the Regressives.
All I can see is that this referendum, as in Northland, is the slightest opportunity to give the “two fingered salute” back to Key!
Judging by the polls showing a distinct lack of support to change the flag, at the end of the day, John Key is going to have to bend over big time on the whole matter, and jamb the flag pole you know where.
I hope he’s his usual “relaxed” self when that happens, Bruce… Insertion is easier when one is relaxed. So I’m told.
iPredict punters suggest there is a 79% chance the flag won’t change. The only story here is why The John Key rammed through this referendum in the first place when it was abundantly clear from day one almost no one wanted it. Why didn’t The John Key need to collect 300,000 signatures like everyone else to force a referendum? It would have known right there and then this thing was a non-starter.
https://www.ipredict.co.nz/app.php?do=browse&cat=1289
The Italian and Hungarian flags are almost identical – http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/images/h/hu-var23.gif – http://rlv.zcache.com/italian_flag_poster-r8bdf89422272449fb384717ecc6ec3df_2dc9_8byvr_324.jpg – and you’d never hear of any Hungarian or Italian suggesting a flag change.
Or the Russian and French flags; http://luxuryrentalsmanhattan.com/sites/default/files/uploads/french-flag.gif – http://staff.pausd.org/~cbly/1web_design/08_09b/joe/images/flag2.jpg.
Part of the reason is that Italy, France, Russia*, and Hungary are confident in their cultures and millenia-long histories.
Post-colonised New Zealand is still a young nation and our insecurity is sometimes painful to witness.
(*Yeah, yeah, fucking pedants will point out that Russia/USSR has had different flags over the last century…)
The flag thing is just another example John Key’s kneejerk mentality to everything he does.
Just because another nation (Canada) displayed the wrong flag during Key’s visit, we’re the ones with a problem, now we need to change the flag so that they (Canadians) will be able to recognise the NZ flag.
It’s a joke.
By the way, I’ve set up this FB page to give folks an idea how to subvert this referendum fiasco… https://www.facebook.com/opposetheflagreferendum/
Key needs to talk to Turnbull about Australia copying our flag, why should we change our flag when the copied ours which had been in existence for 32 years, let them carry the cost of changing their flag!
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