The Sun-Herald

WHO WE ARE: How to become younger, sexier, smarter

To discuss the dawning of The Age of the Brainy Blockbuster, go to The Tribal Mind

A column about Australia by David Dale, published in The Sun-Herald, 10/8/2008
Two sightings could be a coincidence. But three sightings is a trend, a movement, a cultural shift, a tipping point in the zeitgeist. And that is what's happening this year with Brand New Zealand. It's so hot right now that Australia needs to move fast to make the offer of national amalgamation. Letting the Kiwis become one state of Australia is not going to be enough. They're getting so big for their boots they may not even be satisfied with two states.

Recently the ABC's most popular program, Spicks and Specks, held a contest between music experts from New Zealand and music experts from Australia. Guess who won? Then the ABC's second most popular program, The Gruen Transfer, commissioned two ad agencies to develop a campaign to sell the idea of Australia invading and absorbing New Zealand, followed by a campaign designed to divert world tourists from Australia to NZ.

And while that was going on, Channel Ten was showing The Flight of the Conchords, a US hit series about two musicians trying to succeed in New York. One plotline involved the boys being refused service at a fruit cart because they were New Zealanders. Asked to explain this racism, the cart owner said he hated convict dingo-lovers. Oh, you're mistaking us for Australians, said the Conchords. The cart owner softened immediately, gave them free fruit, and joined them in making rude gestures outside the Australian consulate.

Although Aussies tend to talk about Kiwis the way the English have traditionally described the Irish, The French discuss the Belgians and the Americans discuss the Canadians, the Kiwis actually consider themselves our intellectual superiors. The former NZ Prime Minister Robert Muldoon remarked that every time a New Zealander moves to Australia, it raises the average IQ of both countries. He cleverly packaged the notion that Australians are dumb with the notion that you'd have to be stupid to leave New Zealand. We can't test the second proposition, but the Bureau of Statistics has recently provided some clues on the first.

According to the "International Comparisons" section of the bureau's Social Trends report for 2008, 21.5 per cent of the NZ population and 19.5 per cent of the Australian population are under the age of 15. So they're younger than us. They're also having more unprotected intercourse - NZ's fertility rate is 2 babies per woman, compared to our 1.8.

The real comparison comes in the literacy testing done in high schools last year. On reading skills, Australian teenagers scored 514, Kiwi teens scored 521. On mathematical literacy, it was A 520, NZ 522. And on scientific literacy, it was A 527, NZ 530.

Clearly the addition of 4 million Kiwis to Australia's population would make us younger, sexier and smarter (as well as letting us claim Sam Neill as an Australian actor and Lord of the Rings as a great Australian trilogy).

So we'll need to offer them three states. And we'd better start practising to make them welcome. Say after me: "Buy some fush 'n' chups for the cet in the het".

To discuss the amalgamation of Australia and New Zealand, go to Comments

David Dale is the author of Who We Are -- A snapshot of Australia today (Allen and Unwin). To discuss Australian attitudes, go to http://blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare.