Everyone knows that the real difference between NZ and Australia is in their parliament buildings.
In Australia, they had a parliament building in front of a hill that they decided that they didn't want anymore, so they levelled the hill, built a new parliament building directly behind the old one, rebuilt the hill on top of and behind the new building, placed a silly looking flag-holding contraption and some walls on top of the new hill, and then put a giant platypus on an unrelated hillside overlooking parliament (see below). Of course, they didn't bother to do anything with the old parliament building, which now is apparently a Vegemite warehouse.
The Kiwis' original parliament building, on the other hand, apparantly consisted of a pile of wood that managed to catch fire in 1907. This being rather disturbing, they operated out of a library for 25 years while they built slightly more than half of a new parliament building, but then gave up on it. Forty years later, they decided to spend a huge pile of money building a very large beehive next door to parliament house rather than finishing the original project. After 70 years of saying, "New Zealanders are a bunch of crazy nutjobs, and I'm not going to dedicate their silly building project." Queen Elizabeth finally showed up to inaugurate the combination beehive/parliament building in 1995, some 73 years after they gave up construction on the place (which made it 77 years since they started using the incomplete parliament building).
-Pufer
This post has been edited by Pufer: 06 December 2007 - 01:28 AM
"Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who said it, even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense." -The Buddha