We have spent the last week in Australia and have considered the differences and similarities between the countries, as far as one can do that in a short visit to one part of a country. I was thinking about the contrasts, given  friends of ours have encouraged their son to take a job in Australia because they don’t like the path they consider New Zealand is headed down – particularly in terms of race relations. Without a doubt New Zealand is changing, like every other place in the world. Is his concern about significant change, or is it more about how people's opinions shift as they age, feeling the world was a better place when they were young? And they were better people. Young people these days, they don't have much ... gumption?

My first, prosaic, observation about Australia is that it’s hot! For me, hot is not good. Hot makes me feel like I’m turning into human sludge and will shortly need to be scraped off the floor, having turned a nasty green-brown colour. Today, I finally put a bomb under myself and cycled 45km to Byron Bay on a sub-optimal route (the only route) including a motorway (at least there's a bike lane on it). I felt better after cycling, but I could understand why I saw precisely zero other cyclists en route. This is not a place for cyclists, young or old.

 
Australia does not have its race relations all sorted. Does anywhere? At Billinudgel Pub, a man behind me was talking with his mate about support given to aboriginal people. “We should just all be the same, like when I signed my Navy papers' he said. "I don’t know who to vote for. These lefties are going to bankrupt the country, the Liberals don’t have much to offer, but I don’t agree with the far right either. I’m not one of them.” There were many f…s in his sentences that I haven’t transliterated – at least one f... per clause. The speaker could consider linguistic diversity as another type of diversity to aspire to.A next observation is that Australians are friendly. Not saying New Zealanders aren’t friendly! But it has been really easy to engage in conversations with Australians in queues, or on the street, shopping, or kayaking up a river. People seem keen to chat, even when you might be scaring their fish away. We had a similar impression of Slovenia. In contrast, New Zealand life seems to have become so 'fast' that people are often annoyed when their queue is slowed by interactions at the till.

Australians do a lot of driving, even more than NZers. Oz is big so you have to drive to get places. As a result there is a huge roading network, which means a lot of maintenance; maintenance appears to be getting on top of the roading authorities in some places. The roads damaged by the Lismore floods a year ago very far from fixed; frequent potholes leapt out of nowhere and hit our tyres on the country route we took to Ballina (okay, the potholes probably were stationery).

That’s a similarity Oz and NZ wish they didn’t have – big floods. The Lismore floods topped out at 15 metres above normal river levels. That’s insane – a five story building! The prediction was for a flood of 10 metres – a ‘normal’ flood. However, the rainfall was more intense than predicted, creating unprecedented flooding. In Northland, Auckland, East Cape and Hawkes Bay, we also discovered our weather predictions are excellent for wind, but not so excellent for rainfall. In both Oz and NZ, infrastructure recovery will be very long term. One wonders what 'recovery' means, in the end. Can we afford to keep 'building back better'? When will people's enthusiasm to rebuild wear out? When a flood (or other natural disaster) hits an area twice in quick succession?

In the Ballina-Byron Bay-Coolangatta area, one of the effects of the floods has been many dehoused people living in vans, or cars. One wonders whether mobile living will become a permanent solution given that, of the 6000 affected houses, it's a year on but only 250 have been offered buyouts. Around 2000 houses need to be bought out, 2000 rebuilt and 2000 renovated, using an $800 million from government. It doesn’t require a lot of maths to figure out $800 million won’t cover all those costs.

It's clear there are plenty of similarities between NZ and Oz, even if both countries might like to think themselves superior to the other. When one listens to the national radio in Australia, it's hard to remember that you aren't listening to RadioNZ. Common topics include houses being too expensive, not enough housing for workers, not enough workers to fill the jobs available, rising food prices, rising fuel prices, how to cope with increased frequency of natural disasters, how the upcoming generation has mental health issues and wonders what their future will look like, whether we can 'afford' to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to reduce rates of global warming ...

However, unlike New Zealand, Australia has Gumption. New Zealand has No. 8 wire (though it feels a lot rarer than it once was), but we don’t have Gumption. I saw ‘Gumption’ on a shopping list, between Tomatoes and Lettuce. I thought the shopping list writer was having a flight of fancy. I scanned down the list looking for Inspiration, or Perseverance, but there was only Gumption. It was Chris who pulled the Gumption (as pictured above) out of the sink cupboard. Oh, if only Gumption was so easy to acquire!