New Zealanders will be given a choice between three ferns and a koru for a possible new flag, after the government-appointed panel published its final shortlist of four alternative designs.

The shortlist was announced by the deputy prime minister Bill English at the national museum Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington on Tuesday morning.

Three show variations on the silver fern design known to be the preference of prime minister John Key: one in black and white, and two paired with the Southern Cross constellation. The fourth option is a koru, or unfurling fern frond, in black and white.

The New Zealand public will now rank these four designs in order of preference in a binding postal referendum to be held between 20 November 20 and 11 December. A second referendum, to be held in March next year, will pit the preferred alternative against the current flag.



If the outcome is a new flag, it will be adopted six months later.

Reaction to the shortlisted four at the hashtag #nzflag was by and large disparaging, reflecting a general sense of fatigue with the process and disgruntlement at the lack of transparency.

“The #nzflag selection is like an ad campaign: ‘Which of these cars would you like to buy?’ rather than ‘Would you like to buy a car?’” tweeted one New Zealander.

The 12-person flag consideration panel selected the four alternative designs from the longlist of 40 it announced on 10 August; it did not consult with the public on either decision.

One longlisted design – the “Modern Hundertwasser”, inspired by architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s 1983 “Koru Flag” – was subsequently deemed ineligible for consideration following a copyright claim from the Hundertwasser Non-Profit Foundation.

The initial longlist of 40 was selected from nearly 10,300 submissions designed by members of the public and uploaded to a government website, the more outlandish of which attracted global media attention.

The shortlisted four designs are Silver Fern (Black & White) by Alofi Kanter from Auckland; Koru, by Andrew Fyfe of Wellington; and Silver Fern (Red, White and Blue) and Silver Fern (Black, White and Blue), both by Kyle Lockwood, a Wellingtonian now based in Melbourne.



The panel chairman Professor John Burrows said the panel’s decision had been guided by the responses it received from thousands of people about what New Zealand “stands for”, as well as its own criteria.

On top of those who attended the 25 public meetings held across the country, more than one million people had been engaged in the process by social media.