Transcript of AE 1385 - The Goss: Why Are Queenslanders Migrating to Tasmania?

G'day, you mob! Pete here, and this is another episode of Aussie English, the number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to learn Australian English. So today I have a Goss episode for you where I sit down with my old man, my father, Ian Smissen, and we talk about the week's news. Whether locally Down Under here in Australia or non locally overseas in other parts of the world, okay.

And we sometimes also talk about whatever comes to mind, right. If we can think of something interesting to share with you guys related to us or Australia, we also talk about that in The Goss. So these episodes are specifically designed to try and give you content about many different topics where we're obviously speaking in English and there are multiple people having a natural and spontaneous conversation in English. So it is particularly good to improve your listening skills.

In order to complement that, though, I really recommend that you join the podcast membership or the Academy membership at AussieEnglish.com.au, where you will get access to the full transcripts of these episodes, the PDFs, the downloads, and you can also use the online PDF reader to read and listen at the same time. Okay, so if you really, really want to improve your listening skills fast, get the transcript, listen and read at the same time. Keep practising and that is the quickest way to level up your English. Anyway, I've been rabbiting on a bit. I've been talking a bit. Let's just get into this episode, guys. Smack the bird and let's get into it.

Dad.

Pete!

We're back.

We are.

It's been minutes since our last episode. It has been recorded, so.

It might be hours or days for you!

Aussies are moving to Tassie, Dad. They, they..

No, Queenslanders are moving to us, too. The headline on the article was Aussies. Australians moving to Tasmania.

They're pulling up stumps.

To, um...

They're bailing.

To avoid climate change, which I find just bizarre. The, the list of stories that we, that we've sort of thrown around for this set of, uh, of recordings has some of the worst journalism ever.

It's really degraded recently, hasn't it?

Well, it's it's all now. It's all about, if you notice. And just visually looking at this story, every paragraph is one sentence because they break it up and every fourth paragraph is an ad.

Mhm.

Um and so and they just keep repeating themselves and this story there's about, I reckon there's 150 words of content in this and it's probably 500 words long.

Dad's reviewing the journalism. The story, not the story.

Well, we'll get on to the story. The story is rubbish as well. But but the. Because there's no there's no actual story. And again, it's the lowest form of journalism is to take a human interest story where you get two people, a couple, and they tell you why they're doing something, and then you generalise it and get other people's opinions and they'll go, oh yeah, we did that. And you only ever publish five, five opinions that agree with you. Not the 500 that went, this is bullshit.

You need to get eyes on it, Dad. You got to get these other people freaking out about climate change in Queensland.

Yeah. So the essence of this story is that a couple had decided, well, a guy, the male partner.

The protagonist.

Yeah, had decided that it was just too hot to work in Queensland.

They didn't say where, interestingly..

They actually do. Finally, right down near the bottom somewhere, they say they moved from the Sunshine Coast.

Oh, that was where they were? I was expecting it to be Cairns. The way that he talked about it.

And so it was too hot. Obviously he was a tradie or an outdoor worker.

He's a tradie, yeah.

And he was saying this is too hot, I can't work and I can't breathe. It's so hot. Which I find completely bizarre because it. Heat-related breathlessness comes from dry heat. It doesn't come from when it's humid. And Queensland in summer- well, our summer down low, you know, they're they're sort of you know, summer season, is very humid. You're not going to run out of breath. It's draining and it feels hot. It's not that hot either. It just feels hot. It's like it really gets above mid 30s. Um, Celsius.

Well, that's, they don't really have the same extremes.

No they don't.

They'll have like that sort of from, I guess it could be in southern Queensland. It'll be like in the 20s to 30s and then the north, the further north you go, the sort of it's usually above 30 constantly.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's 100% humidity and..

Yeah. Exactly. And it rains a lot. Um, so the essence of this is they've moved to Tasmania, which is obviously the most southerly state in Australia to Antarctica. And it's cooler, um, both literally and metaphorically. And that's the story. So these two have decided it's too hot to live in Queensland. And so then the journalist and or subeditor have decided this is a climate change story. So all of a sudden it's too hot to live in Queensland because of climate change. So we have all these climate change refugees, of which they found about five, that they could report on agreeing with them. Oh, it's too hot in Queensland. So we moved to Tasmania.

Mhhm.

Um, and then they make the point that they then jump to, well, climate change is affecting Tasmania as well. And they go to a completely different story about some scientific research that is predicting, uh, floods and sea levels by about 2090, in Launceston, which is the northern city in Tasmania.

