Paul Thomas: It doesn't say much about this country as it is now

For most of New Zealand's short history our flag largely reflected who and what we were.

We were a former British colony. Apart from the unacknowledged indigenous minority, most New Zealanders were either of British descent or had emigrated from Britain.

Psychologically we were still a colony. Just as Muslims bow to Mecca, we looked to the mother country, or "home" as many New Zealand residents referred to it.

We were comfortable being the last, loneliest outpost of a dying empire.

When visitors from the Britain observed, sometimes wistfully, more often patronisingly, that New Zealand was like provincial England 30 years before, it was taken as a compliment.

We were a bashful little country, a wallflower among the community of nations that blushed and shuffled our feet whenever someone paid us attention.

It rather suited us being stuck down at the bottom of the world, obscured by Australia, out of sight and out of mind, When commentators dubbed New Zealand "the Romania of the South Pacific" they weren't just referring to our state-run economy.

Writer Gordon McLauchlan called us the passionless people whose outstanding characteristics included a drab sameness and "fear, even horror, of change".

On visiting her home town of Oakland after 30 years in Paris, the American writer Gertrude Stein said: "There's no there there." Expatriate Kiwis knew what she meant.

Given all that, a flag which led half the world to think we were a British colony and the other half to think we were a state of Australia, Tasmania with more scenery and less inbreeding, was quite appropriate.

When Britain entered the European Economic Community in 1973 the assumptions underpinning our Mother Country fixation went out the window.

A more diverse immigration pattern changed the face of New Zealand.

Technology shrank the world to a global village.

The New Zealand represented by the flag began to recede into history.

It hasn't disappeared, nor should we want it to: it is, and always will be, part of what we are. But only a part, and as New Zealand becomes more diverse and independent, its size relative to the whole will diminish accordingly.

The flag doesn't say much about contemporary New Zealand. If it's still around in a decade, it will say something loud and clear: that we lack self-confidence and a real sense of national identity. That we don't know who we are.

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