O'Rourke Denis: New Zealand Flag Referendums Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Rourke Denis: New Zealand Flag Referendums Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 23 September 2015. Volume:709;Page:7001. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENIS O’ROURKE (NZ First): Just in case anyone had any possible doubt about this New Zealand First says this whole referendum process from beginning to end is a very bad idea and we should never have embarked upon it in the first place. The nation is effectively being forced into it by John Key’s own orders and that is the feeling that I get in the community. The community does not really want to go there but is being forced to do so by a Government that wants to distract it from other more important issues. Not only that but several National MPs a number of them do not agree with their own party and are in fact being whipped into shape by party discipline which is making them vote for this bill and indeed the original legislation. That shows just how political this is and how lacking in genuine public support any part of this process actually is.I now want to particularly refer to the general policy statement in the bill before us. The first thing that I read there is that the New Zealand Flag Referendums Act the principal Act is “to provide for 5 alternative flag designs”. Well why should it be just five? What is magic about five? Indeed what was magic about the original four? I do not understand why the legislation and why this bill needs to actually prescribe any particular number of alternatives. That is what should have come from the community. If there were enough good designs that would qualify as reasonable alternatives to the New Zealand flag then that process should have been gone through first before any number was specified in the first flag referendum.So that is the first problem that it has and that is one of the things that this Government has been tripped up on because now we have instead of four a fifth one which some people—not many I do not think; no groundswell just a molehill of people—want added as well. Well it is not a very good process on that basis.Secondly it says in the general policy statement that this flag design is “commonly known as Red Peak”—commonly known as Red Peak? It is not commonly known as any such thing. In fact this design is not commonly known at all and I know that because I speak to people in my electorate and around me and in taxis and so on and actually the fact is that very few people really know what this particular flag is or what it is about. That is the truth. Some people in this Chamber have deluded themselves that there is support for this particular alternative but in fact there is not. Most people—90 percent of the population—neither know nor care about Red Peak and that is the truth about that.That leads me to something else. Further down in the general policy statement we have references to other alternatives but in fact there are no such other alternatives. So this one has just been one out of many other possible alternatives that for some inexplicable reason based on a tiny little number of people in a poll many of whom have voted several times—that is the basis. That is the basis upon which this particular design is being included and that is a very very poor basis for doing that. It is a very very poor process.I will have to say this and I regret having to say so but I personally believe that the expert panel actually did not do a very good job in selecting the four alternatives that are there. It is that bad job that has led to this further demand for other alternatives to be put on the ballot paper for the first flag referendum. What is wrong with what the expert panel did is they included a number of designs that are almost identical to each other. That is not very sensible. People needed completely different alternatives if there was to be a genuine choice. That is not what we got with the first four and that is why we are now faced with this silly process of having to add yet another one—and it should not be. That other one should not have been added.If there were going to be a process for a wider choice it would need to be a much better process than this. It would need to be a process that provided genuine alternatives that were not very much like each other. And it would need to provide a process to develop a much larger number of alternatives for people to express an opinion on than merely four.I want to say something about Gareth Hughes’ comments because Gareth Hughes was clearly afraid of the truth when he protested that New Zealand First pointed out the similarity in symbolism between the Red Peak design and the use of a very very similar design and symbolism by Nazi Germany in the Second World War. The simple truth is that in actual fact as I demonstrated in an earlier speech there is a very very close similarity indeed between the actual use of that design on Nazi sentry boxes and the Red Peak flag.Hon David Cunliffe: You’ve turned it upside down.DENIS O’ROURKE: It was not turned upside down as one person over here says. He is simply not looking at the truth just in the same way as Gareth Hughes is not prepared to observe the truth—and that is the truth.In fact the colours are the same the design is the same it looks the same other people in other parts of the world will point out the similarity and it will be ridiculed. Those people who say that it is not the same should look at those designs to see the truth in that. That is why New Zealand First pointed it out—because it is a fact. It is not our opinion; it is just a fact.I want to go on and say this also if I get enough time. It is this: if we were going to change our flag—and New Zealand First opposes that altogether but if we were going to do so—there would need to be a much better process than the one that this Government has foisted upon us. This is how I think it should go. First of all there should be no legislation at all to begin with. The Government has the ability without passing legislation to simply set up focus groups throughout the country and to say to those focus groups: “Should New Zealand consider a new flag and if so what do you think that flag should be?” and it should take time over doing that—many months if not years to do that—because it does take time for that sort of grassroots consultation to take place. As a result of that you would get a set of criteria that would show you the kinds of things that the general population would like to see in a flag. That would be the first step.The second step would be to use that criteria and to have multiple design generators to use it to start designing a flag. The multiple design generators would be for example schools it would be the use of competitions it would be some paid designers and it would be many many other ways of encouraging people to generate ideas about designs. That would also not require legislation at that stage. To follow on from that you would then need a long period of public discussion on the main alternatives identified by that process. I would foresee that there might be a couple of dozen such designs that would come out of a process like that because people have all sorts of different ideas.Having done that and after that public discussion an expert panel might then be used to help to narrow down those two or three dozen possible designs that could be used to a referendum. But the first referendum should always ask that question: “Do you the public of New Zealand want to even consider a new flag?”. New Zealand First says no but some people might wish to do so. That is where it should have started.