Transcript of AE 1003 - The Goss: How Lockdowns Are Affecting Australians

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.

So, welcome to this episode of the Goss', guys. Dad.

Hey, everyone. Sorry, it's been so long. We've had illness and lockdown and we're still in sort of semi-lockdown, so hence the remote.

Yeah, exactly. So, I guess we can start with the lockdown, that was one of the topics that we wanted to cover.

Yes. Yeah.

So, what's the sort of story in a nutshell, Dad? I- It's one of those things I get sick of talking about COVID, but it is one of those...

Oh, it is.

...That's going around constantly, and people want to know a little bit more about it and what's happening. And I guess we just try and avoid the superficial and dive deeper.

Yeah, and look, because Australia and New Zealand have made a zero-tolerance policy decision effectively that they basically just want to get cases down to zero in the country. It means that we go into tight lockdowns quite quickly and for extended periods of time, whereas I know in other parts of the world they've had lockdowns, not quite as severe as ours for a long period of time.

But most of Europe, for instance, now is just they've gone out of it. The United States is out of lockdowns, most other places in North America are the same. So, it's a bit difficult in some ways to talk to people who are not in Australia or New Zealand about our lockdown problems because we're really sort of unique, I suppose, in that regard.

But we had a- An outbreak, I suppose, what now it'll be seven or eight weeks ago in Sydney, in New South Wales.

Was it the end of June?

Something like that. Yeah. And that ended up, you know, a couple of people ended up coming into Victoria, and so we've got cases here. Same in Queensland. South Australia had it quickly. South Australia got only one case and they got rid of it quickly.

South Australia and Western Australia and I think probably the Northern Territory have done really well, haven't they? And Tasmania.

Yeah. Well, Western Australia in particular, because they've just had a hard border policy and they have distance on their side, you know, the tyranny of distance is the actual reverse in this case, because the, you know, road transport into Western Australia is, you know, very, very small proportion of certainly the tourist trade.

We have trains and road for cargo, you know, freight and so on, but almost everybody flies in, and they've just banned flights. The only way you can get in there is to quarantine for two weeks, you know, when you get there, whereas...

You just made a reference to a book, 'The Tyranny of Distance'. Do you want to just explain that for people who may have missed that?

Yeah, it's a book about colonisation, European colonisation of Australia and how being, you know, on the other side of the world meant life was extremely different and difficult for people when they came from Europe. And that the title of the book 'The Tyranny of Distance' was referring to the fact that being so far away from your home country meant that effectively you're isolated.

It's like, you know, us now going to Mars, you can't rely on- Certainly, they couldn't at the time, rely on having supplies coming from Europe and so on. So, they were basically when they got here, they were on their own.

So, you were saying it was the inverse of that, being WA distance is actually a favourable thing because it means that few people go there, and they haven't suffered too much from COVID as a result.

Exactly, yeah. And they've just had this tight border policy that just says you can't come in, so.

Yeah, I remember I was at...

...Seems it worked.

Palmer. Is it Palmer? The Clive Palmer was try...

Oh, yeah.

...them to open up.

Yeah, he lost that one in a hurry.

Anyway, yeah, so it's been interesting, hasn't it? So, we had this delta outbreak, I guess, in New South Wales that then came to Victoria...

Yeah.

...And the two states have handled it very differently. Do you want to sort of describe what the situation has been like and how it's unfolded?

Yeah. Well, Sydney's version of it- Well, New South Wales government version of handling the outbreak in Sydney was to basically isolate populations within, you know, in suburbs and say, right, this suburb, you know you can't leave this suburb...

What are they calling them? LA's or something? Local...?

LGA's, Local Government Areas. So, you know, we have three tiers of government in Australia, we've got the federal government for the whole country, we've got state governments and then we've got the local government areas...

Councils.

...And shire councils. And so, they're, you know, that's an acronym that I had never heard used before, and now it's just become commonplace.

Yeah.

You know, typically politics and the media will use acronyms for everything, and so...

It's so weird how much they copy each other and the phrases that they use in the media. You'll hear one reporter, or one politician use a certain phrase and suddenly it like just disperses everywhere. I remember...

It goes viral to use an obvious pun.

Well, one of them was like saying, we're going to have a lot of learnings from this stuff. Remember that when that was going around? And you're like, that's not English. No one says "learnings".

