More importantly, they did not change strategy when the evidence came out that Australia's response was sufficient.
There has been a major outbreak in Victoria recently. But that has nothing to do with the level of lock downs, and everything to do with sloppy quarantine. The Victorian numbers are going down, rather more slowly than hoped, but they peaked at 700/day, now at 200/day.
You must live in a different Australia to me.
NZ recent outbreak is sloppy quarantine (even if they can't find patient 0 right now). They had a short but severe lockdown. Now they are having a smaller second lockdown.
Australia has tried to have it both ways. We didn't go for eradication, and we were close enough that it was viable. Instead Scummo decided business over health. This is why we have been living on a knife edge for 6 months. We keep having outbreaks that only get MOSTLY contained, before allowing 2 others to take their place. And every time something happens it gets big, and gets big fast. The only way to get on top of it is severe lockdowns. This is why Victoria actually followed the NZ model to get this most recent outbreak under control. Go HARD lockdown if you want numbers to decrease. Half half didn't work (they tried that with the suburb based lockdowns).
NZ managed to get back to almost normal life. We haven't. Our businesses are "open" but with so much uncertainty and bouncing in and out of restrictions, they can't plan or operate in any meaningful or effective way. The Australian economy is likely to suffer as much or more in the long term for this reason, with the only hope that we can get to a vaccine soon. We have thrown small business under the bus, not to mention allowing more people to die that we could've prevented.
I'd take NZ's model any day.