Are you familiar with Atlassian in particular? They are a software company whose customers are generally other software companies.

So yeah, sure, Australia has cities and overinflated property market. But the point is more the geographic distance from other English-speaking nations. Or so I assume.

Atlassian specifically does a HUGE chunk of their business with clients and companies in the US. And if they started forcing their US-based people (or Europe, or wherever) to return to office, it could result in a clusterfuck of losing their overseas employees to places that do still allow remote work, which would be a big headache to fix because if it got bad enough they'd have to start flying people from Australia (presumably where corporate headquarters are) to start figuring out how the hell to recover from that. And I've worked for software places that had to abruptly send people to their offices in other nations because shit went wrong on the ground and phone calls weren't fixing it.

(I've had aussie co-workers and clients...inevitably, one side or the other has to stay late or come in early to get a live phone call done. The time zones are so far apart between Australia and the US time zones. It's REALLY easy to struggle with that if something is going wrong on one side or another.)

When you're separated geographically so far from a BIG chunk of your market, it's downright dumb to rock the boat by forcing employees to choose "you, or remote work". Especially when Atlassian is a "known" name and looks good in a resume. So the CEO probably recognizes that and has no interest in being dumb like that. There'd be a risk of losing your current employees with all their knowledge and replacing them employees who aren't skilled/good enough to get a remote job.

So, sure, Australia I'm sure does have cities and markets just as big and messy as anywhere. But Atlassian in particular is a software company that does a LOT of remote overseas work--it makes a lot of sense they would not want to push employees back into the office. The geographic distance between their Australian offices and their employees in Europe and America could make things get messy if things went out of control. There's a vested interest here that is probably different than other corporations.