Air NZ’s Luxon on the flag

The Herald reports:

Luxon spent 16 years living overseas and several years in Canada during the Canadian flag referendum.

In 1965 when they changed their flag, there was a lot of the same debate that was now happening in New Zealand.

“One of the things was, is the maple leaf and in our case, the silver fern, an overused logo or emblem. The reality is it has become a singular identifier of Canada and all Canadians and I think in many ways the silver fern will work like that for us here as well.”

Luxon said Canada’s transition was quite messy but that was the nature of such debates.

Countries like Canada with its maple leaf and Japan with its rising sun were easily identified by their iconic flags and Luxon said the fern was on par with those global icons.

“We’re in a world of 196 countries, 7.3 billion people. As a person who has spent 16 years living overseas and leads a company that does a lot of export business, I just think it helps us stand out a little bit better,” he said.

I doubt 1% of the world could recognise the NZ flag as representing New Zealand. However I’d say the maple leaf flag and rising sun flags have massive recognition globally as the flags of Canada and Japan. We have a chance to have our national symbol of the silver fern fly on our flag around the world. Or we can stick with a flag that like 30 others has a union jack on it.