I don't know to what extent there are established precedents for when a topic is worthy of a mega-thread, but this decision seems like a big deal to me with a lot to discuss, so I'm putting this thread here as a place for discussion. If nobody agrees then I guess they just won't comment.
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Notes -
The most immediate controlling characteristic is temperature: you can have a temperature swing of twenty degrees farhenheit going thirty miles inland, in a country that's already pretty toasty throughout its spring, summer, and early fall. Which has never had a surfeit of fresh-water rivers. So a majority of the population lives almost exactly on the coastline, and more than a third live in Sydney or Melbourne. On the east, inland settlement was driven by tapping a single massive aquifier; on the west coast, it mostly wasn't.
This has lead to a massively urbanized population, spread across a handful of major cities.
Americans tend to think of Australia in the same way Europeans think of America. Where Brits think of the various states like taking a half-hour train ride to London, Americans think of the various territories as states like the American southeast. But driving from Adelaide to Perth is a longer trip than going across all of Texas, it's got the same scope of planning requirement, and if you're in Perth, it's your mode of comparison (going north is worse!).
Ok, economics. Work in the country is heavily bifurbicated, with resource extraction and agriculture providing a vast majority of economic exports along with a nature tourism industry, and then on the other side the finances/state agency/urban service sector. Manufacturing used to span the gap a bit, but it collapsed over the last couple decades, even more so than American manufacturing did. Construction kinda tries, but doesn't really.
((There's some policy stuff that augments this; the backpacker visa being one of the most obvious to outsiders by providing a massive labor force of mobile non-voters who get changed out every few years; among other things, they're why the rural/far-suburban service sector is a non-actor in politics.))
As a result, rural areas have basically no political (the National party has been a joke for a long time) or cultural (except as villains) importance, while urbanized voters face strong economic and environmental pressures toward communitized interests.
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