As a kiwi I have enough of an outsiders perspective on Australian culture to notice some things I wouldn't of been able to notice had I been born here. I've been here 7 years now. At first I noticed very little difference. Aussies just seemed like less PC versions of kiwis. But recently the differences have snapped into focus and they are significant.
The key thing to know about Australians is that they focus on process rather than outcome. But not in a German or Japanese kind of way. Australians have a reputation for being laid back and it's true they are. They don't really mind if you follow a different process to them. They will just think you're a bit dumb or something and leave you do it your way. An Australian basically lives by the belief that everyone should pick a job and do it1. If the outcome is bad then that's just tough luck. Nothing to be done about it.
This culture makes for some of the worst public servants2 in the world since government workers aren't beholden to customers they always become a bit detached from reality. But combine that with a culture of just following the process and you have a money wasting machine. The TV show Utopia does a good job of satirising this but I've never met a public servant here who can watch it because they find it boringly realistic.
This culture stems from the colonisation days. The early colonisers were made up of criminals and guards. The guards obviously had access to the most resources and with resources comes access to women so modern Australians descend from the guards not the criminals. And these guards were unambitious Englishmen who liked being told what to do. England had a strong libertarian streak at the time but that aspect of english culture just produced migrants for America. Which was finally becoming a place where young ambitious people could make a fortune for themselves. The people that remained in England were either already rich or lacked the ambition to become it. From the later England drew it's public servants and the least of those got shipped of to the other side of the world to extract labor from criminals.
Kiwis take pride in their can do attitude and there was an ad on TV when I was a kid that showed an Aussie kid playing with a kiwi kid in a sandpit. They decide to build a sand castle and the Aussie kid immediately starts listing all the friends he will call in for help while the Kiwi kid just says na mate she'll be right and just starts building. This scenario played out in my life here about a dozen times before I remembered the ad and shared it with my Australian colleagues. They weren't insulted in the slightest which is when I realised this is a genuine cultural difference. I remembered this ad towards the end of building an almost literal castle by myself.
I missed out on ~$15k when my employer went bankrupt because I was on holiday at the time they filed the paperwork. When I researched similar cases I found out about one guy who missed out on ~$100k because he got cancer just before his employer went bankrupt after he spent his entire adult life working for that one company. The public servants involved took so long to decide not to pay him that they had to tell his widow instead of him. I brought this story up with one of the public servants involved and they had nothing to say about it. It didn't sound like she intended to lose any sleep over it. And by the way the liquidation company's fee happened to line up with how much money was left in the company so I was out of luck there too. I suspect this is standard practice for liquidators in Australia because the culture makes this kind of thing very easy to get away with.