Our record was eight with a long-wheelbase minibus.

And we weren't that young at the time! Happy days....

I think that both countries are equally bad. The main difference for me is that in Australia everyone loves to race from one traffic light to the next traffic lights (which seems to be only 100 m away at times) . A few more roundabouts would certainly help the flow and also avoid the traffic light grand Prix and associated bad manners!

Australian drivers are comically bad. They are so impatient, they fear indicators, they are unaturally aggressive, they cant stop drifting out of their own lanes, they dont look behind, left or right etc.
The RTA doesnt help by covering up its lack of forsight by taking a two lane road, repainting it and turning it into a three lane one.

Combine shitty road planning, crappy impatient drivers and large engines and you have a recipe for disaster.

I cant fathom why complete third party insurance (including 3rd party propety) is not mandatory, especially in a country which loves nothing more than to nanny its inhabitants.

What makes me laugh is that the RTA teach you to always have a 3 second gap between the car in front. Problem is, someone will always fill it, so you slow down to maximise the gap, then people screech past you on both sides and race to fill the gap again. lather, rinse, repeat.

Its hard to say this without appearing racist, and I'm not, but it is my concluded observation that Asian drivers are the worst. Not through aggression, just through appalling situational awareness and blind ignorance of whats around them.

I will not ever miss Australian roads when I leave. Road trips maybe, but roads and road users, no ****ing way.

That is exactly what i would have wrote.

But added that Australian cars must have the best brakes in the world, because apparently you can drive 3cm's off the back of the car in front at 100 km/hr in the wet.

But it doesn't matter and you will never get done for it because only speeding causes crashes.

I've driven in most states now (not WA) and there are clear differences in all of them as to the standard of driving (in general, not just the every 1 wanker in a 100).
Sydney tends to be absolute chaos whenever I am there in cabs or in a hire car, however I always get the feeling that it is organised chaos, where the chaos is not likely to be fatal. Melbourne, I have found them to be the most courteous (for Aussie standards) and appear to adhere to most rules more than any other state, however the speeders there really do take the cake. Adelaide was too quiet for me to get a good understanding of the standard. It would be interesting to put them in the middle of a real gridlocked metropolis to see how they fare.
Maybe I am biased, but I really do believe that QLD drivers in general are some of the worst in the world. There is a big "up yours" to rules here and people really do not seem to appreciate they are driving deathtraps recklessly.

The difference between states says to me that there is very little consistency in driving tuition. The comment before from the person who learned to drive in Perth and was told by their instructor to not bother keeping junctions clear is a great example of this, whereas someone in Adelaide learned the correct way.
My wife's examiner was the local policeman, who did a quick few laps of the carpark and passed. She never learned some of the most basic etiquettes for the road. I think this says it all really.

If Aus is serious about wanting to reduce the road toll it would federalise the system and bring it all under one wing with one set of rules for all and make all driving instructors/examiners adhere to one handbook, which they can be regulated on. It should also force learners to have a certain number of professional lessons before being able to sit an exam. The majority of people I know here have never had a single professional driving lesson. In England I didn't know a single person who had a private lesson (exaggerated, I know, but you get my drift), they were all paid through professional companies.

Speed is an issue for the roadtoll, however you sort out the root causes of driving standards in this country and you will see a dramatic change in the death toll.

I drive up the F3/M1/national route 1(hell they haven't even named the biggest motorway in NSW properly yet) every day and it is life threatening. Nobody has ever learnt to drive on it. It's a 110 speed limit but you get people travelling in the outside lanes at 80-90 so you have no choice but to undertake.

Agree with the lane changing as well. As soon as they see you indicate they speed up to make sure you can't get in.

Everyone on this thread complaining about Aussie drivers obviously haven't travelled much through Europe or Asia or you wouldn't be complaining about the standards of driving. Relative to most of the world's driving standards Australians are excellent.

Only if the roundabouts come with clear instructions! Here it seems to be whoever who is driving fastest towards the roundabout has right of way regardless of what direction they are coming from & relative to any other traffic

true, and relative to hitler, clive shipman and fred west are saints.
self invoked godwins law!

Australian drivers are terrible. Other nations have terrible driver (Egypt for example) but that does not make them good, only in a comparison.

Understand that everything is treated as a competition here and it all makes perfect sense.

I find the lack of any forethought of the drivers here astounding. The number of times the car behind me nearly kills us both to get past me (one nearly dropped his spliff) only to race up to the red light at break neck speed, then by the time I get there it's gone green and I overtake him again.

i cant help but keep hearing that in my head as if it were spoken by the Queen.
"One's spliff" etc!

I hate driving in Brisbane, its like wacky races. People refuse to let you in, even speeding up nearly going bumper to bumper with the car in front to make sure you have absolutely no chance of getting in to a space. They drive like morons in the rain and god forbid you actually get away from the lights first, if it's a bloke in the car next to you, you can almost guarantee that they will go in to warp speed just to get past you and make them feel like a big man again.

I have been almost ran off the road trying to merge onto the Bruce Highway, by some stupid woman speeding up so that I couldn't get in front of her(you really do take your life in your hands when you go on that road), flipped the bird by some old dude because he almost crashed into me (trying to over take and didn't see me in the lane next to him, over taking him), almost been crashed into when someone didn't look as they were pulling out of a parking space and missed my turning by 10 streets as not one person would let me in (had to wait for traffic to thin out naturally). I've only been in Brisbane three and a half weeks.

I think half the problem with Brisbane and the surrounding area traffic is that there are a lot of people that come in from the country and are just not used to dealing with high volume traffic, also there are a lot of people that have passed there tests out in the country, where they haven't been made to show that they have the capability to drive. When my husband and SIL told me what they had to do for their tests, I was horrified. My FIL is also proof of this as it's a terrifying experience to get in a car with him, it's honestly like being in a car with a drunk Monkey.

When I was here on a working holiday visa years ago, I tried to get my provisional changed over so I could take my test as its pretty essential to drive here. Instead they gave me a full open licence. I've taken and passed my test since but still, they might as well just give them away in packets of cereal if they are going to do that.

Haha...that's funny. That exactly how my family described it when we went out for a drive on the first jet lag affected day of their holiday!

I hate the way that they tailgate until you indicate to turn at which point they overtake or undertake in a manner that reminds me of the old TCR adverts http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxXTEMSC_w0 swerve at the last second, at which point the car that was tailgating them suddenly finds a stationary car in front of them.

I found driving in Paris, Egypt, UAE and Qatar much worse than driving in Perth. It's pretty stress-free and easy going here, in comparison...