Transcript of AE 1335 - The Goss: Tall Poppy Syndrome

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.

What's going on?

Annoying story of the week.

I've got one. I've got one.

You've got an annoying story.

We can add this to it. You can do this one first. What's the annoying one of the week?

Um. Gas giant Santos fined $10,000.

That'll be..

And ordered to pay court costs of $9,700 for a 25,000 litre oil spill from a kink in one of their pipelines.

That'll teach em.

That'll teach em. I did the calculation. Um, that's the equivalent of. If I got a fine for littering of seven and a half cents.

So you'd be feeling it?

I'd be going. I'll throw a bit more on the ground.

You caused a minor..

Seven and a half cents, you can pick it up!

Well, that's almost like the tax that you pay when you go to Woollies or Coles and have to buy those reusable paper bags, right?

Yeah. It's $0.15 for one of those.

Because every single time I remember they used to be, when they first came in, they were like, oh, don't forget to bring your own ones. And I'm like, yeah, sure. And then you go and you're like, fuck it, I'll pay $0.50 a dollar for two full bags. Like I just, I don't want to have to remember, um, always having these in my bag and carrying them around and, you know, in the car or whatever. But yeah, it sucks that they get away with such a light slap on the wrist, right?

I know, I know, and look, there's, the story is deeper than that because there was no identifiable, um, environmental.

Damage?

Yeah. Damage, from that spill. Now, there will have been, you know, small scale environmental damage, but it's the principle of the thing. It's like, maintain your bloody oil and gas loans, or we're going to smack a huge fine on you. Yeah, to a company that had a $500 million profit last year, fining them $10,000 and getting them to pay court costs of less than $10,000, it, they won't even bother paying it! You know, fine us, or get a $500 fine for not paying your $10,000 fine. Like, it's just ridiculous.

It's a bit of a joke.

So yeah, that's my whinge of the week.

Whinge of the week.

Whinge of the week.

I know all companies in Australia. I thought we could have a bit of fun with tall poppy syndrome, because I don't know if we've talked about this on the podcast before. We probably have.

I think it's been mentioned.

But I was reacting to a video recently that I was going to, um, release. But then I realised that I had been watching it in 1.75 speed. So listening back, I was like..

Sorry, I'm getting over a chest infection.

Was dying, yeah?

Yeah, I'm dying here. Don't make me laugh. Yeah.

Yeah, it didn't seem that bad at the time. But then..

Oh when you listen to it back again.

Oh my God, this will be impossible.

Because. Because you'll. It'll be. If you had recorded the whole thing at that speed, it would be one thing because your voice would be the same cadence as the other one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah..

Whereas when you're talking at normal and you've got this [speaking gibberish].

I think that was the weird thing. The contrast.

Yeah.

Between the two, because I was talking normally and they weren't. Um, so yeah. Anyway, needless to say, I'm not releasing that. I'll have to redo it or just switch something else, but yeah he-

Scratch it.

The guy talked about tall poppy syndrome in the video, and I sort of had an interesting take on it, but I thought I would ask ChatGPT here to define it and then compare it to, um, well, Australia and the UK are the differences, so let's see what it says. Tall poppy syndrome refers to a cultural, a cultural phenomenon where people who are perceived as being overly successful, ambitious or prominent are, quote, cut down or criticised to bring them back down to the level of others. The metaphor originates from the idea of trimming tall poppies to ensure uniformity in the field. This concept reflects societal attitudes towards success and humility and varies between cultures.

Yeah.

And that was why I thought it was interesting.

Yeah. And we have a, there's a follow up expression that gets used is, Don't put your head up.

Yeah.

Or you'll get it cut off.

Keep it down. Yeah. But it is a weird one. I remember in the video he was saying like, tall poppy syndrome. Yeah, it's this thing of the flower sticks up above everything. Of course you cut it down. And I remember thinking, why?

I know why.

The fuck would you bother? Who gives a shit?

Oh, no. When I'm looking at my farm, my my crop, I don't want to see the little red things sticking out of it.

Surely you just leave the flower alone. Who gives a shit? Anyway, so yeah. Um. All right. Tall poppy syndrome in Australia. Origins and nature. Tall poppy syndrome in Australia is deeply rooted in the nation's egalitarian values, stemming from its convict past and cultural emphasis on mateship and equality. Australians often value modesty and are wary of individuals who appear boastful or elitist. Success is celebrated, but only if it is perceived as earned, grounded and not accompanied by arrogance.

So that was, that was sort of my take on it, because this guy was Australian living overseas and he was like, this is one of the biggest reasons I'm never coming back to Australia. Fuck this place. Tall poppy syndrome sucks and no one wants you to achieve anything good. And I remember having this attitude of, I don't think that's how it works. And he'd been living in the UK. So with that in mind, and that was my sort of view on it, let's have a look at what it says here about the UK.

