I barely recognise my fellow New Zealanders

(First published in The Dominion Post, March 18.)

In his best-selling 1976 book The Passionless People, journalist Gordon McLauchlan famously called his fellow New Zealanders smiling zombies – basically decent, but smug and complacent.

I wonder what he makes of the extraordinary kerfuffle over the flag.

Every so often in New Zealand, an issue comes up that seems to rouse us from our inertia. It happened in 1981 when the Springboks came and it’s happened again, albeit without the flour bombs and Minto bars (the affectionate name given to the long  batons wielded in 1981 by the police), over the past few weeks.

The flag debate has exposed an ornery, cranky streak in the national character.  I keep waiting for the tumult to abate, but the letters to the editor keep coming and the radio talkback lines continue to run hot.

Who could honestly say they saw all this rage and fury coming? I bet John Key didn’t.  

He probably thought this was his best shot at making history – the one potentially memorable act of a political career otherwise defined by carefully calculated pragmatism in the finest National Party tradition.

What he surely couldn’t have imagined was that the flag referendum would lift the lid on a seething, boiling, often contradictory mess of emotions, some of which are only tenuously connected with the flag.

I barely recognise my fellow New Zealanders. McLauchlan probably doesn’t either.

We’re normally a stolid, easy-going lot, but the referendum has ignited unexpectedly intense passions encompassing wildly conflicting notions of nationhood, identity, culture and history.

The problem, for those who make it their business to understand such phenomena, is that it’s impossible to detect any particular pattern in the rage. We’re all over the place.

For some, the vote on the flag is a referendum on Key. Regardless of how much they might like the idea of a new flag, it’s an irresistible chance to inflict a damaging blow on a prime minister whose imperturbable blandness is almost as maddening to them as his popularity.

For others, the debate is all about our British heritage. They see the alternative silver fern design as a denial of who we are and all that we’ve gained as a result of Britain’s civilising influence.

Other traditionalists have convinced themselves that New Zealand soldiers died fighting for the current flag and that to change it would dishonour their memory.

Then there are those – let’s call them the anti-beach towel camp – who are favourably disposed toward a change of flag but withering in their contempt for the Kyle Lockwood design. For them, it’s largely about aesthetics.

Oh, and I almost forgot those who  complain bitterly about the cost, although the same objection - "a scandalous waste of money!" - could be applied to any vaguely contentious government initiative.

Good luck to anyone trying to find a common thread here. As I wrote in a column last year, there are four and a half million New Zealanders and four and a half million opinions on the flag.

Not only does everyone have their own idea about what the flag should look like, but many can’t understand why other people don’t agree with them. This translates into a cantankerous, one-eyed intolerance that is strikingly at odds with our reputation as easy-going people.

What’s clear is that there will never be a consensus. Whatever the flag design, some people are bound to hate it. It follows that arguments about the flag are doomed to go around in circles, which is pretty much what’s been happening over the past few weeks.

This is one instance in which the democratic process turns out to be imperfect. It can be a prescription for permanent paralysis.

If the referendum results in a “no” vote, as seems likely, we’ll either be stuck with the present flag in perpetuity, or a new one will have to be imposed on us.

Actually, that mightn’t be so bad. Canadian prime minister Lester Pearson championed a change of flag against intense opposition in 1964. The people had no direct say. But Canadians are happy with the unique and distinctive maple-leaf flag that resulted, and who knows – perhaps New Zealanders could eventually learn to love the Lockwood flag too.

Is it the best possible design? Of course not. There can be no best possible design, because that’s a subjective judgment. (In any case, it could only be the best possible design until someone comes up with a better one.) But I don’t think it looks like a beach towel.

And despite what the jaundiced critics and Key-haters say, the selection process was impeccably democratic. It just delivered a slightly weird outcome.

Now it’s down to us, the voters. If we genuinely believe in democracy, we’ll graciously accept the result whatever it is.

And if we end up opting for the status quo, it won’t have been a complete waste of time. If nothing else, the debate has shown that we’re a more devoutly patriotic lot than we thought, and not quite as passionless as McLauchlan supposed.  

Perhaps not this time, but there will be a change of flag

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, March 9.)

Even as I opened the envelope containing the ballot papers for the flag referendum, I wasn’t sure which way I was going to vote.

