Key right to put our flag to the test

How does the saying go? Run the idea up the flagpole and see who salutes?

Not too many people are saluting the idea of changing New Zealand’s flag, unless you count digits that have been raised to express something other than support for the idea.

Prime Minister John Key is in disodour for foisting the rigours and expenses of a referendum on us, especially as plenty of people are saying the question has already essentially been asked and answered. Opinion polling suggests 70 per cent don’t want a change and it’s not hard to understand why. A combination of people standing by the flag for the history and patriotic sentiment it has evoked and the gagging reaction to the cost of the consultation process – all those other things $26 million could achieve.

There’s also politically based suspicion that this is all diversionary malarky to distract us from matters the Government would just as soon not have scrutinised. A charge that could be levelled pretty much any time.

Nevertheless, even advocates of change – and The Southland Times stands among them – have to concede that right now the idea of a flag change isn’t fluttering as much as hanging limply.

But here’s why the referendum is still a good idea: we shouldn’t sanctify inertia and call it respect for tradition. There are questions, not especially easy ones, that we shouldn’t forget to ask ourselves even when it comes down to matters of symbolism. Some symbols carry potency, or lack it. When you’re talking about our flag, that’s a consequential issue.

Even more than that, it’s not a particularly good mindset for any nation to spurn too often and too easily the effort needed to explore potential significant improvements on the basis that we already have something that we’re not dissatisfied with to the point of being agitated about it.

The process needs to be diligent and options clear. It should be a fair contest between the existing flag and the challenger champion from a range of other options.

If the present flag emerges from the process as still preferred then it’s not the case that nothing would have changed or been achieved. It would have emphatically shown itself to have earned its living. The nation will have rallied around the flag and it will fly more proudly as a result.

Alternatively, we might have one that more people find not just more pleasing as a design, but more evocative of our own sense of ourselves.