He referenced Tiger being bought by Virgin as a loss of the only independent LCC. He did not mention that they could not make money.
Virgin paid $1 for Tiger, at the same time the owner, Singapore airlines (also an owner of Virgin at the time) gave $100 million in finance to Virgin to sure up its operating margins. That means Singapore effectively paid Virgin $100,000,000 to take Tiger off their hands, so as far as being a successful or even independent airline, is very debatable. The only airline transaction that seemed to net at least someone some net gains was Sky West, both with the sale of a dying entity as well as a lucrative leasing arrangement for a number of aircraft (mainly ATRs).
And as said above, anyone who compares the Australian domestic market to the US has been sniffing some sort of fumes for too long.
If the population here was 40/50m
Even if that was the case, without major structural changes to how Australians live most of those would still live in the same places, the major cities. You need to build up regional centers to populations of at least 500,000 for secondary and tertiary airlines to be able to thrive on these alternate routes. You cant even run a jet from Bendigo or Ballarat to Sydney yet profitably and that's two of the top ten population centers in regional Australia.