So by the time these guys are 110, it'll be a real problem.

Exactly. So you just sit there and go, what's the point of this story?

Uh, freaking people out, I guess.

Yeah.

And should be freaking out Queenslanders. Making them think, oh my God.

Climate change is real. But funnily enough, climate change is not a temperature related thing in Queensland. The temperature hasn't increased much. It might have, you know, the average temperature might have increased. The challenge is the weather changes. And this is what the problem is that people are conflating what happens on one day or in one period of weather with climate. Climate is decades or centuries of patterns of weather. Um.

It's no individual event.

It's not an individual event. But when you get..

.. higher amplitude,

When you get..

.. or frequency..

5 to 10 years with much more rainfall and flooding and stuff, you go, oh, the climate is actually changing.

Well, that's what's going to be really interesting, right? With Cairns, Darwin and Broome, that sort of northern third of Australia, is it going to become effectively unliveable uninsurable because of just the frequency of cyclones and extreme weather events? And so even if you can live there, you probably won't be able to afford to insure your house or your building or whatever it is. And even if you could, it's potentially more dangerous to live there and you're just going to get disrupted constantly by these events. So you wonder if there will be a gradual exodus from those places. Um.

Well, it possibly will. But again, when you're living in a what, as a, you know, someone who's lived in and around Melbourne all my life, um, a fairly mild climate in a sense. Um, I would call Darwin as a good example, an extreme climate in that, you know, for me, a wet season, our summer in the South, their wet season would be unliveable. It would be just unbearably humid and raining every afternoon and thunderstorms and cyclones. But that's that's what it's always been like.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes.

But it was weird what they were talking about, saying that they get stuck inside eight months out of the year, just going from building to building for air conditioning, right.

Yeah.

That was being mentioned somewhere in the story. And I'm like, is it really that bad? Like, eight months of the year in southern Queensland?

No.

Like, ahhh! Yeah. So anyway, would you move to Tasmania, Dad?

Yeah, I could live in Tasmania. The problem is that it's just isolated. From a climate point of view, it's pretty much the same as living in southern Victoria. Um.

Yeah.

It's not as hot over summer. Probably no colder over winter. Rains a little bit more. Um, ironically, Hobart has more hours of sunshine than any city in Australia. Because in summer, it. Because it's so far south. Um. Sun rises earlier. Sunset is later. Um, but yeah, it's a it's a lovely place, but it's just isolated from the rest of the country. You've either got to fly or get a ferry.

On this topic, I guess, of climate change. What did you think of the government's recent, um, bill or, what were they introducing in terms of climate change and trying to reduce emissions by 60 to 70%? I think by 2035?

2035. Yeah. Well, again, it's a commitment.

Yeah. But do you feel like it's enough? I've had a lot of, um, academic friends working in this sort of area of climate change and biology, and they're just like, this is bullshit. Needs to be more.

Well, it needs to be more. But the other side of the argument, you know, you hear from people going, what are we doing this for? It's just going to affect business. Yeah. So, um, I think it was the best they thought they could get away with.

Yeah. So that's that was the..

Because the opposition is saying do nothing.

Pretty much.

So.

Great. Yeah. China's not doing anything. And it's like, well, just because everyone else isn't doing the right thing doesn't mean we shouldn't. That's not an argument for we shouldn't, right? It's like, well, these people are murdering. Why shouldn't we murder?

Exactly.

Maybe because it's the wrong thing to do.

Yeah, exactly. And if you want to hold the high moral ground somewhere along the line. And Australia has not been very good at this in climate over the last 20 years, particularly when we've had liberal governments where we've made commitments in the past and they've just gone, we're not going to do that.

And environment and extinction and all these ecosystem issues.

Yeah. Um, yeah. I think you've got to commit to these things and do everything you can. At least it gives them something to base action on.

Yeah.

Yeah. Having a target means what action can we take in order to try and meet that target? Even if you don't meet it or even if you exceed it, great. But at least you can then come up with some action plans.

Are you feeling sort of pessimistic or cynical about the future of Australia and climate change, or the future of the world and climate change?

Yes and no. Which is sitting on the fence answer. Um, yes because..

I think you're eating it too.

Yes because I'm, um, firmly convinced that modern politics is all about popularity. It's got nothing to do with what's best for the country, the world.

How do we get in people? How do we maintain power?

How do you get re-elected?

Yeah.

