Jumping in again, as a Canadian citizen and NZ resident:Jordi, it's probably not a great idea to slag a country you don't live in yet. Wait until you've lived there for six months, and then see who you want to do fractals on.
As for the NZ/Aus debate, my experience (so far) is that Aus is like the Canadian Praries minus the 6-month ardure commonly known as 'Winter'. Same kind of latent sexism, rudeness masking as frankness, but friendly as anything.
NZ is like the West Coast, minus the Campbell government. (Oops. We just elected Keys. Scratch that last comment. We even have the Campbell government now.) :P
The novel thing about NZ is the electorate will vote out a (mostly) working government for the sake of a 'change'.
Women here still average 2/3 the pay packet of their male counterparts. Domestic violence is still up there. At least the previous gov't didn't think either was ok (it's too soon to tell about the new government's approach).2008/11/24 Brenda Wallace <brenda@wallace.net.nz>:I ask because I'm in Australia, and in most cases Australia and New Zealand are extremely culturally similar.We're similar, but i reckon on gender equality NZ is doing far better
Steph