JAY KUTEN: Wool pulled over our eyes

RECYCLE: Cheap Confederate flags could be deconstructed and recycled to provide a new Kiwi flag that would represent us all.PHOTO/AP

NEW Zealanders are often the happy beneficiaries of largesse from other countries. Sometimes it's ideas - like privatising mental health care - which are imported from some other place; sometimes it's material things.

We tend to import things that people have already broken-in. Take cars. We don't make any.

Not quite true. We don't actually make a large-scale brand of our own. The closest thing we've got is a Holden, but that's a General Motors car from Australia.

We are quite wise to accept the tried and tested from overseas. After all, why go through the expense and risk of making something original here when we are such a small market?

After the last election in which Nicky Hager nearly skinned the Teflon off the PM, and especially after the unfortunate results of the Northland byelection, the PM needed to find something that might occupy New Zealanders and take their minds off things - like his fascination with "tantalising" ponytails.

So he singlehandedly decided to spend $26 million of taxpayer money on the design of a new flag.

Now the ostensible reason given for a new flag is not as a first step towards complete republican independence. The PM is not committed to that symbolic step. It's to cover his embarrassment at being mistakenly seated on formal foreign visits before an Australian flag.

His own first alternative flag suggestion was a silver fern on a black background, but the resemblance to Isis's banner made that a little unpalatable.

So he's turned to popular suggestions, starting with a survey of New Zealanders' attitudes toward the flag.

I have an historically-based skepticism about surveys. They're often subject to misuse. I can remember when the cigarette-makers trumpeted that "eight-out-of-10 doctors smoke(d) Camels". My recent newfound appreciation of Gallipoli brought me to the survey website, where it seemed eight-out-of-10 Kiwis were just short of outraged at the idea of changing the flag under which they or their ancestors had fought and sacrificed.

Despite this sampling of popular will, the project for a new flag is going ahead.

I have a suggestion, one that's consistent with our native conservatism. Any design of a new flag is likely to reference our Southern Cross constellation with stars. And we'll also need the basic colours of red, white and blue in some distribution.

Even though we are becoming a vassal state of the US under this government, I don't recommend that we simply adopt the US flag.

No. As of last week, the southern states of America, prompted by public reactions to a racist-inspired massacre of nine black churchgoers, are taking down their Confederate flags. These have been viewed by African-Americans as residual symbols of slavery and oppression.

Those upholding the flag, the symbol of the South in the Civil War of 1860-65, regard it as emblematic of the heritage of the Old South, the states who fought for the right to determine their own laws, including slavery, free of federal authority - and lost.

Those flags are being taken down from public buildings and rendered surplus.

I'm offering a modest proposal that instead of manufacturing our new flag, whatever its design, we buy up the surplus Confederate flags on the cheap, take them apart or deconstruct them using their red, white and blue fields and bars of stars in our new Kiwi flag that would represent us according to our PM.

In addition to the stars, we ought to have at least one or more sheep on the flag, to represent those willing to be corralled with this amazing discard of our own past symbols.