Um, and you get re-elected by doing things that are popular, um, to the majority of things that are right. Yeah.

We won't touch housing because the majority of voters currently have money invested in housing.

Exactly. Yeah.

But the moment that changes the oh, all of a sudden, this is a really important issue that we feel like we need to tackle.

Yeah. Um, and so all of those sort of environmental all issues, whether it be, you know, taking action for climate change or, um. You know, protecting habitat, endangered species, all of those sort of things. And a lot of people look at this and go, why do we care about a regent honeyeater? You know.

It's not about the specific species.

Exactly. It's about various indicators for the environment that if the environment is falling apart, then species are disappearing.

Objectively, no one really gives a fuck about one individual species that no one sees or experiences or that has no. But if you work on trying to conserve that individual species, it's going to have flow down effects onto the other species and that environment.

Exactly right.

It's going to help everything in the long run. And if you don't take care of the environment's, a lot of the time humans end up suffering like this isn't a bit of, what would you say, a benign or beneficial thing. You're not like, no, I'm doing it for..

We're not being altruistic.

Yeah, it's not for the sake of the honeyeater and no one else or nothing else. It's usually because we want something pretty to look at, somewhere nice to live or to be able to grow crops and all that sort of stuff in a, in a sustainable environment. When I was in Indonesia, I remember seeing in Sulawesi that, we were driving up through the mountains, and there are a whole bunch of these places where they had the forests left at the top of the mountain. And I remember saying to my supervisor at the time, why have they just farmed the bottom of the mountains, but not the top parts? Like, it seems like there's perfectly good farming land, that they could just extend these farms all the way to the top. And he's like, the moment they do that, they're fucked. Like it rains and it will just erode the shit out of the entire mountain and everything is fucked. It will all flow down the river and they won't have anything to farm. So they have to leave the growing...

On rocks.

Yeah, exactly. They have to leave the forest at the top of the mountain because they keep producing dirt. The dirt washes down. It keeps all of that nutrients and everything in the farms. And they've worked out that if they keep that balance, that they're not fucked in the long run, right?

Yeah.

So it is one of those things, they're not doing it because they're like, God, it's so important to protect the forest.

No.

They're doing it because.

They don't.

We want to survive. Yeah.

Exactly.

Anyway, rant over. But yeah, I keep wondering about the future of these things. It seems like the human race is so much like me in a microcosm at university and school. When you every week you go to an exam, you go to a lecture and the teacher's like, don't you know, it's a lot easier if you guys just study all year round, just study after each lecture and you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you go and get pissed. And then at the end, at the end of the semester, they're like.

Go to the library, have a cup of coffee.

There's a yeah, there's an exam in two weeks. I'll start studying now. And I feel like that's what will happen with something like climate change. I have a feeling that we will do really well and come out on top. But it'll be the final hour. It'll be the most expensive possible way of doing it where you've left it this long. Because no one I think we've it's weird that it's almost like human nature is very averse to suffering pain in the short term. For the sake of the long term, we're much more kind of like or suffering pain in the long term for the sake of our benefit, right? Like we don't want to. We don't want to have to save every single day so that when we retire, we have a certain amount of money. It's like, can't we just wait until we are almost retiring and..

Wait till I'm 55 and then save everything? It doesn't work that way.

Yeah. So I fear that we'll be in that sort of a situation where most countries won't do anything..

We're, we're actually, unfortunately, stuck in a, um, an evolutionary dead end from in terms of we are, by our very nature selfish as individuals, as a culture. Mhm. Which makes us socially and environmentally really difficult to deal with.

Yeah.

Uh, because we want the best we can possibly have today, tomorrow, this week, this month, this year.

To pass on our genes.

Not- I'm going to do the best I can for, you know, 100 years time.

Well evolution doesn't really select for that, right? It doesn't. You don't give a shit about 100 years from now when you're not around and you're, you know, three generations below you is, there's no selective pressure that really deals with that.

And look, evolution by its very nature is retrospective.

Yeah.

Evolution has only only worked on stuff that was happening in the past.

Yeah.

You know, you don't evolve by having good genes for the future because we can't predict what the future is going to be.

Yeah. What was it that blew my mind? Someone, an evolutionary biologist, once said it was like, you're adapted to your parents environment. Correct? Right. Like.

Correct.

And so, yeah, as it changes. Anyway. All right. That's probably enough for today. I guess it's a short one, Dad. Thanks for joining me!

All right!

See ya!

Bye!