Holy crap, Australia has approximately the same population as New York City. That's nearly an order of magnitude less than I would have guessed. I had no idea!
An order of magnitude higher and it'd be of similar magnitude to the entire USA.
I tend to think of Australia as pretty similar (if literally polar opposite) to Canada. Similar population and standard of living on a similarly large but largely inhospitable landmass.
Australia has almost everything wrong you can think of climate-wise: cold Antarctic currents hitting the west coast causing dry winds with little moisture, on the east coast there's a narrow strip between the coast and the long N-S mountains that gets moisture, but even then the mountains are barely high enough to trap winds and cause rainfall. The very north gets monsoons, the inland is a baking desert and only the very south is temperate.
If you want an idea of scale, there's a single cattle farm in Australia operated by less than a dozen people that is larger than Texas.
To a good approximation Australia is a desert surrounded by a narrow, narrow strip of livable land. It would be pretty remarkable if it had a population close to that of the US.
An order of magnitude! That would be imagining that Australia has >200 million people. Given that the US has a little more than 300 million, well... No, they aren't comparable.
Australia by an large is an inhospitable island with only a few pockets of population.
Depends where you draw the line. The 5 boroughs alone is about 8M, but the broader metropolitan area is something like 20. (And even beyond that it's still pretty densely populated compared to most places.)
