New Flag? I’ve got a better idea
Forgot a new flag, its time to get new name.
The flag debate is a complete red herring (presumably the flag of Norway). Flags are old school. They represent a time when you needed cloth to identify things. Kings and Popes wore purple robes and funny hats so that you knew they were important. Nowadays with TV, a rich powerful dude such as Keith Richards can dress like a tramp and we all know it’s him thanks to close up camera work. So it is with flags. We used to need flags to identify who owned the ship that had just sailed into your harbour laden with guns and gonorrhoea.
No – flags are anachronistic, like wooden teeth and corsets. We have moved on. New Zealand would be better placed to not worry about the flag but to reinvent our name. After all, this is the age of branding. Countries will soon go the way of armies that fought by standing in straight lines holding pointy blades. Apple, Google and others are now country-less. They operate in between borders, particularly when it comes to tax, and footballers care more about club than country. Nations are gong the way of body hair. Yes there will be death throws. Europe reverts to countries when baby laden refugees arrive at the front door, but commonalities of currency and language will win in the end.
New Zealand has of course started on this track of not being a country. The TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) is the precursor to getting rid of borders then statehood. It’s entirely logical that eventually all countries will blend together with common everything. The challenge for us is to join this party and make it fun. What our country is called within the ‘World Wide World’ (you heard the term here first) will not matter to our incomes or culture, as they will soon be the same as everyone else’s. But it would be handy to have an identifiable name because of our geographic isolation.
Future travellers could travel to ‘World Wide World sector 6’ but we might get more interesting people if we maintain a more interesting name. We might as well start debating it now and get ahead of the competition. Common currency and language are going happen anyway as will sports teams representing corporations not countries. So lets put our efforts into where the future is.
I see two approaches to this.
Firstly, assuming the World Wide World occurs as I suggest (and it will), then immigration will also be borderless. It will be against UN law to turn anyone away – especially those scarf wearing babies. Therefore, if you don’t want New Zealand to be as crowded as Japan, then the only way to stop people coming here might be to call ourselves a really off-putting name. You might remember that Greenland was so named by a mad Viking so that people would move there – spin doctoring at its best. So to keep people away we could do the reverse and call ourselves something like ‘Shitesville’ or ‘Crapland’.
The second approach is to create an extremely appealing name in the hope of attracting attractive people. Names like JohnnyDeppland or Angelinaland spring to mind. This approach would of course dovetail nicely with our attractive scenery.
Like all company branding and development, what we cannot do is stand still. We need to rebrand now in order to become a fully fledged member of the World Wide World club. Forget the flag debate and start thinking of brand names. At this stage, my top five suggestions are:
Pretty Land (although this could get abbreviated to ‘P-land’)
Ritchie’s Place (even when he is dead this name will have traction)
Aardvark (always good to be first in the phone book)
Pleasure Island (hey why not make a promise)
Australia (get rid of the confusion once and for all)
So instead of running up a new flag, lets run a new name up that flagpole instead. I will let the Prime Minster know that the tide (soon be tsunami) of public opinion is with me. I think he will be keen as I’ve have heard a rumour that the Nats are considering New Keyland.
Richard Alexander Bain
self confessed man of the world