Was Class The Decisive Factor In Determining The Flag Referendum's Outcome?

Class Warrior? At the core of Labour MP Sue Moroney’s controversial "Just Because You Own" tweet was the unmistakeable whiff of class warfare. Her generous parliamentary salary notwithstanding, she clearly reacted with visceral working-class fury to the visual cues of the Silver Fern Flag and a “flash beach house”. In a peculiar, largely unacknowledged way, voting to retain the flag became, for many Kiwis, a small but satisfying gesture of class defiance.

 

FOR THE BEST PART OF A WEEK, the Labour MP, Sue Moroney, has been on the receiving end of a vicious media caning. Her crime? Tweeting a photograph of a handsome Waihi Beach property flying the Silver Fern Flag, accompanied by the incendiary caption: “Just because you own a flash beach house doesn’t mean you get to decide our flag.”

 

Was this an intelligent political gesture? Not really. A moment’s thought on Ms Moroney’s part would have warned her of the inevitability of a swingeing social media backlash, followed inexorably by the heavy artillery fire of the mainstream news outlets. A tweet of such provocative content was never going to pass unnoticed. Better, therefore, not to send it.

 

Ms Moroney should also have paused to consider the feelings of the people who actually owned the beach house over which Kyle Lockwood’s creation was fluttering. Their motivation for displaying the flag was something Ms Moroney could only guess at, and when you’re a Member of Parliament guessing isn’t good enough. The owners of the property had every right to complain, and Ms Moroney had no option but to remove the offending tweet.

 

Exactly what Labour’s Leader, Andrew Little, said to his errant colleague, as the controversy she’d created started spawning the most trenchant journalistic criticism, we have no way of knowing. It is, however, very likely to have included a great deal of admonition and very little approbation.

 

And yet, as the week progressed, and the journalistic vitriol increased in strength, I couldn’t help wondering whether, in this case, the media clobbering machine was protesting too much. Such exaggerated offence, and such ferocious criticism, strongly suggested that Ms Moroney had touched a very raw nerve. What could it be?

 

When the irrepressible Paul Henry says something provocative, his defenders frequently respond with the observation that he is only expressing what a whole lot of people are thinking. Did Ms Moroney’s inflammatory tweet fall into this category? Had she put into words what a great many New Zealanders were feeling about the social forces pushing for a change of flag?

 

It is difficult to argue against the proposition that the entire flag-changing exercise was driven from the top down. Certainly a review of the polling data offers scant evidence for there being a popular groundswell in favour of replacing our present flag. On the contrary, in the eyes of a large number of New Zealanders, the whole initiative originated from, and was associated with, the Prime Minister, John Key.

 

Are the following associative mental leaps similar to the ones Ms Moroney made when she saw the Silver Fern flying above that Waihi Beach property?

 

Look, there’s a swanky beach house flying that damned flag! — John Key has a swanky beach house. — I bet his is flying an even bigger Silver Fern Flag. — Why does he even want to change our flag? — Just to show us that he can! — I’ve always felt this whole referendum thing is nothing more than the Prime Minister and his rich mates telling us what to do. — It must be why the National Party, the news media, and the rest of the political establishment is backing him so strongly. — Because, when a National Party Prime Minister wants something, it’s important that he gets it. — Well bugger them! — Where’s my cell phone!

 

If that was the general direction of Ms Moroney’s thoughts, and if she was by no means alone in thinking about the referendum in such terms, then what New Zealand has just passed through may be a lot more significant than the political pundits are prepared to acknowledge.

 

At the core of Ms Moroney’s tweet is the unmistakeable whiff of class warfare. Her generous parliamentary salary notwithstanding, she clearly reacted with visceral working-class fury to the visual cues of the Silver Fern Flag and a “flash beach house”. Something in her personality (and in the personalities of tens-of-thousands of her fellow New Zealanders) linked together wealth, power, the proposal to change the flag, and the Prime Minister, in a causal chain of extraordinary emotive strength. In a peculiar, largely unacknowledged way, voting to retain the flag became, for many Kiwis, a small but satisfying gesture of class defiance.

 

Perhaps this explains why Ms Moroney’s tweet has elicited such an angry response from those who, in one way or another, contrived to carry the Prime Minister’s flag. Her bitter caption clearly stung them in ways many found difficult to explain. It implied that at least some members of the punditocracy had behaved discreditably; lined up with the wrong people; backed the wrong cause.

