G'day you mob, Pete here, and this is another episode of Aussie English, the number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to learn Australian English. So, today I have a GOSS episode for you where I sit down with my old man, my father, Ian Smithson. And we talk about the week's news, whether locally down under here in Australia or non-locally overseas.
in other parts of the world. Okay. And we sometimes also talk about whatever comes to mind, right. If we can think of something interesting to share with you guys related to us or Australia, we also talk about that in The Gospel. So, these episodes are specifically designed to try and give you content about many different topics.
where we're obviously speaking in English and there are multiple people having a natural and spontaneous conversation in English. So, it is particularly good to improve your listening skills. In order to complement that, though, I really recommend that you join the podcast membership or the academy membership at AussieEnglish.com.au where you will get access to the full transcript.
of these episodes, the PDFs, the downloads, and you can also use the online PDF reader to read and listen at the same time. Okay. So, if you really, really want to improve your listening skills fast. Get the transcript. Listen and read at the same time. Keep practising. And that is the quickest way to level up your English. Anyway, I've been rabbiting on a bit. I've been talking a bit. Let's just get into this episode, guys. Smack the bird. Dad. Pete, hang on. Gotta do it.
This one is not beer, though. No, we're taking it easy. I'm going to be rude. I've got to do the slurp to get rid of the dregs off the top of the can before I drip them on my shirt. What are the similarities and differences between Australia and New Zealand? Yeah. It's so funny. I open it up on Reddit. This is under Ask an Australian. The original post disappeared. All the comments are still there. I'm not a Reddit person, but it happens every now and then.
Yeah, the original post has disappeared, but all of the replies are still there. Yeah, I know. It's a bit of a bizarre thing. Anyway, what would you say? Prior to me reading out any of these... The Exint. Yeah, any of these ones here. And apologies to my New Zealand friends. They're about my... They probably do the same for us. No, New Zealanders can't do an Australian accent.
Australians can't do a New Zealand accent. Yeah, that's it. That's all they'll be saying. And they both get accused of being South African, which is an ultimate insult in accents. Have you heard what a South African accent sounds like? Well, there's an English South African and then there's the African accent.
Yeah, it's a weird one. Anyway, what are some of these similarities? What would you say are the similarities? Are there more similarities than differences? Well, depending on where you put the stake in the ground to start with. If you're talking about... what are there, 200 and something countries in the world? 195. then you just made that up? No, I read that today. Well, and then there are some principalities and things that probably don't count as a country. But anyway.
Let's call it 200, round it at 200 or 195. Hey, Siri. Yeah, don't mention the S word. It's all right. Mine's in Portuguese, so it doesn't answer. Oh, yeah. What's Portuguese? It'd be EIE Siri. Nah, it's not doing it. So if you were to say... How close is any other country to Australia? New Zealand is by far the closest. Isn't Indonesia or Papua New Guinea? No, not in geography. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Gotcha. Papua New Guinea is the closest, Indonesia second.
Well, East Timor, then Indonesia. I'm not sure whether East Timor or West Timor is closer to Australia because... The Timor Island is sort of parallel to the Australian coast. So it's probably East Timor and then Indonesia. and then New Zealand geographically. But in terms of culture, then they are clearly most similar. The single biggest difference other than me taking the piss with the accent, and look, a lot of people can't tell the difference.
you know, a lot of non-Australians. But this is me and Canadians. I find that so difficult to pick apart, like at least the West Coast American accent and Canadians. Yeah, it's harder to pick at somebody from... british columbia and california yeah yeah yeah like in vancouver you go to well forget the french speaking ones because you can pick somebody from quebec or a french speaker from new brunswick easily or and you can pick somebody from nova scotia
And Newfoundland is completely different. They have just the weirdest accent. But, yeah, so there are bigger variations in North American accents than there are in Australia or New Zealand. New Zealand's accents tend to get more...
more different from Australia the further south you go in New Zealand. Yeah. They get more Scottish sounding. Not really. That's right. I remember we had a New Zealand teacher who would always say a wee bit. Oh yeah, wee, that's very New Zealand. A wee something, as in a little bit, and it was... I imagine she's from the south part where there's loads of Scots because no one says that in Australian English. But it's a very New Zealand thing and a very Scottish thing to say.
