[gumby]

> It's pretty Australian to think your country is the best at most things.

What? Australia is the land that gave the world the term “cultural cringe”. Often something is described as “world class” to justify its quality (whether correctly or not) by an external reference.

If you move to the USA you’ll see the opposite: people implicitly assume that the local thing is the world’s best, and don’t even bother to say so as they assume it’s self-evidentially so. The other country I’ve lived in where this is true is France, which is possibly why they criticize each other so much.*

Of course the truth is that each of these places does some things well and some not so well.

* The French also moan a lot — it feels like the national pastime — but that’s different.