If you could link to a study done in Aus with the same methodology perhaps you could make a similar point.

“…..Participation in Sport” states that 158,100 New Zealand adults participated in Rugby Union in the previous twelve months ……”

The Australian figure is for all ages because according to the ARU annual report in 2008

http://www.rugby.com.au/aru/images/aru_annual_report_2008_revised_reduced.pdf

37,179 adults played Rugby in Australia

Their are a lot more rugby players in New Zealand hence their great success at the game

Cheers

Don’t worry repub, if the fires get out of control like last last year then you can be sure NZ will send over fire fighters to help……………….thats just what mates do

So are you saying we are the same culturally – then why are you not a state if that’s the case?

The differneces are too numerouse to expound on here but if you knew your history it shoud be obvious i would have thought

Ora

No not all. Much of what I have expressed here is in fact a widely held sentiment amongst Australians, it’s just that most Ozzies are way to polite to air it.

Hate is a strong word but then NZers should know more about that emotion, since NZ holds a collectively obsessive disdain of all things Ozzie. You are indeed a constant source of bemusemnt to us posumms, since on one hand you spend an inordinate amount of time piously deriding this country and it’s people, all the while coveting everything about us.

When rarely challenged over this affliction of national proportion, you simply spit the dummy, villifying the messenger rather than taking any of it on board.; truth be told, you mob spend way too much energy scrutinising Australia when you would be well advised to start putting your own house in order.

No worries about the Jo Blakes etc however we are again up aginst it re. the fires.

Good day and good luck

What’s the difference between New Zealanders and Australians culturally?

What I’d say is don’t hate us because your not us!!!

have a good evening mate I hope the snakes and spiders dont bite

If i happened to know you, yes then i reckon we potentially could be mates.

Our countries are not ‘matey’ in that respect and I am sure you know exactly what I am trying to convey here.

I like your style however, cobber, digger blue….

Cheers

Speak for yourself ‘Mate’

Conversely the Amin of League in NZ is very ordinary from what many are saying however this has NOT rendered NZ un competitive with Oz, on the contrary I would say Kiwis are superior in League presently, especially considering their playing numbers, admin, structural apparatus and grass roots.

So how does that explain Unions lack of pedigree in Oz? I still maintain this has much to do with where it sits in the national sporting psyche, which is very low compared to other codes. NZ are still devout in their support of Union which does translate to how they perform compared to Oz. There is absolutely no doubting that Union is huge proportionately speaking in NZ, compared to Australia and I maintain that is the difference.

Cheers

This was actually referring to Australia’s lack of ‘overt’ patriotism, drawing analogies with countries that display their patriotism/ nationalism in a more public manner. The usual suspects graced this list of around twenty countries including the U.S, Norway, Korea, a few European and Middle Eastern countries and to my suprise NZ, which was in the top five to ten from memory.

I am not privvy to the methodology or criteria used in producing this particular list however I do respect the credibility of this publication and have been going through my back issues, in the hope of offering further referance in this respect.

I have no doubt we Australians are a patriotic mob, that was not the issue here, however what should be realised is that there exists cultural nuances that influence the ways in which patriotism is experienced and acted out.

NZ are a small country that punch above their weight in a sporting sense with a cultural profile to match, which can be attributed to an overt patriotic desire to be noticed despite this. For a country of only 5mill they certainly are ubiquitously in the worlds face and far from being the demure collective they inwardly profess to be.

Can I also reitterate that Australia and NZ are NOT the same culturally and it is about time that those on both sides of the ditch accepted this. I tire of this misplaced sentiment that says we are best mates, we are not mates at all. We are countires that share some quite looosley connected historic ties to England and we happen to be geopgraphically close.

For the main part we simply tolerate each other out of some sort of P.C. obligation which can be attributed to such dated institutions as ANZAC. This is an alliance of mythical proportion that has little relevance to the NZ or Australia of the 21st Century and as stated in a previous post, harbours some pious resentment from the Kiwi perspective, which should be no suprise to us really.

Cheers

The only people that give Australia more attention in the ANZAC legacy are Australians.
And when I say that, I don’t mean the actually soldiers who can call themselves ANZACs, every Australian vet i’ve spoken to is immediate in their respect for the NZ soldiers they fought with once they find out im a Kiwi.
That same respect isn’t carried on by the Australian ANZAC day PR machine.
Everyday NZers give due respect to the contribution of our brothers across the Tasman, it is most definately not the other way round.
Its not resentment, its respect and the expectation that the same respect is reciprocated.

You can’t spell ANZAC without NZ, likewise with Australia.
Although NZAC looks better on paper then AAC

All I can say is this is a tired and overstated sentiment fueled by years of politically exploitive pathos. Kiwis are in fact quite resentful of the attention Oz commands through ANZAC compared to them as with just about anything else you care to mention.

They have certainly come out of the woodwork again here.

Good night and good luck.