But I think apart from the accent thing, which by far the biggest difference is the... It's hard to say indigenous culture because I don't think the Maori even claim to be indigenous in New Zealand because they're Polynesian. They've only been there about 800 years. And so they are Polynesian. They identify as Polynesian rather than New Zealanders, but clearly they've got an 800-year history of having migrated to... to New Zealand but the Maori culture is much more part of
mainstream culture than our Aboriginal culture is in Australia. But that's no surprise because there is about one third of the New Zealand population is Maori or... Pacific Islander, other Polynesians, as opposed to roughly 2% to 3% in Australia identified being Indigenous Australians. So there's no surprise there. But they also have the... they're the only semi in this case, but Indigenous people in the world who have never been conquered.
Yeah. Well, they have a treaty with the... Yeah, the Treaty of Waitangi. Well, it's a treaty with Queen Victoria. Queen Victoria, okay. Before New Zealand, while New Zealand was still a colony. Yeah. And the Treaty of Waitangi... set out that Maori would have a... legitimate status within the population of New Zealand. Aren't they the only sort of Indigenous group to have ever had that with the British Empire? Yeah, and they're the only one who's never been conquered. Yeah.
Because they still have that thing of we are a legitimate part of. And they never got defeated, never got shuffled off into, you know... tribal areas or anything like that. It was just part of their culture. Now, there is clearly... They were very fierce warriors, though. They were. They defend themselves well. Yeah, but they didn't have guns. They were fierce warriors. At least initially, yeah. But, yeah, so, I mean, in New Zealand, the...
A lot of New Zealanders speak at least some Maori. They can not necessarily have a detailed conversation, but they will introduce themselves or, you know, do those sort of things. It's a bilingual country, a true bilingual country in that almost all public signage now is in English and in Maori. So that's...
The clear distinct difference, I think, between Australians and New Zealand is that. But you couldn't do that here the same way because we have so many different languages and everything. It's not a single language. And there's no written language. Yeah. You know, Polynesians developed. They didn't have written language originally, but they developed written language as English, French, Spanish. Portuguese people started to land in Polynesian territories around the Pacific.
they developed the ability to, you know, well, not the ability, they didn't need it, but the Europeans wanted to write down that language and so there became a standardised way of writing out that language. Whereas... The Indigenous languages in Australia have never had a written thing. It's always been. You can look at the number of ways that the Wadawurrung people in the region are referred to. Wadawurrung itself has...
any number of different spellings. And pronunciations. And pronunciations. And so... But you're right, like, what is it, 600 different language groups in Australian. Dialects, yeah, there'd be like 200 languages, or at least there were prior to a whole bunch of it. Yeah, so there is no common language. The thing that always blows my mind about Australian linguistics, I believe there's 20, I think it's like 29 language families.
And there's only about six in the rest of the world. Well, I don't know what the exact number is, but like Europe would have something like maybe three or four. Yeah. So like, you know. Russian, even Hindi and English are all in the exact same language family, Indo-European, right?
You would have the Basque language family because that's like an isolate. And then you would have the Uralic languages like Hungarian, Estonian and Finnish. That's another one. But that's about it. Whereas the indigenous... languages in Australia. There's like apparently, yeah, 20 something of them. And most of them are up in the Northern Territory. The whole of the continent outside of pretty much that Northern Territory is all one single language group. They didn't have...
While they had the most severe changes in seasonal climate, in terms of wet season, dry season, as we would call it, they were many, certainly top end of the Northern Territory, many Indigenous people would say they're either seven to eight or nine seasons. But they weren't migratory in a sense that all the seasons did was change the food and stuff that was available to them, whereas many places in southeastern Australia and southwestern Australia...
people had to move around. Yeah. A lot more. All right. So I fibbed. It's there's. Oh, no, that's Victoria. Yeah, there may be as many as 13. Either way, there's a lot of language families and there's 250 languages and 800 dialects in Australia. But that's, you know, the biggest reason is because of the amount of time. Yeah, where you've got 60,000 years to do it. And they lived in small groups.
