Gareth Morgan has finally announced the winner of its flag design competition.
Out of the about 1,000 designs, one emerged victorious, winning a prize of $20,000.
The winning flag was made by Studio Alexander. Headed by Grant Alexander, they came up with a design entitled “Wā kāinga / Home.”
The flag is looks clean and simple, and embodies a profound meaning: there’s a white space and three triangles: the red symbolises Maori who invited Treaty partners to share the land, the blue triangle symbolises the heritage of British settlers, and the black triangle stands for multiculturalism.
The contest was set up by Gareth Morgan because he believes that the current flag should be changed.
“It is a defaced British naval ensign, an artifact of a colonial era and doesn’t reflect modern Aotearoa New Zealand. It is an insult to Maoridom, and all other immigrants for that matter,” he explained.
He added that the current design is “a flag of convenience invented by the colonising power, a flag to enable it to avoid liability for the Maori or New Zealand Wars of the 1860s.”
The winning flag will become Morgan’s entry to the crowdsourced design process by the Flag Consideration Panel. According to Morgan, the competition came into fruition when he noticed that “the design community has been a bit offside with the panel.”
The 1,000 entries was entered to the Flag Consideration’s Panel’s design process, which ended on July 16 with around 8,000 entries. Four will be chosen on November 20 to December 11 to go before the public in a referendum–the winner of this would go up against the current flag, in a second referendum on March 3 to March 24, 2016.
Morgan hopes that the Government would pay attention to the results of the competition.
