Endorsements

Christopher Doig, O.B.E., Former International Opera Singer, Former CEO NZ Cricket
I have always considered myself a passionate and patriotic New Zealander. I love this place and get tremendous satisfaction when we as a nation punch above our weights and take on the world in sport, commerce and the arts and triumph as we so often seem to do.

The irony is that we do that against a backdrop of self-effacement and a disturbing tendency to denigrate our high achievers. I have never quite understood this part of our psyche which is so very different from our closest neighbours across the Tasman.

My family and I have spent a fair bit of our lives living abroad and have as result a well established and healthily balanced view of just what a special place it is we are privileged to live in and just how important it is for us to have something clear and strong with which we can identify and believe in.

I am a strong supporter of a change in our flag, not because I am anti-establishment, or anti-royalty, but because our traditional flag does not define our uniqueness or a defined New Zealand characteristic for me personally. It is far too derivative of a past era and is for many indistinguishable from the Australian flag and others.

That was never more obvious to me than when I was living in Vienna and was dining at a fashionable Heurige Restaurant in Vienna with other New Zealand friends. At an adjacent table were some rather loud Australians. The restaurant had a habit of placing miniature flags on the tables of their visiting tourist guests, but none of us at either our table, nor indeed at the Australian table could advise the waiter what our respective flags actually looked like. I would have loved to have had a Silver Fern displayed on my table that day with all the proud tradition that that emblem represents.