Sam, yeah I definitely agree that there is some factor we’re not taking account of…like maybe the demographics of RU in Australia, they are much the same as NZers Cricketers, ie they have a North Shore Mentality. Ambitous on the surface (ie so they can fit in with their trendy team mates) but not too much deeper they have an mentality of entitlement, believing that they’re owed much and that to get what they want they must only try as hard as is required of them, not willing to go any further than that. Sorry for the generalisations but the parallels between the Rugbies is barking up the wrong tree.

Also Republican to artificially-inseminate (pardon the lowly agricultural analogy ) a sporting culture that has never existed before and cannot hope to attain mainstream appeal is to deny the culture that has gone before. One wise man once said to me that the reason Australia are so good at Cricket is not your shrewdness in terms of your talent rosters, but the weight of tradition/legacies. Same apparently applies to Baseball in the US (particularly the Yankee half of NY) but my point is that by creating new cultures the end result cheapens the overall measure of success.

The DNA argument is becoming less and less valid. But y’know it is quite convenient isn’t it, if your people were convicts and your family line’s been free for generations…that the toughness they needed to cope is somehow transferred to you Aussies ten generations or so later

But participation rates are not good enough as otherwise the RL situation could/will happen all over again

Also I doubt Aussies are less Nationalistic and I’m certain enough to bank on my soon-to-be CC home ( ) that you Aussies care more bout sport than us. And your Govt actually gets involved in sport, which would be a travesty here. Oh wait I should add pumping in X number of dollars to see your nation perform at the Olympics, whereas we just pay to have big tournies played here (sounds a bit like the Melburnians personally)

As I stated on my last attack of your posts Republican, NZ is actuallt known worldwide more for our landscape than for any cultural prowess (and yes sport is actually a thing of culture… )

Oh and the reason we’re in the NRL and will probably have an AFL team one day is because we’re family, also we’re a “State” that could be called bellweather if it were in the US. We like what is good and we trash what is bad more often than not. Making us a good guide as to what sports/cultural texts a la Packed to the Rafters have a wide appeal (which rated really well here in spite of the often overly Nationalistic jingoism which is the usual for Aussie TV programs that we get a la Sea Patrol) And we also tend to do things across the entire nation (tho RL might not apply here)

Mate reading your last paragraphs it’s obvious you won’t like it when a NZ-descended PM comes to rule the roost in OZ, which seems more likely now. Your rhetoric of competing nation states etc is actually a generation or two too old, as more NZers go over to OZ there will be an increasing flow of capital (financial but also Social-Cultural aswell)

Also in spite of what you think we do have a slightly different cultural millieu than the one you espouse, largely the fact that we are apparently quite a learned people at least in terms of the Anglosphere.

Your right I think money (depending how much) can cancel out every type of enviromental advantage.
Just need to look at the Americas Cup – How a landlocked country won that? Buy out the other teams sailors and go for gold.
Americas cup bought. As you say NZ will always do well because alot of people (not that many but more then alot of countries) have access to sailing.

But of course Money should always lose out to Money + Enviromental advantages.

Is this inherent to their DNA, that they seem somehow predisposed to play the thugby codes with such aplomb?

I actually believe the Polynesian physique is well suited to both League and Union. The % of Maori and Islander players that make up the bulk of respective Kiwi national rugby sides is quite compelling indeed.

Cheers

I don’t know about Leagues growth in NZ, when looking up those statistics I found the SPARC report on the NZRL. It makes for pretty sober reading. Doesn’t give one great confidence in the admin of league in NZ. The state of the game, from an administrative point of view, is just shocking. It would be interesting to see what a little support from the ARL would do for the NZRL.

Not only is Union far greater on a per cap basis in NZ but so too is the quality of it’s domestic comps so in this respect, Australian Union numbers are quite misleading. The structure of our domestic comps and the limited demographic from which we derive our playing elite need to also be considered. We have two WC’s to our name which is incredible when compared to the expectation and pedigree of NZ Union no matter what the stats.

As far as League goes, I would have to say that Australia should be extremely concerned because League in NZ, if taken seriously, would decimate Australia’s status without a shadow of a doubt. Australian League has for too long been the big fish in a very small pond.

Now the ARL are about to experience decades of eating humble pie me thinks, courtesy of the Kiwis and a benevolence in being the catalyst to Leagues growth in that country.

Cheers

Rugby League in Australia – 423,584
Rugby League in NZ (estimate from SPARC) – 17,000
Rugby union in Australia – 183,310
Rugby union in NZ – 140,279

Note all these figures are for 2008. I find the difference in participation rates between NZ and Australia in league staggering. The problems NZ Rugby League has had over the last couple of years has been covered pretty well in the NZ media but you can see why SPARC was sent in. Pretty incredible that they even come close to beating Australia as often as they do.

As for the rugby union figures, probably kills the myth that more people play rugby in NZ than Australia. On a per capita basis it’s clearly higher but overall it’s not. Comparing the winning record of the All Blacks and Wallabies is quite interesting when you look at participation numbers, one would expect them to be more similar.