FOUR FLAGS THE PM'S CHOICE

Prime Minister John Key wants a fern for the new flag. The Prime Minister John Key got three ferns in the final shortlist of four. Shall we act surprised? He got the panel he wanted; he got the designs he wanted (with something else chucked in to make the thing look like a choice--but even that is the tip of a fern).

We got the bad best of the long list of forty, and it is of course dominated by what John Key wants.

Not one of this shortlist does what a flag should do; not one says to the rest of the world, 'This is New Zealand, and nowhere else.'

And all of them are virtually impossible to define accurately for reproduction. It can only be done photographically, which makes a perpetual problem. The Canadian flag is very precisely defined, with precise measurements and angles. Ditto the British and American flags. These cannot be.

And no one seems to have thought of the variations needed. There need to be variations for the Navy and marine use, and there need to be variations for the army, the RNZAF, Civil Aviation, the police, the Fire Service, the RSA... These designs do not lend themselves to those needs.

The first design has the merit of having only two colours. But although it works for waving at a footy match it is not a good national flag. Far from it. It is boring, stark, and devoid of international meaning.

The second one is superficially attractive, and will probably win the referendum. But it is not a good design. Red is the colour that attracts the human eye more powerfully than any other colour, and therefore must be used carefully and intelligently. In that design it has not been. That red area at the top lefthand corner is the first place the eye goes. But it is meaningless; it is not an element that cries out 'This is New Zealand.' It says nothing. It is just a blob at the mast. It fights for attention with the white fern (the ponga is white on the back, not silver) and the stars. The white fern, with red and blue seen through it, flashes at us, it has a dazzling effect. So the eye finds itself hopping about between three elements fighting for attention. And not one them is unique to New Zealand. It is arrogant for little New Zealand to claim the Southern Cross, which can be seen all over the Southern Hemisphere and parts of the Northern. And ferns grow all over the world; there are even ones with a white back elsewhere. The only reason the fern has achieved some dominance is because early settlers, struck by the prolific ferns, which were a contrast to their native land, called New Zealand Fernland. But the name did not stick. And again the two-tone backing of the fern motif makes it flash at us.

The third one is a bad variation on the second one. Bad because it has four colours, and a maximum of three is ideal. And black does not go with blue, even when there is a comb of white between them. As the saying goes, they hold hands very hard.

The fourth one is the worst of this rubbish. Are we really and truly to consider THAT THING as our national flag!!! Please!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Social media has mockingly dubbed it HypnoFlag, The only reason it can have been put there is to ensure that we have only ferns to choose from. Manipulative John Key strikes again.

There are only three things that are unique to New Zealand in the mind and eyes of the world: the shape of the country, the kiwi, and the country's coat of arms. The first and last do not work well on a flag. For the Flag Consideration Panel to ignore what Kiwis are called all over the world is wilful blindness and stupidity. But John Key was pulling their strings... 

http://nobilangelo.blogspot.com/2014/02/new-new-zealand-flag.html

To paraphrase Henry Ford's famous remark about the colour you could have a Ford T ('You can have any colour you like, as long as it's black): John Key and his puppets have said to the nation, 'You can have any flag you like, as long as it's a fern.' What a ferny man he is!

THOSE 40 FLAGS NOT THE BEST

The Flag Consideration Panel has now released its long list: the forty designs that it thinks are the best of the 10,292 that were submitted. What a disappointment! Many are rubbish; few are worthy of serious consideration; many fail the Panel's own design criteria.

And although the Panel says it wanted something that...

'should speak to all Kiwis. Our hope is that New Zealanders will see themselves reflected in these flags' symbols, colour and stories. ..... In reviewing flag designs, first and foremost, we were guided by what thousands of Kiwis across a range of communities told us when they shared what is special to them about New Zealand' [emphasis added]

...it did not include even one design that has a kiwi. Not even one! All it chose were ferns and stars and koru curlies, despite the fact that ferns, even white-backed ones, are not unique to New Zealand; and that the Southern Cross is common to all countries in the Southern Hemisphere; and that the koru is a stylised fern shoot, and therefore only the Maori word for it is unique to this country.

This is the forty:

Not a single kiwi for Kiwis to choose. Not one!

It is obvious that the final choice will be one of the five Kyle Lockwood variations. They are nice, but they do not shout 'New Zealand, and nowhere else' to the rest of the world. To many of us, yes, but not to the world. They have to be explained to the world.

Any explanation attached to a flag should be very simple, and fixed to the flag, as with the flag of the United Kingdom, which is simply explained as the combined crosses of the patron saints of the four countries that make up the UK; and as with the flag of the United States, which is simply explained as thirteen stripes for the original thirteen states and fifty stars for the present number; and as with the Canadian flag, which is simply explained as the maple leaf, the national symbol of Canada. For New Zealand, only the kiwi achieves that simplicity: 'We are called Kiwis, after our national bird, the kiwi.'

Removing the obvious rubbish from the list of forty, as well as the also-rans to the obvious rubbish (the small x's), leaves very few that could be considered, and most of them are marginal because they do not make a flag that is all New Zealand, only New Zealand, and nothing else:

Of those, the simplest one, the one that holds the eye best is the middle one at the top. It has only three colours and a central focus. But it is not balanced. It would be better if the white fern was smaller and the stars larger. To many in the world that white 'fern' is likely to be taken for a white feather, which is the universal symbol of cowardice--hardly something for our soldiers to fight for.

Because it is a physiological fact that red attracts the eye more strongly than any other colour, if there is a red patch in the top-left corner it attracts the eye, which then finds itself hopping between that patch and the stars, although they are what should dominate. The green curly is very marginal, and only gets into the above group because it is nice to look at, not because it is a good design for any nation's flag. For New Zealand it would be a thorough break with the past, and the crooked stars, which are forced to be crooked by the fancy curly, puts it at the bottom of this group of five. It also fails to have a strong central point with which to hold the eye, because the stars are small and are in a crooked arrangement. It is nice to look at but a very bad idea for our flag.

None of those five are brilliant. The best is only the best of a bad-to-middling lot.

But the Panel was picked/vetted by John Key and he has said loudly and often that he wants a fern, so a fern is what got, with a lot of rubbish round it as make-weights, like the dirt in a bag of spuds.

The very least the Panel should have done was to have picked the best of the designs featuring stars, the best of the ferns, the best of the korus, and the best of the kiwis--i.e., the best of four different bases. Then there would have been real choice. This is just ferns, ferns, ferns, ferns rammed down our throats with a bit of pretence at democracy.