So they were sort of by definition isolated in a sense of their day-to-day activities. And yes, they would trade with groups that were close by. But they would end up with a different dialect because they're effectively isolated most of the time. Yeah. But, yeah, so I think that's the biggest difference is that... Yeah. cultural difference. Australia is, while we say it is a multicultural country, it is now, but our underlying culture...
from the time of European settlement has been British. New Zealand has had the same thing, settled at the same time. but the Maori culture sits there equivalent to the British culture. Yes. So both countries are very multicultural in the sense that Of the 195 countries, I'll guarantee 195 of them are represented in Australia and New Zealand. Probably close to, yeah, you would imagine. But our language and our basic underlying culture is...
typically British in Australia, British and Maori in New Zealand. What are some of the differences, like, economics-wise, it seems like... as expensive, if not worse, than Australia. And as a result, we have... And their wages are lower. Yeah, heaps of New Zealanders every single year are coming to Australia. They're in a massive crisis of cost of living. It's the old gag of what's the single big... second biggest city in New Zealand Australia the biggest is Auckland which has
more than a third of the population, nearly 40% of the population of the country. Let's see. But there's a half a million people who were born in New Zealand who live in Australia. So let's see how many migrants 586,000 as of 2022. Yeah. And their population, what is it, 4 million? 4 million. Yeah. Smaller than Melbourne or Sydney. But I guess they can come here without a visa and they can pretty much do anything. Yeah, and Australia can do the same thing. We have, you know...
You can go without visas. You automatically get government access to government rights like unemployment benefits, health care, all that sort of stuff, free education. at schools, all of that is You even get healthcare and everything like that. But I imagine, do they draw the line at like...
You know, really, so you can even get in the Dole. You have to register yourself as an Australian resident. Yeah. You don't just walk over here and go, I've been here for three weeks, give me the Dole. Yeah, I assume the difference was that you would just never be able to get government care. No, basically, you can...
register yourself an australian can go to new zealand and just say i'm going to stay here register yourself as a new zealand resident new zealanders can do the same thing in australia and then you're as much so you're a you know yeah you are not an Australian citizen, but you're automatically an Australian resident. That's pretty crazy if our tax dollars will go to non-citizens though. Yeah, but they're working.
Yeah. Well, and there is a clause. They come here to get jobs. Yeah, there's a clause in the constitution that says that New Zealand can join as a state of Australia if it wants. Correct. Which is crazy. Yeah. I wonder how many other... Originally, New Zealand was part of the original discussion about Australia becoming a... you know a country when we you know federation um now they chose not to stay alone but it was part of the original discussion didn't go very far but
Let's see, I wonder why New Zealand chose to not become. One of the reasons that New Zealand chose not to join Australia was due to perceptions that the indigenous Maori population would suffer as a result. Yeah, fair enough. And also the distance, one and a half thousand kilometres away. Yeah. Yeah. You think Tasmania's isolated. Yeah, I know. But I guess, yeah, you wonder how much it would have made a difference economically, though.
If it had joined up for the people of New Zealand, I guess, you know, who are at the moment at least doing worse on average. It seems if you were to compare things like wage and all that sort of stuff. Anyway, let's go through some of these comments. So, Aussies and Kiwis like to act like we hate each other.
But put us in a room full of other English-speaking countries and we'll probably gravitate towards each other than the rest of the people in there until sport comes on. Yeah. And I use the analogy of... It's like two siblings. Yeah. you can shit on each other fight like hell in the backyard yeah
But if the kid next door jumps the fence, all of a sudden it's two against one. Yeah, that's true, isn't it? It's so funny how I imagine this is not unique to us. It's just a cultural thing where it's like the... the friend of my friend the friend of my enemy is my enemy you know that sort of thing or the enemy of my enemy is my friend sight thing where you
You may have issues with your neighbour, but then when there's another external actor or force or something, it's kind of like, no, actually, we're a team now, and that's much worse. It's the two against one all of a sudden. Yeah, I imagine Canada and America must have that to some degree. No, it's not. You know what I reckon? No.
Well, Americans don't give a monkeys about Canada. Or anyone else, really. I don't even think about them, except Trump who wants to create the 51st state. He's totally saying all that crap. to get through all this other stuff. It's just a deflection. He wants everyone to ignore what's really going on.
But Canadians, you cannot use that analogy. I've used that analogy with lots of my Canadian friends. I used to work for a Canadian company and spent a quarter of my life in the US and Canada for 10 years. And they just look at you and go, nah. And using sport as the example, most Australians who are interested in sport... Other than very specific things about we always want to beat England in cricket, you know, but anything where, you know, you go to the Olympics.
We want to make sure that we beat New Zealand. But if New Zealand is playing anybody else, we'll bury him for New Zealand. Canadians? Anybody could have beat America. Anybody. They don't care. They don't care. If North Korea beat America. Whoa. Suck it. So Canadians just don't have that same relationship. Interesting. Yeah. Because I don't think... Well, I think, firstly, there's the...
