The thing is, Australia has never had a particular strong gun culture. Firearm ownership in Australia has always been dominated by things like .22 rifles and basic shotguns.
That’s got very little to do with laws, or anything, but with a different history.
Americans have been fed a narrative about Australia that suggests there was some huge seismic shift in the attitude towards firearms here in the late 1990s. There really wasn’t. Very few people had ever owned anything particularly heavy duty. It’s just never been part of the culture.
We don’t like in the outback, Crocodile Dundee style - well, very few of us do. That’s the Australian mythology but it’s not the reality.
As we settled the interior - and we didn’t settle all that much of it - the police went with the settlers. A ‘frontier mindset’ like that that developed in the lot of the US didn’t develop in the same way here.
I've learned that the "precision rifle" trend has found popularity in Australia. I can see that, given both the laws and the terrain. I hope that interest continues, because marksmanship that can put hits on target at 1000+ yards is never wasted, even if the rifle that the military pulls out of mothballs to put in a soldier's hands isn't quite as accurate. It's the skills that count.