How did we turn a verb into a noun and then pluralise it? Yeah.

Well, you can just say, we're going to learn a lot. Why do you, there will be many learnings?

We're having a lot of learning is fine, because that's the verb. You don't need to- It's this misinterpretation in language of the word sounds and looks from a syntax point of view, like a noun in the sentence, but it's actually a verb. And they pluralise it when they meant more than one, and it's like "sheeps", as well. Even if it were a noun, it doesn't need to have an "S" added for pluralising, you know?

Well, it's so funny to sort of take a tangent- It's so interesting to learn about how language evolves and changes and the differences between languages. Because I mean, learning Portuguese myself, there are a lot of verbs in Portuguese that you wouldn't have in English. You would have to use an adjective or a noun in a sentence.

I mean, one of the examples is the verb disponibilizar, which means "to make available" to someone because disponíve- Disponível is "available", but they turn it into a verb disponibilizar, meaning...

"To make available".

..."To make available". But it's- We have to use a phrase for it and they have...

We have phrasal verbs, in English to account for that.

So, it's really funny. Like...

Sorry to interrupt. Funnily enough, as soon as it- Phrasal verb, is actually grammatically incorrect because it should be a phrase clause. Because of the fact that it's got a verb in it means that...

That it's a phrase. Yeah.

...It's a clause. It's no longer a phrase, but it's that sort of ironic anomaly that you're creating something by calling it a phrasal verb, which means that it actually then becomes a verb, which makes it a clause, but.

Another one would be "viabilizar". Can you imagine what that one means? "Viabilizar".

Visible?

No. Close. "To make something viable".

Oh, viable. Yeah.

So, again, it's really, just because it's like, you wouldn't use- We wouldn't say, I'm going to make this- I'm gonna viable this thing.

I'm gonna viabilise it.

Yes. But that would make total sense.

It would...

Could tomorrow...

...We actually have that phrasal verb, "to make available or make viable or to..."

Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah, so we do that a lot with, and I know you've got lots of material on Phrasal verbs, because they are- I don't know if they're unique to English, but they're...

I've heard Iranian has a lot of them.

Yeah.

And they are beautiful. I mean, the best part about Phrasal verbs, it's kind of a gift and a curse. People see Phrasal verbs, as like the enemy because, oh my god, there's these simple words that on their own usually have specific meanings like, say, working out, right, to work, to do work and then "out" is, you know, the opposite of "in", it's out, outside.

But then when you say, "I'm going to work something out", it's come so far away from the original meaning, which would have been like to do work on a piece of paper outwards, right? And, you know, solve something or draw something out, as in display on paper. That would have been originally, I'm going to work this out by hand, you know, by doing the maths.

And now we just mean it to figure something- To figure something out, right? To discover something, to think about something. Exactly. But it makes life so much easier because all you really have to know is probably 50 to 100 verbs and maybe 20 different prepositions. And once you get used to using them together, you don't need to know new words, you just need to know the meaning and how it changes when they are added together.

Then the noun makes context.

Exactly, whereas in Portuguese for me, for example, I can't- It's kind of a cheat because Portuguese is an Indo-European language, so a lot of the time I can work out what something means because I know the English root word, you know, it's from Latin or French, and you can work it out.

But with phrasal verbs, quite often I'm like, oh my God, what the hell is the word going to be? Like, they don't have "go in", they'll have entrar, "to enter" or, you know, "to go out" will be sair.

Yeah.

Exactly. And so, sometimes there'll be very specific verbs that I can't work out because I can't just say trabalhar fora, like "to work outside". Because...

That has the specific thing of like being a landscaper, you know, you're working outside.

It doesn't really make sense. So, it is- Language is a beautiful thing. Anyway, so we were talking about...

Yeah, we were talking about lockdown. Yeah. So, lockdown we've had- Sydney went on this sort of half arsed lockdown little- Well, it didn't even lock down, they just basically trusted people. And the irritating thing was that the arrogance of the New South Wales premier who was constantly going, we'll do this the New South Wales way. We'll trust people in Sydney to do the right thing. And sure enough, 99.99% of them didn't.

But in a city of five million people, that's still a lot of people who are not doing the right thing. And so, it just continued to spread, and now they've got, you know, hundreds of new cases a day, you know, sadly, they've got people dying every day. And that also because they weren't restricting by legislation, people travelling, they were travelling around the state of New South Wales.

