Changing our flag won't make us more patriotic

BY LINLEY BONIFACE

OPINION: Here's what's keeping me tossing and turning at night: when I'm standing on the podium at the Vancouver Winter Olympics, waiting to be presented with a gold medal for ice skating, or bobsleigh, or that peculiar sport in which you alternately ski and shoot at things, which flag will they run up the flagpole in my honour?

Happily, when I wake up I realise that - providing a sudden plague doesn't strike down all New Zealanders other than those with at least 50 per cent fewer limbs than me - I am unlikely to be chosen to compete in any event at Vancouver, unless of course MallowPuff-eating unexpectedly becomes an Olympic sport. This makes the current debate over the New Zealand flag largely academic for me, because the rarely spoken truth about our premier national emblem is that sportspeople are among the tiny proportion of New Zealanders who regularly get to see it.

That's presumably why sports icons such as Sir Peter Snell and Barbara Kendall are being roped into the current debate about the flag's future: because they're the poor schmucks who have had to wait on various podiums, tapping their feet with impatience, while minor sporting association flunkeys rifle feverishly through drawerfuls of similar-looking flags muttering, "Four stars, not five; four stars, not five . . ."

Even in Wellington, the seat of government, sightings of the New Zealand flag are now rarer than sightings of tui. Only occasionally will you spot the flag flying from a public building, or from the bonnet of a flash car conveying an MP to a bottle store. Unlike in the United States, where flags are so ubiquitous that I expect to see them fluttering from piles of dog poo in the street, very few New Zealanders have the flag on display.

Actually, I know of only two people who fly flags at their home, and neither of them choose the New Zealand flag. One flies the Chilean flag, because he was once an exchange student in Chile, and the other flies the Jolly Roger, because he has wisely decided it is more socially acceptable to express his fascination with pirates by flying the pirate flag rather than, say, walking around with a parrot on his shoulder, or demanding that he be paid in pieces of eight.

Paradoxically, while I'm lukewarm about regarding the New Zealand flag as an expression of our identity, I'm red hot about our reluctance to fly the New Zealand flag as an expression of our identity.

National characteristics are difficult to pin down, but the ones I most value in Kiwis are kindness, tolerance of diversity, and a general reluctance to embrace the sort of bumptious nationalism so often associated with the cult of the flag.

Mark Seymour, a Melbourne musician, recently wrote in The Age about his discomfort with Australia's flag obsession. Seymour said he disliked feeling emotionally forced into a corner when he saw kids at the fish and chip shop with the flag wrapped around their shoulders, or drove behind a car bearing a sticker reading, "Australia. Love it or leave it."

The real message underlying the overuse of the flag and other expressions of national identify, said Seymour, was: "Love Australia warts and all, or piss off."

The uneasiness I feel about our flag debate is over the suggestion that we'd somehow be more patriotic if we had a decent flag to rally behind.

In calling for the flag to be replaced, the New Zealand Herald even suggested we were suffering from a "crisis of identify". Do we really have a crisis of identify? Or do we just have a rubbish flag?

I'd suggest the latter. On everything except sentimental grounds, the New Zealand flag is well past its best-by date: dull, impossible to recognise in a crowd, and symbolic of a historic connection that few of us now identify with.

The tino rangatiratanga would be a great replacement because it's beautiful, and because it doesn't resemble anyone else's flag, and because it seems only fair to have a Maori flag for a while, given how long Maori have had to put up with the Union Jack.

However, as the tino rangatiratanga isn't universally accepted among Maori, maybe we should choose a less controversial symbol - a silver fern, or a koru, or, for all I care, a pineapple lump. But let's not allow a change of flag to change the kind of people we are.

- © Fairfax NZ News