I don’t necessarily agree with various official Australian attempts to impose Australian law on foreign non-government websites, but I don’t see how that is relevant to whether US governmental websites permit access from Australia
Here's a analogously real example from current US-Ukraine policy:
> For example, one current social goal in the U.S., given the geopolitical conflict with Russia, is to avoid facilitating activities that could aid the adversary. As Russia has invaded Ukraine, the U.S. has positioned itself in opposition to Russia but not Ukraine. Banks, therefore, need to align with these geopolitical stances, leading to decisions that might catch some individuals in the crossfire, even if they’re not directly involved.
> Financial institutions often interpret this as: if they're not deeply specialized in doing business in Ukraine, they should avoid it altogether. They fear they won’t be able to consistently ensure compliance with these complex directives from the government [especially because there's a chance those directives might change in a week, or a month, or 3 months].
> This creates a split-brain problem within U.S. decision-making. The government intends to say, "Please cut down on oligarch money laundering that supports Russia’s war effort." However, financial institutions hear this as, "Under no circumstances should you fund anything related to Ukraine," including, for example, scholarships for Ukrainian high schoolers—a slight exaggeration, but not far from the reality in some cases.
(source: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/true-crime-ba...)
I personally doubt US state and local governments are specifically targeting Australia in the way you suggest.
I actually doubt they are thinking about Australia at all. I also doubt their legal departments are worried about the Australian government, since the Australian government taking legal action against a foreign government (even a local or subnational one) would in most cases be illegal under all three of international, Australian and foreign law due to sovereign state immunity, and diplomatically they wouldn’t do it to the US because it would offend their American allies. If for some strange reason an Australian government agency had a bone to pick with some US state or county, they’d aim to solve it with the US State Department. Private corporations and individuals are not protected by the same legal doctrines or diplomatic protocols.
I think they just see some option in their firewall config (or Cloudflare or whatever) called “limit countries allowed to access”, they turn it on and add only the US, and then they think “see I’ve kept all the foreign hackers out now!”.