K ia ora bro. It's New Zealand here. Love us or hate us, we're related. By ancestral blood; by adjacency; and by our inexplicable, red-blooded passion for chasing a gonad-shaped ball around an overpopulated paddock. When it comes down to it, we're brothers. And let's face it. Brothers love nothing more than kicking each other's backsides.

Like most little brothers, we live in your shadow. It was our former prime minister Sir Robert Muldoon who said New Zealand was founded by those who had the initiative to escape from Australia, but it's perhaps no surprise that a lot of us are flying across the ditch to break back inside. We have nobody who looks even remotely like Lara Bingle. The Wollongong RSL's social cricket squad would trounce our national side. You earn more than us. You get more sun. How can we compete?

"Only five teams have ever beaten us. The problem is, you're one of them. And you have this knack of doing it at the most inconvenient times." Credit:AFP

Yet, apparently, all this isn't enough; you then go and adopt virtually all gifted Kiwis as Australian - Russell Crowe, Split Enz, John Clarke, Phar Lap, the pavlova. That's why we invented Tall Poppy Syndrome - so that the moment a fellow Kiwi becomes successful enough to be misappropriated by you Aussies, we've already disowned them.

And it's only fair that overachievers feel more at home in a nation where overachieving comes naturally. Just look at your native fauna. You have a badass species of dog, a bear that fits in a rucksack, a marsupial named after Satan who inspired a Looney Tunes character, and the frankly awesome wombat. Your various football teams are named after creatures that have pogo sticks for limbs, know how to box, and have a front pocket in which to store their young.