Williamson Maurice: New Zealand Flag Referendums Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliamson Maurice: New Zealand Flag Referendums Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 12 March 2015. Volume:703;Page:2236. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga): I am delighted to take part in this debate because I think it is important to nail down a few particular issues. First of all this is not the silver bullet the be all and end all or the change that will make us the biggest wealthiest nation in the world but it is actually an important step along the way to nationhood. We need to understand we were a little colony at the bottom of the South Pacific. We called her “Mother England”. She literally took all of our goods and services and we were more British than you could get. Michael Joseph Savage’s famous speech in 1939 was: “Where Britain goes we go. Where Britain stands we stand.”Well that is no longer true. That is no longer true. They cut the apron strings. They kicked us out like a teenager gets kicked out of home. They did not even give us a bit of spending money to go. I have to say I am a bit down and dirty on the way the Poms got rid of us. They just gave us the boot. But that is fine. We have had to find new markets. We have had to become a country in our own right. And guess what? Of recent times brand New Zealand is getting to be so important around the world. There is stuff that Peter Jackson has done stuff that our wine industry is doing and stuff that is value-added to some of our technology our dairy and our meat products and so on. Brand New Zealand is getting to be more and more important so I think it is well overdue for us to look as a nation at what our symbol is. Obviously one of the symbols of your nationhood is your flag.So to those who are worried about the changing of the flag let us go through a few things. First of all the flag we have currently got is not New Zealand’s first one. It is not our first flag. Actually until 1902 it was the Union Jack. That was our flag. Let us just make sure that everyone understands what the Union Jack is. It is a combination of three sets of crosses: St David of Wales St George of England and St Andrew of Scotland. How does that have any relationship to us at the bottom of the South Pacific? How does a Union Jack have any relationship to us at all? It does not.The next thing I think is worth telling—and this is actually a true story Don McKinnon told us once in Cabinet. He was our foreign Minister and he attended a big United Nations function I think and so on. All the foreign Ministers were asked to come up pick their flag out of a big rotunda thing go and place it in these holders and then stand underneath it. It was done alphabetically so when McKinnon went up he was about halfway through as “n” for New Zealand. Our flag was not there. Don McKinnon went: “Uh oh.” Then he suddenly spotted the Australian flag was still there. Gareth Evans the then foreign Minister of Australian when he had walked up had gone up picked our flag and gone and stuck it up not realising he had got the wrong flag. So that is how similar they are. Why the hell our stars are red and theirs are white no one has ever been able to tell me. Other than that that is the only way I can spot the difference. They have got white stars; we have got red ones. They have got a bigger one but it is hardly that much of a difference. Frankly we want to be a nation in our own right. So I give absolutely full credit to the Prime Minister for saying it is time we began a process of identifying ourselves as a nation and having a symbol that represents it.I want to make it clear that a whole lot of my family members served. My father and his brother served on the HMNZS Achilles at the Battle of the River Plate two of his other brothers served in the New Zealand Army in the desert and two of them served in the air force in part of the Battle of Britain. I do not believe any one of them who have all passed on would say: “I served under a particular flag so I want that flag kept.” You know why they served? They served against the tyranny of—in that particular case—the Nazis and what they were doing in the world and they served for New Zealand. They served for their country and for the people of this country in order to keep it safe. The piece of linen that might have been fluttering above them on one day is not what they did it for. They did it for their nation and their people to keep them safe and secure.I have got a feeling that a lot of old soldiers many of whom have passed would be very happy for us to be now moving to the idea of a different flag that stood out and that was us—a flag that is New Zealand and that is us so when we go on the world stage everyone does not go: “Oh is that the Australian flag? No.” There are a number of other nations that have got the Union Jack sitting up in their top left-hand corner and everyone is saying: “Ah what country is that again?”. It would be great.Again we have heard about Canada and the maple leaf. What a stunningly good example of change. Ask any Canadian—please do because I have done it—whether they would go back. Ask any Canadian whether they would like to go back to their old flag. It is not even up for discussion. The maple leaf is now hoisted and they feel proud of it. It gives them some identity. It is their nation. It is not the same as anybody else’s. That is what I would love to see happen.I do not have a particularly strong view about the design other than a couple of things. I would like it to be as simple as it can be because kids like to draw flags. You want to stick a flag on the side of your car when your rugby team is playing so please do not make it so you have to be an artist of greatness and spend 3 hours drawing all the fancy bits to make it work. It should be something quite simple. In the case of the maple leaf you can flick your hand around and draw the maple leaf within a couple of seconds and that is it on a plain background. Just make it that it is a New Zealand icon that we can all be proud of and that can be put on products that we sell around the world or we can wear it as part of our sporting teams.I make this point: when we see the All Blacks go to the Rugby World Cup and we are cheering them on are they wearing the Union Jack? Come on! Have a look at any rugby stadium and see whether the kids are out there waving the Union Jack to support the All Blacks. They are not. They are out there waving the silver fern because at least at this point until we get this flag thing sorted it is the closest thing we can get to our nationhood. How awful would it be if we were up against the Poms in the final of the Rugby World Cup and we are waving a flag with the Union Jack on it? We would not do it.So it is not our first flag. We have changed it in the past. I do not accept the argument that people because they fought under it and died—and many hundreds of thousands along the way have given their lives in that service—do not want to see that change now. In fact I think the point has been made already that on many of our war graves around the world the silver fern is above every one of the commemorative little plaques for each of the soldiers—the silver fern is not the Union Jack with a couple of stars on the bottom of it. So this is a really important step forward for us as a nation and for where we go from here and I am delighted that we are taking it.To those members from the Labour Party—and I have heard a few of them getting stuck into this Government and saying: “Ah you know you’re boxing forward with this without the consent of the people.”—I want to say that they took some much bigger constitutional issue changes of this country than the flag with no consultation whatsoever and not to an election. What are they? Well let us go through them. How about we take getting rid of the Privy Council? I support it. I am not criticising them. I actually think that the time to cut the strings with the Privy Council was well overdue. I support it. But Labour just boxed on and got rid of it. It threw the Privy Council out. That is it. There was no referendum there was no consultation and it was not part of an election referendum—done. It was similar with our knighthood honours and so on. Labour decided that it did not like the knights and the dames that it was just going to change all of that—bang done did not consult on it and so on. So it is a bit rich when some people come into this House and say “Oh you haven’t consulted with us.” or “You’re not taking account of this.” when those Labour members alone went out and sort of banged things through.I want to finally say to New Zealanders that this is not massive. This is not the game-changer that will see us be the economic powerhouse to take on the world but it is a really important element of our becoming a nation. It is a really important part of us being an entity in the rest of the world and I would love to think that we ended up with a flag—and as I said before I do not have any preconceived ideas on it—that when New Zealanders are travelling they will have on their backpacks or have on their shirts. When we are at rugby matches and we see that flying or we see it at the—someone actually showed me a clip the other day of a couple of Commonwealth Games medal ceremonies. The flags were all going up in the air. All three had Union Jacks and one had some red stars and one had some white stars and you could not work out whether the Australians had got the gold or whether it was the New Zealanders who got the gold. If anyone from overseas was looking at it they would say: “Oh that country cleaned up on all three.”So it has to be different. It has to be unique. I agree with a couple of the people speaking from the perspective of Māoridom. It would be great if we could include something like the koru that Air New Zealand has done something that is uniquely Māori as part of it. I would love to see that. But in the end this country deserves to have a stake in the ground that people around the world recognise. It goes with our pride as a nation as we go forward.