Dave Witherow: Confederacy of Dunces

Just when you think we have reached peak lunacy, it gets worse. The other day, for example, we had Prof Michael Baker, Otago University’s pre-eminent Doomster, advising us yet again that things are looking grim. The virus is not done yet, he thinks, and until Big Pharma comes up with new gene-bending elixirs we are still seriously in the cactus. There is too much complacency abroad, says the Prof, and the rules need tightening again. We must be forced to become “mask-wearing society”.

Yes Michael, yes. We heard it all the first time. We believed the images of catastrophe in Wuhan. People falling over in the streets and being welded into their apartments. We believed you and Bloomfield and Hipkins. We swallowed everything you told us. We were flattening the curve and leading the world. We were the doughty team of five million who, by “following the Science”, would eliminate the virus. Except, of course, that we didn’t. The virus is back, spreading everywhere and infecting everyone.

The Science – or your version of it anyway - turned out to be a crock.

Steve Baron: A $25.7m blunder waiting to happen

I suspect the government is about to make a huge blunder. They are investing $25.7 million in a flag referendum but they have made a crucial mistake in selecting the voting system to decide the referendum. As my mother always told me, if a job is worth doing, it is worth doing properly—especially when spending this amount of money on a significant issue.

A briefing paper issued by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (Bill English) has recommended the use of the First-Past-The-Post (FPP) voting system in the first referendum. This referendum will choose from a potential list of three or four flags that will go up against the existing flag in a second referendum. Using FPP in the first referendum is a disaster waiting to happen and could cause ongoing derision for generations to come. 

Unless there is an absolute clear preference (50%+) for just one flag (highly unlikely) in the first referendum, using the FPP voting system may actually mean that the LEAST

favoured flag could win and that really would be a disaster.

Mike Butler: More separatist flags flying

Wellington mayor Celia Wade-Brown is the latest naïve white politician to be duped by Maori sovereignty campaigners into flying the tino rangatiratanga flag on Waitangi Day this year. Announcing the decision to fly the flag from Wellington's Town Hall for the first time together with the New Zealand national flag, she said "Waitangi Day is all about the spirit of mutual respect and nationhood so we will fly the two flags together. This symbolises and enhances the relationship between the Crown and Maori."

Yes, the flag is a symbol, but the starry eyed Wellington mayor may not be aware that the group that promoted the separatist flag, Te Ata Tino Toa, says the flag symbolises the struggle for Maori self-determination: Spokesperson Tia Taurere said:

The Tino Rangatiratanga flag symbolises the long tradition of struggle and resistance by Maori against colonisation and the Crown sponsored theft of Maori land and resources. It is a symbol used by Maori who continue to resist the pressures of colonisation and cultural and economic genocide. Such a concept embraces the spiritual link Maori have with 'Papatuanuku' (Earthmother) and is a part of the international drive by indigenous peoples for self determination.

David Round: The Enemy of Nationhood

First published December 2009:

There was a poem which my mother had learnt off by heart as a girl and portions of which she could long remember and recite to us.  It was, I later discovered, Whittier's Barbara Frietchie, and it tells of a true episode in the American Civil War when Confederate forces, occupying a town in the north, decreed on pain of death that all Union flags in the town should be taken down. Heroic old Barbara refused, and

‘Shoot if you must this old grey head

But spare your country’s flag’ she said.

The officer was moved.

‘Who touches a hair of yon grey head

Dies like a dog! March on!’ he said.

A nation’s flag is a precious thing. It arises out of a long history; it grows with a people and tells their story. The New Zealand flag is no exception. On the blue of the Pacific Ocean shines the Southern Cross, the great guiding constellation of our skies, and in one corner the crosses of St George, St Andrew and St Patrick ~ England, Scotland and Ireland ~ tell of our British ancestors ~ the explorers and pioneers who found New Zealand a barbarous, albeit beautiful, wilderness of warring tribes, and created by their patient heroic labours the land of peace and comparative prosperity we have inherited.