So, it spread not just within the capital city, but around the rest of the state. And then people, of course, if you can travel out to, you know, country New South Wales, why can't you travel to Queensland or South Australia or Victoria...?

Or the ACT, which just went into lockdown.

...Which just got lock-downed yesterday. ACT is the Australian Capital Territory, which is this little bit of land surrounding the national capital Canberra.

They are pissed. They...

...Are really. Because they haven't had a case- Because they haven't had one case there for over a year.

Yeah.

And now they've got them because people have been coming from Sydney. And so, yeah, so Victoria's approach to that, as soon as we recognise that we had a case here, it was just, well, we'll shut the state down for a week. We started with three days, then they extended it to a week, then it went to two weeks, and then, fortunately for the last week, we've had Country Victoria, so outside the Greater Melbourne area has been opened up.

It's not in lockdown, we still have some restrictions, we have to wear masks outside, we've still got to, you know, QR code check-in whenever we go to any commercial business. So, if you're going shopping, like today, I just went out, you know, shopping for about 20 minutes and I went to three different shops, so I've got to keep pulling the phone out and, you know, QR coding and so on.

But at least that way, it's we're being tracked and traced, and it means that we can, if there is an outbreak, we can trace people and contact people easily. The other thing we have, though, is obviously because Pete and I are in our homes and we're not able to visit each other in home, so we can go outside and catch up, but we can't be in each other's homes. And there's been...

That's next level. When you guys see The Goss' filmed outdoors for the first time, that's going to be a next level organisation. Everything's going to have to be...

Multiple cameras and independent mics, and yeah.

We'll need a diesel generator for the mixer and the computer.

...At some stage. The- And so, the- There's been a lot of people who've been challenging that and saying, look, that's ridiculous. If we're allowed to go and meet in a cafe, why can't we meet in each other's homes? And it comes down to there's no logical argument around it. You can't argue that one is better than the other.

And people are unfortunately trying to because the reason that the health department is saying that is because they know that the majority of transmissions at the moment are happening in people's houses, their families visiting families, friends visiting friends when they shouldn't be. And so, they're just stopping that.

Well, and it's the amount of time.

...You are more likely to get the disease from a hypothetical case by going to somebody's house or meeting them in a cafe. They're simply saying, we know that most of these cases are happening by people going to other people's homes, so stop it.

Yeah.

And it's pretty much working. We- I haven't looked at data today of how many cases we've had, but the most we've had so far is 21 new cases, and the majority of those are all easily traced back to the original two infestations that we had...

Well, we...

...State.

We went into lockdown originally, I think, yeah, because we had the- Was it the removalists...?

And one family that had travelled back from Sydney. There were two separate instances, there were removalists...

Yeah.

...Who came from Sydney, went to Melbourne, picked up a load, then went to Adelaide and then went back to Sydney. So, that's the Adelaide one came from them and all- And most of our Melbourne outbreak came from them and there was another one simultaneously same day or within 48 hours anyway. There was another family that had come from Sydney and, you know, come back to Melbourne and, you know, shouldn't have.

But then it happened again, right? So, we were almost out in the clear and the rules had relaxed. And then all of a sudden there were another two cases that have come in and we got back to 20.

Yeah.

It's just been nuts. How have you gone with mental health-wise? Because it is interesting, I thought originally people were overreacting a bit with the amount of talk online and on the news about mental health from lockdowns. Like when I say that, I mean, prior to there having been a lockdown or maybe at the start when we were going into them. But now after, I think this is our sixth or seventh.

Victoria's sixth. Yeah.

Yeah. Lockdown, I can kind of now understand the effect that it's actually having, like, I found myself drinking more or at least more frequently, like having a beer a night over dinner and just being overall more depressed than usual. Because you just, I haven't been able to catch up with anyone besides yourself, you know, when we went out recently after the rules relaxed again and we had to have coffee outside in another cafe.

Yeah. So, this latest lockdown has sort of occurred at the same time as me getting over a chest infection. And I mean, you...

And me, too.

Yeah, the whole family had it, but it's taken me six weeks to get to the point where I can actually go for a walk now without wheezing, I'm asthmatic as well, but it's just hung on and hung on and hung on. So, I haven't, even though we were technically allowed to be out of the home for two hours a day within five kilometres of home for exercise. So, I could have gone for a walk on the beach or, you know, walk around the streets or whatever.

