Decades ago, brilliant British-born television broadcaster and academic Austin Mitchell fled New Zealand saying, "There's a bloody great clobbering machine there." He referred to stifling conformity, the quashing of dissent and failure to celebrate the kind of eccentricity he was used to seeing in London's Hyde Park. (Ironic, considering Dr. Mitchell's commitment to the ideology that produced the machine, socialism.) Having myself, for some years now, been blacklisted by New Zealand's mainstream media because of my libertarian political views, notwithstanding my one-time status as "the doyen of political interviewers," I can attest to the fact that "the bloody great clobbering machine" is bigger and more clobbery than ever.
In the light of that, I have some helpful suggestions whereby the present debate on the New Zealand flag might culminate in an emblem that truthfully conveys the essence of the unappetising egalitarian wart on the globe's nether-regions that New Zealand is.
First, since someone mentioned the Fourth Estate, several media logos ought to be represented with a swastika overlaid upon them, to symbolise their hijacking by the Politically Correct Nazis of the Left. Thus, for instance, in the contemporary context, it is impermissible to call Islam a "cancer," Brown Supremacism "racism," feminazi man-hatred "sexism," homosexual Bolshevism "heterophobia" and so forth. Government must be fascistically big and intrusive to enforce PC's fascist nostrums. No dissenting voice shall be permitted; offenders shall be bussed off to "sensitivity training" camps, "diversity" courses and the like. The logos of Stuff.co.nz, National Socialist Radio, Radio Left, TVNZ and TV3 come to mind as suitable for a swastika-overlay.
Second, a swastika should also be overlaid upon the logos of academia such as our universities. Once proud bastions of freedom of speech, they are now bastions of the opposite to an extent that would make Hitler envious.
Third, a hammer and sickle should be overlaid upon an image of the Beehive, to indicate that the prevailing view of the role of government in the seat of government is similar to that of the former Soviet Union.
Fourth, a brain with maggots crawling all over it should be depicted over an image of a smartphone, to indicate the ubiquitous, braindead, foul-mannered addiction to a device that is much smarter than its users, whose infantile, obsessive attention-seeking via said technology establishes the truth of comedian Louis C. K's observation that "millennials" (barf!), dumbed down by government education, are indeed "the crappiest generation ever"—in New Zealand as elsewhere.
Fifth, there should be a "millennial" female represented with a giant duck's beak emanating from the place her mouth would ordinarily be, to signify that in New Zealand, women under forty (and all too many over forty) don't speak—they quack. This one might have to be run past the SPCA, since it is arguably cruel to ducks to compare their emissions to those of female Kiwis. Actual duck quacking has far more intelligent inflections than the relentless upward screeches of New Zealand's adenoidal airheads. This image should afford X-Ray vision of the upper skull area to indicate the absence of any organic material between the ears behind the eyes. (This is not to let the boys of the hook—their mumbling, grunting, groaning and droning scarcely qualify as speech either, but are a lot easier on the ears than the girls' amplified nails-on-blackboard squawking.)
All the above symbols should occur against a backdrop of yellow, to indicate the complete absence of courage in New Zealand's public discourse. It is the absence of the audacity to speak out that has made these symbols so sickeningly accurate.
It might be objected that all of the above are too much to fit onto one flag. Well, this is one giant-sized wart.