Jim Hopkins: Let it remain - it's our history, the good and the bad

A new flag? Why not. While we're at it, let's have a new constitution too. And a new anthem - something post-modern like Love In A Fowl House. We could change the capital too.

Leave windswept Whellington to its earthquaked fate and move to Dargaville.

And if the anthem tweakers and curriculum twisters and every last member of the anal Geography Board won't move, good riddance. And we could have a President.

That tireless old bonkmeister, Jacob Zuma, perhaps, or Mr Chavez, or Mr Mugabe, or Colonel Gaddaffi, or the bloke in Iran with the bomb or whomever's in charge of North Korea this week.

We can't footle about here. We mustn't be half-hearted and dithersome. If change is what we want, it must be all aboard across the board.

Change everything. Botox every old, wrinkly, feature we consider unfashionable.

Give Outer Roa a flag job, an anthem job, a constitution job and any other cosmetic enhancement the commentariat considers necessary for proper political education of the unenlightened and true fostering of national identity.

No matter we already have an identity. The chattering classes don't like it. Too vulgar, sports-minded, utilitarian and bellicose. Too much lingering pioneer machismo and other colonial residues.

Too much drinking and footy and no-one paying attention to the clever folk who studied Marx at university.

So the flag's a target. And they'll get it. Eventually. But they won't respect themselves in the morning. And neither will we. Because whatever we run up the flagpole, we won't have changed.

We'll still be the same mid-Victorian puritans we've always been. Home will still be a post-Christian, Greco-Roman, English, Polynesian fragment; the world's last port of call.

An outpost of cultures and traditions - all of which deserve respect.

As we can't pick our parents, so we can't pick our history. We've got to take the lot, wars and all. History is because it was. It's been, and we've done it.

Flags are reminders of that, like old family photos.

They recall mistakes and triumphs, failings and virtues. And that's why they should not be lightly cast aside. Let the flag remain. Changing it will bring no unity to a dangerously divided nation.

Email us your design for the NZ flag