The Flag Change petition

A petition is being circulated to change the N.Z. Flag. While the organizers have a case that the flag needs to be changed, a big problem is that none of the proposed flags look very good.

I don't have any particular alternative to make but I do have the strong feeling that the Southern Cross should be retained. Our country was flying the Southern Cross long before the Australian Commonwealth and even before the states of Victoria and Melbourne put the constellation on their own flags. Hence if anybody needs to drop the Southern Cross to make their flags more distinction, it should be the Australians.

Lastly, but not the least, I was disgusted by the organizer's idiotic comments on TVNZ news. He declared that a good reason for the change was to distinguish between Australian and Kiwi troops because our military policy was now "poles apart" and that a sniper would find it difficult to tell the difference between the two flags. However if a sniper were to be in the situation where he could be firing upon an Australian or a New Zealander, then the two countries are there for the same reason (as recently happened in the Solomons Islands, Afghanistan, post-war Iraq and East Timor). Hence the sniper wouldn't really care what country his prospective victim came from. More importantly, is that when Kiwi troops are wearing field dress, they wear a black and white brassard (scroll down) with the image of a kiwi and the words "New Zealand".