 

At the very least, Ms Moroney’s “class warfare” tweet has cast the indisputable class divide separating those who voted for the present flag from those who voted against it, in a new and disquieting light.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 5 April 2016.

Whoops And Cheers For Democracy's Flag.

 

The People's Flag: For the duration of the Prime Minister’s vainglorious change-the-flag project, the New Zealand Ensign has stood for the right of the people – and not a single individual – to determine their nation’s destiny. It was Democracy’s flag that we voted to keep.

 

WHEN THE NEWS came through that the present New Zealand flag had defeated Kyle Lockwood’s silver fern I was at the pub. One of my companions suggested that we share the referendum result with the other patrons. Having by far the loudest voice, I strode to the bar and announced that the present New Zealand flag had received 57 percent of the votes cast to the Silver Fern’s 43 percent. The room erupted with whoops and cheers and just about everyone in the pub joined in the applause.

 

That spontaneous ovation seemed to me to have very little to do with the respective merits of the Union Jack versus the Silver Fern. Indeed, it is highly likely that at least a third of the people seated in that bar had voted for change.

 

Why, then, did so many of my fellow patrons clap and cheer?

 

The answer is simple: they were cheering the personal discomfiture and political humiliation of the Prime Minister.

 

John Key had made the flag referendum a test of his supporters’ loyalty: of their willingness to follow his every wish – no matter how fundamentally it contradicted their own. Astonishingly, they came within 7 percentage points of passing their leader’s test. Over the last ten days of voting, the gap between the supporters of the present flag and Lockwood’s alternative narrowed dramatically – startling evidence of the Prime Minister’s influence over his conservative base. That the six electorates in which the Silver Fern secured a narrow majority over the Union Jack were all true-blue National seats is certainly no accident.

 

That they were being asked to participate in some sort of weird affirmation ritual did not escape the attention of the rest of the population – and they resented it bitterly. That resentment only increased as the flag-changing process unfolded. I was reminded of the child’s card-trick in which the “magician” appears to be giving his “mark” a series of choices, while actually contriving to sequentially eliminate all but the chosen card from contention.

 

What infuriated the population even more was Key’s armour-plated insouciance. He clearly believed that his referendum card-trick would work on just enough people to secure him the affirmation he was seeking. All it communicated to those not yet under the Prime Minister’s spell, however, was how thoroughly manipulable he believed the electorate to be.

 

The alternative flag “finalists” only added insult to injury. With three of the four designs featuring a silver fern, the cynics’ view, that the judging panel knew exactly what the Prime Minister wanted and was determined to give it to him, gained widespread currency.

 

What the panel could not give him, however, was the option Key’s loyalists were most eager to vote for: the “All Blacks Flag”. Intellectual property considerations had conspired to keep Key’s first choice for an alternative New Zealand flag off the ballot. The NZRFU was simply unwilling to surrender its brand. If it had, that 7 point gap separating the status quo from change would, almost certainly, have been narrower.

 

For those not in thrall to “Brand Key”, however, the choice was clear. If you were determined to deny the Prime Minister plebiscitary proof of his own invincibility, you simply had to vote for the status quo.

 

Only the most indefatigable leftists, like the former Green MP, Keith Locke, were willing to set aside Key’s all-too-obvious agenda and vote to get rid of the most enduring symbol of New Zealand’s colonial heritage. (The flag Irish nationalists still refer to as the “butcher’s apron”.)

 

Most supporters of the “Government-in-Waiting”: Labour, Greens, NZ First; were, however, willing to swallow their socialist, republican and nationalist principles and vote for the “Good Old Flag”.

 

Challenged by their outraged comrades, many offered the excuse of the proposed alternative’s design inadequacies. “If we’d had something better than a glorified tea-towel on offer” they protested, “we’d have voted for it.”

 

But would we? To fly, a flag has to stand for something. No matter how well-designed, the flag worn so ostentatiously on Key’s lapel would still have stood, in the minds of his opponents, for the Prime Minister’s determination to demonstrate that, even on a matter as fundamental to the nation’s identity as its flag, his would be the will that prevailed.

 

That was the aspiration so many National supporters (regardless of their personal preference for the status quo) were willing to satisfy by voting for their leader’s choice. A genuinely frightening demonstration of political fealty.

