I didn't have strong views on the flag referendum (although I voted for change), but this comment piece is the sort of arrant, sentimental tosh that makes me want to throw up. It could only have been written by someone who has lived in Britain for 40 years and eaten far too many pork pies.
7 comments:
This is tripe. Utterly patronizing (especially to Maori) and historically untrue. Almost makes me wish I'd voted for change and not given him the smug satisfaction of writing it.
If he'd written like that before the referendum we might now have a new flag. - Ele Ludemann
Hi Karl
No, we don't call Britain home, and those of us with Irish grandparents never did. However we owe a considerable debt to the British and European colonists who first settled in New Zealand and who brought with them (some of them anyway) their faith, their legal and justice system and their democratic institutions that had developed over 600 - 800 years.
New Zealand would be a much different country today had we been settled by (say) Turkish Moors.
I thought Bruce Logan's article on the flag published in the Herald was more substantial.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11595044
I don't disagree with any of that, Brendan. Like you, my lineage is not British, but that doesn't stop me from valuing New Zealand's British heritage and all that we've gained from it. (I support the continuation of the constitutional monarchy, for example.) But I object to readers of the Daily Telegraph being given a fanciful and deeply patronising image of a New Zealand that existed 40 years ago.
My parents called UK home, our generation never has as NZ was our home. While I am an avid anglophile my view is that this referendum was a lost opportunity opposed by a petty, unprincipled and vindictive opposition. We actually had the opportunity to move beyond the symbolism of colonialism and lost it. And this is from a 60's radical.
Personally as a 75 year old I haven't heard anyone call Britain 'home' since I was a child and then it was used as often in jest as in reality. We valued what we had that was British but also disliked being told as so often seemed to happened in the 1950's 'we don't do it this way back home' for which there was a very short and pungent reply. My first time in the UK and I thought about this as I stood and waited in the queue labelled 'others' while all sorts of other peoples walked through the gate marked EU.
The referendum gave as well as retention of the flag; a clear signal to John Key to stop trying to pull wool over eyes. A deceitful,manipulative and dishonest process, in my opinion.
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