It's a Sydney thing, I think. They've been suffering a long-term shortage of hats and/or common sense.
> The problem with the Australian tech industry is most of the big players are just copy cats.
Yes and no. There's a lot of small and medium firms doing cool stuff, and several of the giants have offices doing important things. IBM's got a mainframe OS lab in Perth and runs a major Linux lab in Canberra. Google are in Sydney of course. Recently I saw a mob in Adelaide (I know, I know) doing cool things with computational intelligence.
But as for consumer-facing stuff, yes, it's mostly copycat. See a foreigner do it and launch something here before they turn up; ideally to sell to them. It's a proven, repeatable business model and investors like that.