It was just difficult to do that. So, just being stuck at home means that, you know, you've got to find something to do. And ironically, I was listening to Keith Urban, the Australian country music singer who's a coach on the Australian The Voice Show, the, you know, TV singing competition.

He's married to Nicole Kidman.

Yeah, he's married to Nicole Kidman, which is why he's really famous. But he was saying, talking to one of the contestants about it because obviously they filmed this during the original pre-lockdown phase, the early parts of it. And it takes a while for us to catch up because we only get two or three shows a week to catch up to real time.

But he was saying, and this is somebody who's, you know, got squillions of dollars, a lifestyle that we would all envy, you know, lives half his time in Nashville, part of his time in Los Angeles, part of his time in Australia. And he said that he felt really depressed, he said, because I couldn't get out, I can't get out and play music. And he said, I just felt like sitting in front of the TV all day and eating snacks.

Yeah.

And he said he had to- It hit him when he was talking to a friend. He rang a friend just to see, you know, see how he's going, and he was telling him that. And the guy just said, I know exactly what you mean, but you've got to stop looking at what you can't do and look at what you can do, find something to do and do those sort of things, so.

And funnily enough, I'd sort of taken that advice without being advised it but done the same thing myself. So, when we started off in lockdown last year, I thought, I'm going to write a book. And so, I've been writing this family history book, and that's taken me a lot longer than I thought. But at least it's been a project to work on, and it's a project that I can't do outside.

I can't, you know, yes, I would like to go out photographing some of the old family sites and things, which I've been able to do while we're out of lockdown, but mostly it's sitting in front of a computer and writing and then doing the layout, doing that sort of stuff.

So, I think that's really part of the advice to people, if you stop worrying about what you can't do and think about what you can do and find something new to do, you know...

Work on your English, keep listening to Aussie English.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

No. But I was saying the same thing because I've been trying to do as much Portuguese recently as possible. I noticed that my Portuguese hasn't dramatically improved since moving in with Kel after we got married and, you know, having a family, it hasn't really improved this whole time...

Baby steps...

...Same stuff.

...Improved.

Excuse me, guys, excuse me. I'll have to get a swab. But, yeah, so I've been trying to read and listen to podcasts and do a lot more. I'm actually listening to a dramaticised? Dramaticise? Dramatised.

Dramatised.

Dramatised audio reading of Game of Thrones, which is really...

Oh, really.

Yeah so, I'll tell you my little system. So, I have the e-book for the first book. I have that read by this dramatised- I don't know if they're just a company or something in Brazil that have done it for this one book. I'm assuming it's legal because it's up online and you can just access it. And I then have found a podcast where they discuss each chapter in Portuguese, these two girls.

I think it's called Hodor Cavalo, so like Hodo Horse or something. And so, each time I listen to a chapter, I find the new vocab and then listen to the debrief of the chapter, and they compare it to the TV show and what's different and which characters came in and what they did, why they liked it, why they didn't like it.

So, it's a very good way of reinforcing the Portuguese and the understanding and everything of that. That book, and it's funny, I mean, Rory, my brother-in-law, had a go at me. He's like, oh, your medieval Portuguese is going to get really good. But the weird thing is, I was sort of freaking out originally. I'm like, do I really want to read Game of Thrones? There's going to be so much vocab in there that's just redundant or weird.

Like, I've been learning a dozen different words for horse, cross, sell, gun or, cavalo. But it is interesting how much of it is just normal language because there is a lot of dialogue and inner thought going on. So, it is still useful and it's enthralling.

So, it's really been good to smash out a chapter of that each day. Before we finish up this episode, do you want to talk about Victoria versus New South Wales, the two premiers, and then maybe how the media's covered that, as well?

Yeah, well, we have a very- Well, say very. For Australian politics, we have a very right-wing mainstream media, most of which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, and that's not just newspapers. He owns...

TV channels.

...TV channels, radio stations and everything. So, the general reporting of things in the commercial media is fairly right-wing. Not right-wing, in comparison with many other countries, I mean...

Conservative and...

Conservative and...

...Big business.

...And supporting business, but also basically supporting the Liberal National Party, whether they're in government, which they are in the federal government or in the case as Peter suggested in New South Wales there is a liberal government. In Victoria there is a- Our state government is a Labour government, so left-wing.