I surprised myself by seriously considering giving my tick to the status quo, despite being in favour of change.

That might seem perverse, but I reasoned that if we’re going to have a new flag, it should be one that the country is prepared to unite behind.

Clearly, that’s not going to happen. The flag debate has uncorked a lot of anger and resentment. I don’t think anyone (least of all John Key) expected it to be so inflamed.

Much of that anger has little to do with flags. Even so, it can’t be ignored.

A flag is supposed to be a symbol of national unity. It would be a bad start if a large segment of the population hated the new ensign and deeply resented having it imposed on them.

I thought that perhaps the best option in the circumstances was to accept that the flag issue had been irreversibly contaminated by politics, and to buy time by voting against change.

I reasoned that once the heat had subsided – which would probably mean once Key has moved on, since much of the opposition to the new flag is about him – we could revisit the issue.

Perhaps we could then have a calmer discussion.  We might also be able to draw on the lessons of the past few months by coming up with a fresh range of alternative designs.

That was another factor that made me hesitate before I cast my vote. In last year’s referendum, I favoured Kyle Lockwood’s red, white and blue design.  

Most New Zealanders who supported change did the same, but democracy can yield imperfect results. The design that voters ranked as their favourite in the referendum finished second, by a hair’s breadth, once votes for all the other options were taken into account.

So we ended up with what I and many others regarded as a second-best option. Lockwood’s red, white and black design was not one that I could feel wholly enthusiastic about.

That was the thinking, then, behind my hesitation over which way to vote. But in the end, I came back to my original position in favour of change.

Why? Principally, because I believe the present flag is an anachronism dating from a time when we were content to see ourselves as a distant appendage of a faded colonial power.

It’s one thing to value our historic ties to Britain, but quite another to be defined by them in the 21^st century. The Union Jack represents a past that has become largely irrelevant.

We surely should feel sufficiently mature as a country to have our own distinct, instantly identifiable flag – one that’s in no danger of being confused with that of Australia.

There will never be 100 per cent agreement on what that flag should look like. But as the expatriate New Zealand entrepreneur Claudia Batten points out in the latest Listener, symbols, once entrenched, acquire a power of their own.

Not all Canadians wanted a change of flag in 1964, still less the maple leaf, but they grew to embrace it once it was adopted. There’s an important lesson there.

And another thing. People sneer at the Lockwood design as resembling a tea-towel or a corporate logo, but you could say the same – and worse – about many nation flags. In any case, I have yet to discover what mystical quality distinguishes a flag from a logo.

The truth, I suspect, is that many of those who criticise it on aesthetic grounds have other reasons for resisting change. Aesthetic objections often serve as a smokescreen for political emotions.

Here we get to the core of the hysteria – not too strong a word – over the flag.

I accept that many people oppose change for perfectly legitimate reasons: tradition, for example, and loyalty to New Zealand’s British links. But unquestionably, the debate has been distorted by extraneous factors.

For many voters on the left, the referendum is seen as an opportunity to strike at Key. That factor contaminated the debate from day one.

A recent One News Colmar Brunton poll gave a clue to the extent to which the debate has been politicised. Its most striking finding was that 76 per cent of Labour voters were in the “no” camp.

Given that Labour is historically the party of change, it was telling that on this issue its supporters appear to have discovered a hitherto unsuspected streak of conservatism. Perhaps they were taking their cue from the party’s leadership, whose position on the issue has been ambivalent, if not downright contradictory.

Having proposed a change of flag in its 2014 election policy, Labour couldn’t bring itself to support the proposal when Key picked it up, and instead grizzled endlessly about the process.

One reason I finally decided to vote for change, in fact, is that I resent the way political interests hijacked what should have been a reasoned, informed debate. I don’t want to give the hijackers the satisfaction of an overwhelming victory.

And while I’m almost certain to be on the losing side this time around, I’m confident that those who vote for change will ultimately be shown to have been on the right side of history.

In the end, ranking the flag options was easy

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, December 2.)

I hesitated for a couple of days before casting my vote in the flag referendum last week. I thought it might be too difficult.

I can be a shocking ditherer. Just deciding what to have for breakfast can leave me paralysed with indecision. But as it turned out, when the flag choices were starkly set out in front of me, I made up my mind almost instantly.

