Anzac flag burner under fire

A student activist who burned a New Zealand flag to protest against Anzac Day has been described as an attention-seeker.

Victoria University student Joel Cosgrove, 23, poured turpentine over a New Zealand flag last week, set it alight and stamped on it as it burned, later posting a video of it on YouTube.

The former student association president had planned to burn a flag at a dawn ceremony on Anzac Day, but the protest fizzled after Cosgrove and his followers realised large numbers of police were attending.

The fiery protest happened outside a Victoria University Student Association meeting instead.

Cosgrove said he believed Anzac Day partly glorified war and did not achieve its "Lest we forget" objective.

"The whole focus of Anzac Day never seems to come out in any positive action against war," said the media and women's studies student.

Cosgrove, a self-described Workers Party-Marxist-Communist-women's rights activist, added that his protest was aimed at exposing the "imperialism" behind conflicts since the Boer War.

"New Zealanders have been involved in a whole bunch of wars - World War I, Vietnam, Afghanistan - where we have been party to the invasion of other countries oppressing other people, been accomplices in the murder of millions of innocent people, whose only crime is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Cosgrove said his grandfather Jack, who died in the mid-1990s, fought in World War II before being captured in Greece.

His gripe was not with the soldiers who fought, he said, but the politicians who sent them there.

His views have been derided by the Returned Services Association and Labour MP Clayton Cosgrove, who Joel Cosgrove described as a distant relative.

The MP - who said he knew of no family relationship and would take no pride in it - said his surname-sake needed to "read some history".

"Our veterans didn't die in places all over the world so people could spit on flags, burns flags or bare their buttocks. They fought, died and were wounded to give us these freedoms. He should get a life and pay respect."

RSA president Robin Klitscher said Cosgrove was only able to burn the flag because of freedom won by those who had fought for New Zealand.

"If people have to go to such great lengths to draw attention to themselves, there must be something wrong with them in the first place."

Joel Cosgrove's latest stunt comes after a string of antics that included wearing a T-shirt to graduation proclaiming: "I love my penis".

Cosgrove said he had come to realise the T-shirt might not have been appropriate.