The whole thing was a confused mess. It's hard to pick where it was doomed, so I'll just list why it was fucking stupid from the get-go:
1. The entire thing was drawn into partisan lines, with the National Party basically steamrolling over all others and pushing through with the process, rather than trying to make it a genuine cross-party effort. More on this later.
2. The organisers failed to articulately and coherently explain why there was a need for a change in the flag, offering little more than weaksauce bullshit reasons like "they done got one," or "it's time for a change!" while failing spectacularly to address the inevitable respective responses of "so?" and "why?"
3. By failing to articulate a coherent reason why there needed to be a change, it created a reason void which was promptly filled with "legacy project for Key." This inevitably led to observations like "if this is meant to be his legacy, it shows how little, if anything, this government actually accomplished when not plagiarising and watering down opposition policy." This will be revisited later.
4. John Key going FERN FERN FERN FERN FERN FERN FERN FERN FERN FERN FERN FERN FERN FERN all the time and the abundance of flags with ferns (including 2 of the 4 originally selected for the first referendum) and the admission by the selection committee that they were influenced by John Key muttering "fern" all the time influenced them meant we got boring, shitty designs. I mean, look at this shit:
5. The selection committee, or "flag consideration panel," was dominated by lawyers, businessmen (one of which was the CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi NZ), politicians and athletes. Only 2 of the 12 had anything even resembling experience or knowledge relating to vexillology. In fact, there wasn't a single actual creative or vexillologist in the consideration panel (if you're about to say "but what about Julie Christie?" then fuck off. Like, what the hell was she even doing there to begin with?). If I wanted to know about rugby, yeah, I'd ask noted rugbologist Brian Lochore, and if I wanted to know about throwing things very, very far, I'd ask noted former pro-thing thrower Beatrice Faumuina. But what the hell do they know about flags?
6. The public didn't, or refused, to engage with the process when the government solicited public designs, with a vague, incoherent and confused campaign about "what the flag means," complete with a farcical travelling discussion panel road show where no one attended, with people basically shouting at empty rooms. The Lazar Kiwi design sums this up nicely - the public saw right through the entire process as a farce, and took to mocking it openly.
7. The designs that were unveiled were deeply stupid, with two lazy-as-balls Lockwood designs that were obvious palette swaps, hypnoflag and a shittily-drawn silver fern version of those aliens from that Star Trek episode that were half black and half white. The discontent manifested itself as the Red Peak campaign, which gathered an embarrassing (for the consideration panel) amount of momentum, largely due to the fact that unlike the pieces of shit on offer, it actually had some thought and meaning put into it, and actually looked like a flag instead of shitty corporate logos or old Black Caps shirts.
8. Lockwood's blue-and-black fern design won the first round, quashing any further significant interest in a flag change, because fuck that noise. People also noticed that it was basically a silver fern and a black corner pasted on to the existing NZ flag over the Union Jack, which led to an embarrassingly hurried hue-change.
9. The timing of it coincided with swelling ill-will and frustration with the government, that had already hit MediaWorks (who own TV3 and Four) hard (and guess who Julie Christie, from the flag consideration, panel works for?), along with public resentment and anger over the TPPA process, and had seen Key get booed out of the venue at successive public appearances, scaring him away from the Waitangi Day ceremonies at Te Tii Waitangi. We also got to see Steven Joyce get a dildo thrown at him, because lol. Key would deny that it was about himself, but he had also made himself so intimate to the process, that he might as well have been humping the flag at public engagements, with the silver fern part wrapped around his dick.
10. The partisan nature of the process, the shittiness of it where it was clear from word go that Key was trying to rig the game for his preferred inane design, the failure and refusal to engage with the public when it actually mattered, and that it ended up being about being the NZ flag v. John Key's flag basically made what could have been a robust discussion about national identity into an arduous and costly farce, a deserved fat lip on the government's face, and frustration as we ponder what that $26million could have been better spent on (answer: literally fucking anything else).
So if someone said "sum all this up in one image:"
At the risk of making this an even more partisan discussion, the closing statement in opposition leader Andrew Little's editorial in the Herald couldn't have put it better.
I do not blame Mr Key for looking into the issue of the flag. I do blame him for not taking 'no' for an answer. His pet project has cost New Zealand $26 million - money we could have spent on doctors, teachers, police, healthy homes.
Quite fucking right, Andrew.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news ... d=11611452