Tall poppy syndrome in the UK, the syndrome manifests differently due to the class system and historical reverence for traditional hierarchies. While modesty is also valued, success is often more accepted if it aligns with established norms or comes from certain institutions, e.g. Oxbridge alumni, so people from Oxford and Cambridge. Criticism. Criticism tends to target those seen as new money or self-made individuals who challenge the status quo. So that is, I had that kind of a feeling that he was misconstruing these two aspects of it, because I feel like there's, there's pros and cons to the idea of tall poppy syndrome. And I feel like there's more pros for the Australian one, where it's much more about we're all the same, we're all equal. Don't try and pretend like you're better than other people. Don't boast and don't, you know, act like you're the upper class. And the lower class suck. Whereas it seems like in the UK it's.

You don't belong to the upper class so don't pretend to be.

Yeah. That's it. And that the upper class is this special thing that is, is revered. Whereas I think in Australia you would be like, we're not going to intentionally hate you, but if you had that attitude of..

Being an upper class..

We would just be like, screw you.

Well, we never had an upper class after early colonisation.

Yeah. So what's your take on it? On the- how does tall poppy syndrome manifest in Australia?

I think there is all of that stuff I agree with, but I think there is also a part of Australia that anybody who is successful, there will be this thing of 'oh yeah, but'. And not necessarily we're going to cut them down, but we will start going, oh yeah, but you know, they're not really that good. And look at um say pop singers. Some pop singer comes along, you know, 15 year old kid comes along and has a hit song. There'll be a bunch of people who go, oh, that's really cool, but there'll be a whole lot of people going, oh, they're not really that good. They were just lucky, you know. And you know, so who did they sleep with to get that? You know.

They want to ride off the hard work they put in to actually achieve what they have.

Yeah, yeah. And it's that sort of oh, well, you know, they're not really that good.

Well, it was interesting because he sort of mentioned the issue of actors and singers and businesses not thriving in Australia and having to leave the country, and that being related to tall poppy syndrome. And I was like.

No, it's just not enough money around.

Exactly. That was my take on it. I'm like people who play in bands, when they start getting a foothold, in Australia or anywhere else, they want to leave so that they've got more to do and more money to make.

You're only going to make money in the UK or the United States.

And so he mentioned people like..

.. actor or a singer.

Kylie Minogue and Chris Hemsworth, and you're like, mate, if they had stayed in Australia where they were successful because they were actors and actresses on TV shows that were relatively big in Australia prior to leaving, then the best they could probably do is, you know, starring in the odd Australian film and making maybe a few hundred thousand dollars a year. Whereas you go to America or you go to, you know, Great Britain and base yourself there and your career absolutely skyrockets because of the opportunities that you've got and the amount of people nearby that you can obviously perform in front of or with or whatever. So, you know, that's why you've got Kylie Minogue and Chris Hemsworth, I imagine, both worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Yeah.

Um, today. But he also mentioned, like, entrepreneurship is really difficult in Australia and businesses too. And my take on that was more the reason it's so hard for businesses to do well in Australia and entrepreneurship doesn't do that well, is because we're a country that's incentivised to invest in property more so than in businesses. It's hard to get loans and, and also it's a smaller country with fewer people..

But we also we also have um, relative to the rest of the world, very high base salary rates. So, you know, entrepreneurship, you know, if we want to look at it that other than the people like yourself who are effectively created something entirely by themselves and then started employing other people to backfill um. Entrepreneurship is mostly exploiting other people's labour to make you rich. As a starting point, you come up with a really good idea, and then the only way you can be quickly successful is to go, I'm going to get a whole lot of labour from really cheap labour to make this work. Now that's an exaggeration to make the point, but in Australia that's difficult because there's a minimum wage. You've got to pay people and it's the minimum wage is not going to be what you're going to pay. In order to get people to do a good job, you're going to have to pay them a good salary. And that means that if you want to employ one person to do a job, bare minimum, if it's an even a relatively unskilled job, you're going to be paying somebody a 50 to $60,000 a year.

Yeah.

So you're going to have to earn double that, at least in order to afford to be able to pay them..

Assuming you had no running..

Superannuation and all the other stuff just to pay that person, not just for yourself.

Yeah.

Um, and so, whereas if you can get cheap labour, it makes a huge difference. But yeah, all the other things are right. You know that we, it's very hard to get business loans because businesses fail and banks are not willing to..

Well, they're riskier. They're seen as riskier, right. And so Australia has this perverse incentive where everyone invests in real estate because it seems to be this sure thing. The government won't do anything to sort of undermine it. And it just keeps increasing year over year. And so it's just an easy place to plant your money, but it's unproductive.