The Murdoch press in particular for exactly the same decisions that get made every now and then will be praising Gladys Berejiklian, who's the premier of New South Wales and criticising Daniel Andrews who's the premier of Victoria.

To pause you there, some of the things, you'll go and see some of the cartoons that they've made of Dan Andrews, Dictator Dan, they've called him and they've dressed him up as like Chairman Mao and Hitler and Stalin, saying, you know, that he's this authoritarian person because of lockdowns. And then when Gladys has done the same thing, they're like, oh, the woman who saved New South Wales or whatever, and you're like, make up your mind, guys.

And she went through a period where she wouldn't even say the L-word, she wouldn't say lockdown, right.

Yeah, she didn't say lockdown for weeks at the beginning because she didn't want to have that over the top of her because- And, I'm sure. In some ways- I think I've said this before. In some ways, I sort of feel sorry for Gladys, only a little bit, just a little bit. Because I'm sure she's for a long time, has just been a puppet of the federal government.

Yeah.

Where, you know, the Scott Morrison, our prime minister and the federal government, that's also Liberal and national party, the two conservative parties in the country, they've been making policy decisions about what the country should do. And I'm sure with New South Wales being the most popular state and the one that is currently in trouble, mostly with COVID, I'm sure they have been trying to drive their agenda through Gladys.

And a year ago, well, a year and a half ago when COVID first hit, the three East Coast, if you discount Tasmania, apologies to Tasmanians, but. The three East Coast states, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, two Labour Party premiers and one Liberal Party premier both stood up against the federal government when they were trying to say, look, we don't want lockdowns, it'll affect business, blah blah blah.

And all three of them said, no, this is the only way we can go. And they basically ran the country in terms of how we dealt with COVID for about three or four months and then...

ScoMo went to Hawaii.

Yeah. Then- That was during the bushfires.

No, that was the joke...

...By two months.

Mentally. Mentally, he went to Hawaii. He's like, tap out, guys.

And so, they were sort of the three musketeers really, were really driving the national cabinet on, you know, which was all of the leaders of the states and the federal government getting together to make decisions about these things. But then that sort of disappeared after Melbourne went into lockdown, then it became very much a Liberal Party versus Labour Party policy and process.

Whatever Queensland and Victoria did was wrong, and whatever the federal government wanted New South Wales to do was right, and of course, the Murdoch press supported it.

So, yeah, that's probably what you see. I really don't like Gladys anymore at all. Like, she's just done such a bad job and seems to be flip flopping all over the place. And you see these like, I sent you that video today.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I don't want to criticise other states, but.

It's effectively a video where there are all these cuts of her from different news interviews and when it doesn't suit her, she says- Effectively, when someone's asking or comparing other states to hers and showing that she's been making some bad decisions or that things are going wrong, she just says, oh, well, I'm not going to comment on any other states and what they're doing.

But the moment she thinks she's got the upper-hand and that she's got a point to prove and, you know, crap on the other states. She'll be like, oh, well, Victoria this, and Queensland did this, and then the next line, it'll be the next day and it'll be like, well, I'm not commenting on other states. And you're just like, my God, I just hate politicians like that. It's just so- It's so myopic, and...

It's such superficial marketing strategy that you just say what you want people to hear rather than telling them the truth.

And the saddest thing is that in politics, probably in any country that's selected for. If you're an honest person, you're going to be taken out pretty quickly.

Oh, yeah.

The first person to admit fault and say, yeah, I made a mistake. They'll be like, well, he can't be trusted. You got to vote him out and everyone's like, oh crap, you can't be trusted. We got to go with that guy that says he never makes mistakes.

Yeah, exactly right.

Anyway, guys, thanks for joining us for this episode and we will see you next time.

See ya.

Alrighty, you mob. Thank you so much for listening to or watching this episode of The Goss. If you would like to watch the video, if you're currently listening to it and not watching it, you can do so on the Aussie English Channel on YouTube. You'll be able to subscribe to that, just search "Aussie English" on YouTube.

And if you're watching this and not listening to it, you can check this episode out also on the Aussie English podcast, which you can find via my free Aussie English podcast application on both Android and iPhone. You can download that for free, or you can find it via any other good podcast app that you've got on your phone. Spotify, podcast from iTunes, Stitcher, whatever it is.

I'm your host, Pete. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope you have a ripper of a day, and I will see you next time. Peace!