New Zealand is appealing to the public to design and vote on a new flag, and the results are as weird and wonderful as you’d expect
There’s an internet joke, perpetuated by BuzzFeed, that New Zealand doesn’t exist, riffing on the fact that it’s often grotesquely distorted on maps, omitted from them altogether or, worst of all, thought to be a state of Australia.
New Zealanders – all 4.5 million of us – understandably find this hurtful. But part of the issue is that the two countries’ union flag-centric designs look similar, with just a scattering of stars to differentiate them, and the ongoing confusion has led the New Zealand government to consider alternative designs to be put to a referendum later this year. Four designs will be selected by a 12-strong “flag consideration panel”.
The referendum process, estimated to cost just under $NZ26m ($A25m), will include a two-step postal vote. In the first vote people will be asked to rank – using a preferential voting system – their preferred alternative flag designs. The second stage will get underway in March 2016 and will be a vote between the current flag and the winning alternative design.
The good people of Aotearoa, plus the million or so of us living overseas, plus anyone with MS Paint and an internet connection, have been given the opportunity to upload their own designs to a public gallery.
Most involve the silver fern, the curling “koru” fern frond or the southern cross constellation in a combination of red, blue, black and white. But some displays of “Kiwi ingenuity” are as weird and wonderful as you’d expect from a country you’re most likely to hear of as an ‘odd news’ segment on a late-night talk show.
Remember, by way of context, this is a nation in which the prime minister admitted to pulling a woman’s ponytail, a man was convicted of attempting to take out women’s teeth during sex, a corpse on a gurney rolled out of a hearse and onto a highway, a pet sheep was stolen and spraypainted with an Isis logo on one side and “420” on the other, a runner drank her own breast milk after getting lost in the bush, and a parochial swimming pool had a six-week ordeal with a “serial pooper”.
And that’s just in the past couple of months. How do you capture those eccentricities in shape and colour alone? These bloody legends gave it a decent stab.
Here are 15 of our favourites. Which would you pick?
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