But you know, there's a grumpy old fart part of me as well, that sits there and says, why should the rest of our country care about entrepreneurs?

Well, it's not-

Your average entrepreneur is going to make what- define entrepreneur for me.

Well, I guess it's someone coming up with a business idea by themselves or on their own, as opposed to it being like a huge business coming up with other ideas and, you know, manifesting those. But an individual who then builds a company from scratch effectively, right. So they're going to find- carves out their own space.

Yeah. And they're going to end up employing people and do those sort of things. But from the country's point of view, we don't care.

Yeah.

No, it doesn't make any difference to us.

But that's part of the problem. I wonder, you know, whereas America seems to value that a lot more. And they have a very diverse economy, whereas we don't.

But they also have that the idea of the freedom of the individual is more important than.

Yeah.

Corporations, ironically, they have the, the most, uh, biased distribution of wealth of anywhere in the Western world.

Look at. Yeah. Who's Trump's, um, stacked his government with. You know, I think all of them are billionaires, aren't they? So it's going to be interesting to see how it all changes. But.

The American oligarchs.

Yeah. It's just yeah, it's such a weird time to be alive. But yeah. So how do you see tall poppy syndrome in Australia? Negative, positive? A mix of the two? Largely one of them?

Well, I don't think. I don't think there's much positive about it. Um, but at the same time, I don't think it's a huge negative. It's it can be an irritation. And you can sit there and go, oh yeah, shut up and leave him alone. But it's not really a big problem.

Yeah.

You know, I think there's, there's also, there's the element, there's an element of it that is another part of Australian cultural personality is that Australians are very cynical.

Mhm.

Um they don't, they tend not to trust or believe what they are told. Um, in comparison with many other cultures around the world. So you compare that with or you, you add that to the tall poppy thing. If somebody succeeded, they must have cheated.

Mhm.

It's that, you know..

Cynical as..

Whereas in the US if somebody succeeds you go, wow, they must have worked really hard. They must be really good at what they do. Um, whereas I think in Australia there's that element of yeah, no they, you, you can't do that. You know, not, I won't let you do that but it's impossible.

But that's like a lot of the politicians you have, right. They're all like, well, I'm self-made. I got here by my own, you know, pulling my bootstraps up, and then you're like, yeah, but you had rich parents who sent you to a private school.

Yeah.

And then when you went to university, you got into the Young Liberals or the Young Labour group, and you made all these connections, and then you got a job here because your dad knew someone through nepotism or whatever. And it's like, I think you hear those stories again and again and again, as an Australian at least, and in Australian companies or politics or whatever, that you're sort of like, you just get so used to just calling bullshit when anyone says that kind of like, I'm self-made. I didn't receive help from anyone and you're like, you received it from the fucking system.

Yeah!

If nothing else, which wasn't just, you know, didn't just appear out of thin air.

Yeah. It's the Australian equivalent of 'born with a silver spoon'. It's not that you were born in the upper class, which is where that silver spoon thing comes from in British culture. Um, but it is that, you know, you were, you were born into success.

Yeah.

And therefore you are much more likely to be successful. You know, some working class immigrant who came here as a child of an immigrant family is way less likely, despite the fact they might have more talent, more creativity, or whatever else, to be successful, because they just weren't born into a successful community.

Well, they didn't have the connections.

Yeah, that's what I mean. They were born into that successful community. It's that, you know, when you're born into success, you are much more likely to be successful.

Well, I was watching that. There was something that I was watching. I can't remember when. Probably about six months ago. About a woman who got a job as a journalist working for Channel 7. And she was, I think, of Iranian heritage. But she'd been born in Australia. And the first, on the first day she showed up to, you know, whether it was Channel 9, 10 or 7 or whatever. Um, they were like, who did you know that got you the job? How did you get this job? Who did you- what are your connections? And she was just like,

"What?!"

Like..

"I applied for the job!"

Apparently. Apparently, yes. So she had just applied for the job and got it. But when she got in, she was just like, I had no idea how all these people are just giving jobs to people they know, friends they have, relatives, and it's all about who you know and not about what you can do. And I think she, you know, pretty quickly was just like, fuck this place.

Have you watched television?

I know, well, I tapped out of Channel 7, 9, 10, um, years ago, and you go back and watch now, and you were just like, even the news just feels like not even acting.

But the ABC News has fallen into the same trap now.

See, I don't, I don't really watch it. Besides the literally the reporting of the news like, you know, ABC 24 on YouTube. That's about all I watch.

Yeah. ABC 24 is different.

I just can't handle free to air TV because it just says- Channel 7, 9 and 10. The problem is, it seems like everything is an advert. Even the news.

Of course it is!

Everything. Oh, we just happen to have this story on this new type of vacuum. That's really important.