Canada and the US are contiguous in that they share a border. And it's a very long border. I think it's the longest border in the world. Maybe Russia and China. Between two countries. Between two countries. But it's also that... The US has always been the economic big brother. of Canada in population and probably 20 or 30 times the size in economy. So Canada has always had to fight for economic independence. And it's taken for years.
to have decades, centuries of the development of those two countries to actually have a fair trading room between them. Now, they threw Mexico into it as well, which makes sense too, but it was all US-driven. Canada have always wanted it. Mexico had always wanted it. The US are going, no, no, no, no. And then all of a sudden it made sense. Whereas Australia and New Zealand have always had that, you know, we just treat you as us, you know, politically and economically.
The next one, this is funny, you will find that Australians tend to live in Australia Whereas Kiwis tend to live in Australia. Yeah, yeah. There aren't many, like you said, what, 500 and something thousand New Zealand immigrants to Australia. I wonder, like, which country... There aren't more. There aren't many more. There aren't many Australians going to live in New Zealand. I wonder if...
If New Zealand is the country that the most Aussies live in outside of Australia. No, it's not. The UK, then the United States, then New Zealand, then Canada. So 160,000 Australians live in the UK as of 2021. 100,000 as of 2019 in the United States. and yeah, 76,000. In New Zealand. As opposed to 500,000 coming the other way. Yeah. It would be a nice place to go, but I imagine it would wear off pretty quickly where it would get very cold and... New Zealand. Yeah, expensive. It's not cold.
well it depends where you live i guess yeah or colder or comes like melbourne doesn't get hot but doesn't get cold in winter yeah Firstly, Australia and New Zealand are very similar. So much so, there is an almost sibling-like relationship between the two. There you go. We've already talked about that. As someone else... touched on though, New Zealand indigenous culture has embraced a whole lot more than Australia does its own.
Although, again, we just don't have one culture and that's the issue. I think if we did have just one Indigenous culture here in Australia, it would be a completely different story. You know, you'd have this language taught in schools, everyone would be a much more... all over the country would know about this one culture shared, all that sort of stuff.
So yeah, Australia is huge by comparison, being approximately 29 times the size of New Zealand. New Zealand's climate is fairly consistent across the country. However, in Australia, it varies wildly. widely across the country. Or wildly, depending on how you want to look at it. And wildlife between the two is quite different too.
Yes. Yeah, I think a lot of these do tend to be this rivalry, and then they talk about, like, Maori Indigenous differences. But it is interesting, isn't it? Yeah. Geographically... Very different, obviously, Australia's size. There are deserts in New Zealand. There'll be some spots that you can sort of call deserts, but they're not very big. You can walk across them. We are nowhere near as mountainous as they are, and they're much more geologically active.
Yes. You know, constantly got volcanic activity and earthquakes going all the time. I know. It's absolutely nuts. Whereas it's very rare in Australia. Well, and that would be one of the big ones there. Skiing would shit all over ours. The amount of like... huge mountains they have that you can go skiing on and the snow cover and all that sort of stuff. And being further south as well, in the South Island, being further south than the Australian ski resort.
it means they last longer too. And winter doesn't last very long. Yeah, you get a handful of months, right? And they would have more natural disasters, I imagine, at least in terms of like earthquakes being one of them that would happen a lot more frequently. Volcanic activity. Yeah. And it's funny, yeah, someone else here says like, we make fun of each other. You cannot make fun of our cousins. Yes. But yeah, it is interesting, isn't it? Because we both come from like the Brit.
But we don't really have that kind of same attitude towards the Brits, seeing them as like a sibling or a cousin or anything, more like a parent kind of relationship where we kind of... There's not that same kind of don't you talk about the Brits that way. It's like, oh, yeah, fuck them, you know. Pretty much. I mean, that's not to say we don't love, you know, the Brits at times. If you met say like an American who was shitting all over New Zealand, you would probably be like, mate,
Yeah, cut it out. Cut it out, pull your thumb out. Whereas if they were shooting on the Brits, you'd probably be like, yeah, yeah. At least present your argument. Yeah, I think I feel like we would probably come to Canada's aid. in that fight a little bit more than we would Britain too. Like if you hurt Americans. Canada would be the other one. Don't talk about them that way, mate. Canada would be the other one, the other country that would be similar to Australia or New Zealand.