I had the advantage of having seen all five flags flying alongside one another only days before. They were flapping in a stiff north-westerly, which is how flags are most often seen in our wind-buffeted country. But I also saw how they looked during lulls in the gale, so was able to assess their merits both under stress and in repose.

I opted for the Kyle Lockwood design featuring the silver fern and the Southern Cross, but with red in the top-left quadrant rather than the black of the other Lockwood design included in the five alternatives.

Is it wise to reveal how I voted? Probably not, given the vehemence of the flag debate. I should probably brace myself for hate mail and death threats.

The intensity of people’s feelings about the referendum has been a surprise. All sorts of strange emotions have been uncorked.

A debate about the flag is all very well, but this one has become overheated to the point of inciting paranoia. On a talkback radio station last week, I heard a caller say he had phoned the Electoral Commission because he was worried that if he placed the figure 1 in the square underneath his favoured design, someone might turn it into a four.

Another caller was convinced that the ballot paper had been designed so as to subtly encourage voters to support John Key’s personal favourite, which was the first option on the left.

It’s almost comically ironic that the country is tearing itself apart over what’s supposed to be a symbol of unity. But since I’ve declared my first preference, I might as well go further and list the order in which I ranked the designs.

My No 2 choice was the black and white silver fern and No 3 was the second Lockwood design. I ranked the koru fourth and the so-called red peak last. If there was a way of showing that I felt the red peak should have been an extremely distant last, I would have so indicated.

Explaining why I voted the way I did is difficult because these things are subjective, but I found the two Lockwood designs aesthetically pleasing and unmistakeably emblematic of New Zealand, which is surely what a flag is supposed to be. This is not to say there may not be better alternatives.

The monochromatic fern I quite liked because it’s simple, clean and emphatic. The koru design, too, is graphically strong and would be instantly recognisable wherever it was flown.

People have attacked some of these designs as resembling corporate logos, but I have yet to see anyone explain what mysterious quality distinguishes a flag from a logo. Neither can I see how the red peak magically avoids the disparaging logo comparison.

A flag, it seems to me, is simply a national logo as opposed to a corporate one. Its essential qualities, surely, are that it should be instantly recognisable and should engender feelings of identification, empathy and pride.

The Lockwood design strikes me as being capable of doing all these things, although it may take time (as it did for Canadians to embrace the maple leaf).

On the other hand, the red peak design fails from every standpoint. But the very fact that it was included in the referendum, at the last minute and largely as a result of a noisy social media campaign, says a lot about how the flag debate has been derailed.

The proposal for a new flag is widely regarded as John Key’s vanity project. It therefore was seen by his opponents as a means of damaging him politically.

Key may poll highly but he’s nonetheless a polarising figure. People who dislike him, and there are plenty of them, have used the flag debate as an opportunity to get at him.

You’d have to say they largely succeeded. The late inclusion of the red peak design was seen as a defeat for Key because he’s known to favour a flag featuring the silver fern.

In other words the issue has been politicised in a way that might not have happened had the change of flag been promoted by someone less polarising.

If the binding referendum in March results in a decisive rejection of the new flag, as seems likely, it could be as much a vote against Key as a statement of support for the present ensign. We won’t know, because the waters have become too muddied.

An opportunity for an emphatic new statement of nationhood may have been lost because the issue has become so politicised.  But at least no one will be able to say it hasn’t been thoroughly debated.

We're ahead of the Aussies on this one

Australians are perplexed – and I suspect slightly miffed – that New Zealand is likely to beat them to a new flag.

Stone the crows, cobber, they complain. Aren’t they supposed to be the rebellious ones?

Australia, after all, is the country that gave us Ned Kelly, who embodied the spirit of anti-authoritarianism, and the Eureka Stockade rebellion of 1854, in which Victorian gold miners rose up against the British colonial government.  

New Zealanders, a much more genteel lot, have never displayed the same eagerness to cast off the shackles of British colonialism. Until relatively recently we were seen as a distant mirror image of the Mother Country, stolidly loyal to the Crown, whereas Australia from the very beginning was determined to forge its own identity. 

This can partly be attributed to the high proportion of Irish in Australia, a group not noted for their affection toward Britain. Former prime minister Bob Hawke reckoned Australia was the most Irish country in the world outside Ireland itself.