Well, you don't watch morning television because that is, that is just three hours of advertorials. But even the news now is that you look at 7 and 9, um, have got huge proportions of the parent company invested in the two biggest real estate websites in Australia, Realestate.com and Domain. And so every second night there is a real estate story, and increasing prices of housing is always the good story. You just go, no, this should be the, this should be the bad side of it. You know, it's.

Oh man, I think, I don't know if it's just a, the older you get, the more disenfranchised you feel about politicians and the news or if it's a more recent occurrence.

I think it's recent. Well, there's I think your sister always says when I say I'm a grumpy old fart and she says, no, dad, you're just old. You've always been grumpy. Um, but, you know, I get I think I'm probably more cynical than I was 40 years ago, but the deterioration of the news services now has got, as I said, the ABC, which is all now about the only way the ABC continues to get its funding for their news service is to compete with the clickbait rubbish that the other commercial stuff puts on. They used to be the standard by which everybody else would say, that's how you run a news service.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's. And there are some, there's still some quality journalism that goes into covering genuine news stories on the commercial channels, but those things are still interspersed with just rubbish, advertorial rubbish.

Well, that's what it's all about. And that's how they make their money.

Back in my day. You know, the, the ABC and Commercial News Services were 30 minutes. Now they're all one hours and they all get repeated some other time during the evening. But they're all one hour services. There's less news in an hour than there used to be in half an hour. And they just fill it with human interest stories. And frankly, mostly they're not human. And half of the time they're not interesting.

I wonder how much this is moving, because I spent a lot of my time getting the news from, from YouTube and following individual..

Social media where people are pointing to stories.

Yeah.

And it's been..

Filtered.

Yeah. Well, it filtered and partly curated.

Yeah.

There was this really good, nuanced take recently on the interview between Ukraine's President Zelensky and the American podcaster Lex Fridman. And I just couldn't believe the amount of nuance in there. It was just absolutely phenomenal. And this guy was a British. His name is Vlad. Um, he's got a YouTube channel. So just type in Vlad Ukrainian and I'm sure he'll pop up. But he.

Along with the other 100,000 Vlad's in Ukraine.

Well, who have a YouTube channel..

.. have a YouTube channel. Don't worry about it.

Now I have to find the goddamn..

Now you got to find it.

He's like. His name is Vlad Vexler. Okay. Vlad Vexler. But he had, he had such a nuanced take on that interview. Um, that it's just so good when you find those types of people that you can follow. And obviously you don't follow them for just news in general, but he has obviously a very specific, um, interest and knowledge about Ukraine and Russia.

Left wing podcasters in the US that are, you know, that pre, the last presidential election, they were the only people that I would go to for news.

Yeah.

Because they would cherry pick the news.

Yeah.

And you'd get the news service through them. But yeah, rather than watching Fox News, which every other right wing people would be putting up.

It is an interesting time though, right, with what will happen with the future of news and online, especially now with AI, because I can imagine a lot of these stories will start being written by AI bots. You will just have journalists, managers who find the facts or whatever, and then feed it into ChatGPT to just smash these stories out, because you can do it cheaper, faster, and increase your profit margins based on the ads that you get. And, um, you just wonder if people at what point do people just turn off and just say, I don't trust this anymore? Like, like news? No. Like, if it comes from. If it's purported to be BBC, if it's a, you know, the ABC, if it's Channel 7, I'll just turn off. I'm not even listening anymore because I'm so skeptical.

And what does that lead to then? Does that become like a post-truth world, like what's happening in the US with Trump and others, where they can just say whatever they want and it becomes the truth, because everyone is so used to hearing and seeing and smelling so much bullshit that they just assume everything is bullshit and then just choose to believe what they want to believe anyway, right. So it is a sad time. You wonder if it'll ever get, um, sort of fixed up and returned to what? At least I imagine it was 'back in the day', where..

Well, you've got to think there's got to be a bounce back reaction at some stage, but I think..

People still want..

We've got to go further down into the toilet before that bounce back happens to mix metaphors.

That's the saddest thing about being a human, I think. It's kind of like me. When I was at uni, it was, um, I knew I should be studying, but I never did during the, like properly, during the semester. You always end up..

Cramming week.

The week to two weeks before the exam, and it feels like that with things like climate change and social media and fixing all these issues. It's sort of like, we could do it now, but we'll wait until it gets really bad, you know, until it's really dire and then shit's gonna hit the fan. It's like, all right, now we'll pull our thumbs out and it's going to cost ten times as much to fix in terms of effort and money, but we'll get it done. Anyway.

Good place to finish!

Anything else to add on tall poppy syndrome?

No.

All right.

Just cut them down.

Just cut them down. Thanks for joining us, guys. And we'll see you next time.

Bye!

Tooroo!