And it's the same thing. It's a British colony that It never went down the United States track of fighting for independence. Its independence has just sort of evolved. We're still part of the British Commonwealth, but we're effectively independent. But I think they're similar, right? They have this reputation of being...
pathologically friendly and nice. Oh, Canadians are pathologically nice. And they just don't have that kind of American- And British to some degree, that kind of arrogance of superiority, that kind of like, freedom, we're number one. or the British kind of like that upper class kind of tinge to it quite often. That used to be my standard line instead of having spent a lot of time in the US.
And I've probably said this before, you know, that Americans are born with a tattoo on their forehead that says, I was born in the greatest country in the world. And it's written in reverse. They see it in the mirror every morning.
And I joke about that with them and they go, of course it's the greatest country in the world. I said, you haven't been to New Zealand. You haven't been anywhere else. And I'm not even being parochial about that by saying, you know, because I'm an Australian. I said, seriously, you haven't been to New Zealand. Name anything. But you wonder how much... And they all look at me and go,
What are you talking about? Just name something. It doesn't matter. New Zealand wins. You wonder how much, though, a big part of their kind of self-arrogance and... love of their own country as being number one is like taught through high school and primary school right because they have so much more of a kind of patriotic upbringing yeah and that comes from you know fighting for their independence yeah yeah that that they they grew up
Beyond the War of Independence, Americans grew up fighting to be free and independent and proud of it. Yeah. Almost no other country in the world has done that to the same extent. To have to fight for their existence that way. And again, it's one of those things. A lot of countries have had wars to remain in existence. Yes. But to fight off your... the country that created you.
Almost nobody else has done it. So correct me if I'm wrong in the comments. I'm sure there's other situations, but it is one of those interesting things. Yeah, just how different culturally America is from, I think, any other English-speaking country, right? They just do have their own really unique view of themselves and, I think, too, of the rest of the world. You know, I think a lot of Americans, you wonder if you would have sort of surveyed the average American how much...
they would know about the rest of the world compared to people from other parts of the world. Oh, yeah. Like if you were to interview people from Norway or Australia or Canada or France. Well, yeah, I think... And there's some sort of semi-unique parts of that. Because Australia and America have got a very similar, in a sense, of geography in that we are huge. as a landmass. Australia doesn't have a big population.
But, you know, so your average American, whatever that means, because there are so many different places and different sorts of cultures and things within the United States, but your average American. The stereotype, the cliche, doesn't travel outside the United States. Yeah.
You don't have to because there are so many other places you can go in the United States. And that's the weird thing too. It's not that I don't travel. Any American you meet in Australia is almost certainly going to be a Democrat. Yeah. And very worldly. And really nice. And not like guns. You know, like you're going to meet these Americans and you're like, oh, these are the ones that get escape velocity. Yes, exactly. Flip that round to Europe. How many countries are there in here? 30-ish.
You can travel from one side of Europe to the other in less time than it takes to cross the United States or Australia. For like a hundred bucks. And you can go to another country in... If you're in the middle of Germany, you can go to three or four other countries in a half a day's drive. Yeah, it's nuts. And Germany is... Second biggest country, take out Russia, second biggest. I think France or Germany are about close, but go to the middle of France.
Half a day's drive, you're out of France. Yeah. Lots of Europeans just travel. They almost all speak multiple languages. You're going to be aware. Yeah. Because they're constant, and certainly in your generation, in the last 30 to 40 years with the European common community, the European common... The EU, yeah. That they...
They are effectively one economy. So, you know, it's free trade, free travel. It would be interesting to know more, I guess, about European countries and how they view themselves like to one another because there must be so many of these types of... Australia, New Zealand type relationships between neighbouring countries, all worse. I think they're all heavy rivalries.
And those rivalries have got longstanding geopolitical history of the border between... modern Germany and Poland has been so flexible over even just the last 200 years. France and Germany, the same thing. But England and France through invading one another and taking over each other. But then you would imagine the Scandinavian countries like, you know, Sweden, Norway and Denmark, you would imagine they're probably a lot more.
sibling type relationships between them than they are, say, like America and Australia type, you know, sort of like, again, it's almost like this domineering kind of stepdad parent kind of relationship, right, with America, whereas like... Great Britain's the mother and we have this incredibly large, violent stepdad that kind of protects us but also forces us to do whatever it wants.
Anyway, that's probably a fun place to end. Oh, yeah. You'll have to let us know, guys, if you've traveled to New Zealand and have also spent time in Australia, what you think. The differences are like and if you have... If you're from another country where you have these types of relationships with neighbouring countries. Yeah. It's always interesting to know about those sort of, you know, situations. Anyway, thanks for hanging out. We'll chat next time. Bye. See ya.