Alleviating your Sunday hangover with a full packet of 24 painkillers - not recommended - will set you back $7.50 here. Over there, the packet only costs about $5.
Now, extend the same logic to everything else in your grocery basket, that new car you want to buy and all the booze you drank last night and you will soon be rolling in wads of spare Australian cash.
Next, consider the world domination of sports we could achieve. We suck at swimming but they've got a swag of Olympic medals for the sport.
They've got the Cricket World Cup. We've got the Rugby World Cup. We'd score fighter jets, they'd score actual ownership of Phar Lap, Russell Crowe and Crowded House.
The thing that may surprise you is that loads of Kiwis don't mind the idea of an Australasian union.
A survey five years ago found one in four of us quite liked the idea. For the rest of you, maybe you're just looking at this the wrong way.
Don't consider what Australia can do for us. Consider what we can do for them. In 1901, Australia's six colonies joined to form a country. They invited us to join them.
The offer is still there in the constitution. In the list of possible Australian states, squeezed between New South Wales and Queensland, in black and white, is New Zealand.
The story goes that we said "thanks but no thanks" to Australia because of the way it treated its indigenous people. We didn't want them to treat Maori the same.
So, for the next year Australia flirted with us like mad. Trying to impress us with their new-found tolerance, Australia gave Maori the vote in 1902.
When we couldn't be wooed, their goodwill died. It was another 60 years before Aboriginal Australians got the vote.
So think about all the things we could affect now if we pretend we'll sign up as states seven and eight.
Maybe the Ockers would give Kiwis the healthcare their taxes pay for. Maybe they'd consider allowing their same-sex citizens to marry.
Maybe they'd stop treating asylum seekers with the kind of disdain that would make South Africa's apartheid governments look friendly.
Heck, maybe they'd even think about joining the rest of the democratic world and put human rights into law. It's not a big deal. We've had a Bill of Rights for 25 years.
And here's the biggest benefit: we wouldn't have to change our flag. We could keep ours, they could keep theirs.
We could fly whichever one took our fancy that day and no one would notice because they look almost exactly the same.
Debate on this article is now closed.
