In 2014 the New Zealand government announced its intention to hold a referendum on adopting a new flag. Personally I had no confidence in the process from the beginning, and was to be proven right about how the whole thing would unfold. That's another story, and this is not about politics.

I had had an idea for what a new New Zealand flag might look like, and had this idea in my head since my late teenage years. Part of the process of finding a new flag was to have open submissions online for all New Zealand citizens. While I didn't particularly like the process, I decided to add my own submission despite the fact that it didn't have a silver fern on it...

The original idea was more basic, which I drew in Adobe Illustrator. It was one colour, a deep green, to represent New Zealand's greenery. A wave, reminiscent of a koru passed diagonally through it. It was a basic design, which I showed to my girlfriend Victoria, who suggested it was a bit too bland. Perhaps another colour and perhaps stretch the wave right across the flag.

Together we chose a shade of blue, to represent either the sky or clean water, but we settled on the sky because that tied into the Rangi and Papa creation mythology. The wave became a Koru, but it also represented a long white cloud. The colours were chosen from the Pantone colour library and needed to look earthy. I saw no need to have the usual red, white, blue or black.

Once we had something that looked almost complete, I added the southern cross somewhat jokingly, about the need for something obvious for average people to relate to. But when I put it on we both thought that actually, that made the flag work.

I submitted it and of course, not having the network of influential contacts and the design not having a kiwi or a silver fern, not having royal colours, not being black, it sat among the other 10,000 entries that you had to wade through and never went further. I do believe that it's a great flag, and just needs to entered slowly into public consciousness, which is a project I'm going to take up soon.