In the latter part of the 19^th century, roughly one-third of the white Australian population was Irish. Peter Lalor, who led the Eureka rebels, was an Irishman, while Kelly was the son of an Irish convict who had been transported to Tasmania.

Perhaps due to the Irish influence, republicanism has always been a stronger political force in Australia than here, although Australians voted against becoming a republic by a comfortable margin (55-45) in a 1999 referendum.

Republicanism seems to be off the agenda there now – not surprisingly, since Liberal Party prime minister Tony Abbott is a former executive director of Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy, which played a key role in the “no republic” campaign in 1999.

That aside, Australians still think of themselves as more overtly nationalistic than New Zealanders. Hence their bewilderment at the fact that we’re seriously considering dropping the Union Jack from our national flag – a proposal considered too radical for Australian politicians to contemplate, even those on the left.

Their puzzlement is compounded by the fact that the idea is being pushed here by an ostensibly centre-right prime minister, John Key.

In the Australian view of the world, this doesn’t make sense. As a conservative, Tony Abbott would no sooner drop the Union Jack from the Australian flag than pass a law allowing same-sex marriage. The same could have been said of his Liberal Party predecessor, the long-serving John Howard.

But right there you have a clue to the difference between the two countries, which many Australians fail to understand. Mr Key did pass a law allowing same-sex marriage – and in doing so, continued a tradition of supposedly conservative New Zealand governments refusing to conform to standard conservative dogma. His promotion of a new flag is entirely in line with that tradition.

Even someone as knowledgeable as the high-profile Canberra political commentator Michelle Grattan doesn’t grasp that we do things differently over here.  Grattan wrote a column on the proposed flag referendum in which she was plainly surprised that a centre-right New Zealand government would do something no centre-right Australian government would contemplate.

But it’s nothing new. New Zealand governments march to a drumbeat which is often out of synch with conservative agendas elsewhere.

In the 1960s, National prime minister Keith Holyoake resisted American pressure to commit more New Zealand troops to the Vietnam War. New Zealand made only a modest contribution to the war effort; enough to show that we supported the Americans in principle, but no more.

Australia, in contrast, succumbed to American browbeating, even sending conscripts to fight. Prime Minister Harold Holt became famous for his craven commitment to go “all the way with LBJ” (American president Lyndon Baines Johnson).

The Australian commitment in Vietnam continued a pattern of close co-operation with America that dated back to World War Two. New Zealand, on the other hand, has increasingly shown a tendency to chart its own course, under National governments as well as Labour, and particularly since Britain abandoned us for Europe in 1973.

In the 1990s, National under Jim Bolger signed up to the former Labour government’s nuclear-free policy, although it had caused a deep rift with both Australia and the United States and continued to be an irritant in our relationships with Canberra and Washington.

Bolger also tried, without success, to promote republicanism – another initiative that must have confounded Australian observers who associated republicanism with the left. I suspect his republican sentiments had something to do with the fact that he was the son of Irish immigrants.

It was under Bolger, too, that National initiated a programme of Treaty settlements, which may have been another manifestation of his Irish sympathy for the victims of colonialism. Again, it was a policy that ran counter to expectations from a supposedly conservative government.

What it all adds up to is that centre-right governments in New Zealand don’t always conform to conservative norms. They are essentially pragmatic; they know they must capture the centre ground to stay in power and are prepared to compromise conservative principles (and even jettison them altogether, as in the case of same-sex marriage) if that’s what it takes.

It might not conform to other people’s expectations of us, but that’s the way we are.

For me, there is a sense of satisfaction in getting the jump on the Australians over the flag issue.

Our neighbours have an unfortunate habit of treating us condescendingly. As far as most Australians are concerned, New Zealand might as well not exist, other than as an object of disparaging jokes about sheep and fush ’n’ chups. So it startles them when we do something that many of them probably envy us for.

But the government’s proposal to push ahead with the flag referendum is consistent with the way we conduct our affairs in other spheres, where we often demonstrate a more independent spirit than they do (for example, by refusing to go to war in Iraq, and by limiting our contribution to the Afghanistan war – an echo of Vietnam).

Let me make a prediction, though. If we decide to adopt a new flag, whatever the design, the snorts of derision from Australia will be long and loud. But underneath the bluster, they’ll probably be wishing they’d done it first.