Sick of being mistaken for Australians, and increasingly removed from their British colonial heritage, some New Zealanders are campaigning to ditch their national flag, perhaps in favour of a new, Maori-influenced design.
Last week a campaign group, the NZflag.com Trust, began canvassing the public and collecting signatures in the capital, Wellington, as well as Auckland and three other cities.
The group has to collect 300,000 signatures in order to force a referendum on the issue. Ideally, that would be held in conjunction with the next general election. A date for the poll has not been set but it must be held before September.
One of the backers of the campaign is Catherine Tizard, a former governor-general who insists there is no contradiction between her past role as the British queen's representative in New Zealand and her desire to abandon the flag and the Union Jack it incorporates.
'The issue is not one of forgetting our British heritage, it's one of defining New Zealand's identity - what symbolises us as a modern independent nation,' said Dame Catherine, who was governor-general from 1990 to 1996.
'There's nothing of New Zealand in the present flag. The Union Jack is British and the Southern Cross is common to the whole southern hemisphere. It's absurd that we should have a flag that is so similar to that of our next-door neighbour that people get the two mixed up.'