 

More reassuring, however, were the whoops and cheers that echoed around the pub as I announced the referendum result. For the duration of the Prime Minister’s pet project, the New Zealand Ensign has stood for the right of the people – and not a single individual – to determine their nation’s destiny.

 

It was Democracy’s flag that we voted to keep.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 29 March 2016.

Flagging Our Opposition.

Sending The Prime Minister A Message: UMR Research asked people to respond to the following question: “The flag referendum has been a distraction and a waste of money. New Zealanders should send John Key a message by voting for the current flag.” Two-thirds of UMR’s respondents agreed with that statement.

 

STRANGE DAYS we’re living in, when New Zealand’s youngest voters are the most vociferous defenders of their county’s flag. It has become a commonplace of post-war political sociology that youth and radicalism go together like Ché Guevara’s image and T-Shirts.

 

Even before the youth rebellions of the 1950s and 60s, the close correlation between tender years and tender ideals had been apparent to no less a figure than Winston Churchill. “He who is not a socialist at twenty, hasn’t a heart”, the great man observed, before immediately alienating every twenty-year-old (and socialist!) by adding: “He who is still a socialist at forty, hasn’t a head.”

 

When it comes to the Flag Referendum, however, Churchill’s formula fails spectacularly. Instead of 18-29 year-olds favouring Kyle Lockwood’s Union Jack-less fern and stars design by an overwhelming margin, UMR Research reveals that nearly three-quarters of them (72 percent!) will be voting to keep the New Zealand flag exactly as it is.

 

Only the followers of another Winston are more determined to keep the Union Jack in its proper place. NZ First voters prefer the New Zealand Ensign to Kyle Lockwood’s silver fern by a whopping margin of 66 percentage points (83-17 percent). Are we to take from this that only about a fifth of Winston Peters’ supporters are serious about putting their country’s independent future ahead of its colonial past?

 

Or, is something else at work?

 

UMR Research clearly thinks so. Why else would they have asked people to respond to the following question: “The flag referendum has been a distraction and a waste of money. New Zealanders should send John Key a message by voting for the current flag.” Two-thirds of UMR’s respondents agreed with that statement. But, once again, it was the 18-29 year-olds who did so most vociferously. Fully 71 percent of them agreed that Mr Key should be sent a message.

 

Is this what the Flag Referendum has turned into? A referendum on John Key? People voting to humiliate the Prime Minister because they know they can do so without upsetting the entire political apple-cart? If so, then politics in New Zealand has reached a very interesting point. The electorate may be rapidly tiring of the National Party’s leader, but it has not yet grown weary of the National Party Government.

 

In other words, Mr Key may have got on a great many of the public’s nerves, but on its all-important hip-pocket nerve he has not got. The economy is still growing (albeit slowly) unemployment is falling, and inflation is as low as most people can remember. Wage rises may be low and infrequent – but, when they are given, they are real. And if you’re one of those voters lucky enough to have both feet on the property ladder, then the “wealth effect” of constantly rising house prices is unlikely to recommend any other party (except Act) for your serious electoral consideration.

 

The Flag Referendum thus permits people to lance the boil of their accumulated frustrations with the Prime Minister easily and inconsequentially. It’s a political diversion so very clever that one is sorely tempted to speculate that it’s exactly what Mr Key had planned all along.

 

And all those angry 18-29 year-olds? Are they going to be content with simply voting to retain the present flag? Will that really be sufficient to purge their twenty-something socialist hearts of resentful millennial rage? One suspects not.

 

And it is here that the political story takes a rather sad turning. Were our young voters living in the United States their hearts would be responding to the uncompromising summons of Senator Bernie Sanders: who, by remaining a socialist into his mid-seventies, has well-and-truly given the lie to Winston Churchill! Living in Britain, they would have Jeremy Corbyn (another superannuated socialist!) to whom they could give their hearts. But here, in New Zealand, there is a dearth of charismatic socialists on whose electoral altar they can lay down their youth and enthusiasm.

 

Guyon Espiner, writing in The Listener, likened Andrew Little to a rather dour Police inspector. Pitted against the grasshopper carelessness of John Key, Espiner argued, DCI Little might be just what the electorate is looking for. Or, at least, what forty year-old voters with a head might be looking for.

 

Those flagging a heart-felt vote, will just have to keep on looking.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 19 February 2016.