COMMENT: The lack of perspective

One of the main problems down here is the isolation. Because Australians don't know much about the outside world, they overreact to everything that doesn't fit their small world perspective - slight disturbances become "riots" and so on. Australians are also badly travelled - a contentious point this, as most Australians do travel abroad in quite high numbers. However, they only really go to English-speaking countries, especially the UK and the USA, and hence in a sense are really not travelling at all, considering Australia's history. But more on this maybe later. Suffice it to say that even an American, surely the most insular people in the world, notices this:

"If Australians lack one thing in their lonely eminence Down Under, it is perspective. For four decades they have watched in quiet dismay as one country after another – Switzerland, Sweden, Japan, Kuwait and many others – has climbed over them on the per capita GDP table. When news came out in 1996 that Hong Kong and Singapore had also squeezed ahead, you'd have thought from the newspaper editorials that Asian armies had come ashore somewhere around Darwin and were fanning out across the country, appropriating consumer durables as they went."

(Bill Bryson, p. 133)