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Australians have always enjoyed taking pot shots at Kiwi sensibilities. The sniping over Ansett is nothing new, writes Padraic P. McGuinness:
So poor little New Zealand is suffering from Kiwi-bashing, is it? Complaints about Australia's nasty bullying tendencies towards New Zealand have always been around. As a former NZ high commissioner to Australia, Laurie Francis, used to say plaintively: "Don't clobber yer cobber." But is it really true?
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What many Australians neither know nor care about is how sensitive some Kiwis are about criticism or, especially, ridicule. There are plenty of Kiwi jokes about, many of them involving sheep - to a suggestion in a light-hearted conversation about trans-Tasman relations that one day the NZ army might be a formidable force, the response was: "You mean a flock of sheep in wolves' clothing?"
Like some humourless Irish diplomats responding to Irish jokes, Kiwis are so easy to wind up that it is irresistible.
The reality is that Australians find New Zealanders far too like themselves to be really interesting. Australians can pick the differences of accent (I am always charmed when a Kiwi friend addresses me as "Peddy") but others cannot. We make jokes about them in the same way we make jokes about Tasmanians. They are so like us that tiny differences or alleged quirks are seized upon, or rather, invented, just to make them more interesting. So as well as the supposed affection of the Kiwi male for his sheep, there is an allegedly high incidence of cleft palates (or even two-headedness) in Tasmania on account of inbreeding. Pure nonsense all round, of course, but it survives only because the butt of the joke gets irritated. The differences between the populations of Australia and New Zealand are about as different as those between Sydney and Melbourne.
That comparison does point to an interesting difference. There is a harder edge, a tougher minded approach to many issues in Sydney compared with Melbourne. There you tend to get more of the politics of the warm inner glow, along with pretensions to intellectual, cultural and moral superiority. Typically, the Fabian Society - wishy-washy socialism for idealistic and ineffectual intellectuals - flourishes there while it never did in Sydney. There is a similar difference between Sydney and New Zealand. Wellington is rather like a Canberra recruited entirely from the ranks of Melbourne school teachers. Not surprisingly, the NZ economy is in trouble when such people are in government.
There are real differences cross-Tasman, of course. The ethnic origins have always been rather different, with Catholic Irish much more heavily represented in Australia. We had a higher intake of non-English-speaking-background European migrants over the past 50 years. And the Maoris (and, increasingly, Pacific Islanders) are a much more significant proportion of the population than are Aborigines (however defined) here.
The do-gooders in New Zealand are, as in Melbourne, much more determined to get things wrong so they will feel good inside than are the majority of Australians, so they have set up disastrous institutions like the Waitangi Tribunal which fritter money away on compensation for past wrongs in such a way as to make the present day situation even worse. They are still strongly affected by old-fashioned pacifism, so they think that they need not spend money on their own defence. Traditional hardware may indeed not be the answer but, as recent events have demonstrated, spending on intelligence and counter-terrorism is likely to be the key to national security in the future.
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Substitute Wellington with Ottawa, New Zealand with Canada, Kiwis with Canucks, and interchange Australia with the US and Australians/Americans, we get a pretty decent mocking of Canada as well. The only difference is to see that Canada has about the same proportion of "founding white peoples" (British/Irish and French) as the British/Irish descent Australians, but there seem to be fewer Irish descent Canadians than Irish-descent Australians. I have noticed that the more purely British stock probably made Canada more fond of High Tory paternalism.
To the Canadians who feel slighted by the "insults", sorry mate but we don't care whether you like it or not. Facts are facts LOL.
Don't know if you have heard of a very famous cricket match between Australia and New Zealand. It was a one day match and there was one ball to go. The Kiwis only had to hit a 6 to win. So what did the rotten Aussies do? They bowled the last ball underarm. Piggy Muldoon was NZ Prime Minister at the time and he said it was appropriate that the Aussie team wore yellow. Unlike the Canadians, the Kiwis and Aussies have no pretensions of moral superiority. I wish Roy and HG would take a look at Canada. I am sure they would find some good material.