What is "appauling" is that somebody with such simplistic views could ever get to the stage of occupying the "leftfrontside." I suspect most reasonable airline captains would have cringed reading his post.
To the subject at hand, I don't believe these statistics prove anything per se, though like most statistics they can be made to appear to prove anything you like. To me it is utterly pointless to use statistics to prove efficiency. We have a few marginal controllers, a few geniuses and the rest of us fall into the competent majority, just like, I suspect, every other country in the world..
While some continue to suffer from the great aussie cringe which has it that anything outside Oz is automatically better (and it has to be admitted there's a few 89ers in their midst), Oz controllers simply do what they are paid to do with the equipment they have available to them, in accordance with the regulations set in concrete for them, not by them. The number of Oz controllers working successfully all around the world, as divingduck mentioned, is testament to the fact they can adjust to work under any other conditions as well. Any suggestion to the contrary is unsupportable.
No doubt leftfrontside knows personally of scores of Oz controllers who didn't measure up to overseas requirements, but I honestly don't know of any. I have also had the pleasure of working alongside several US controllers from Reagan's era. To a man they have been gentlemen and scholars, but only one have I seen who was a natural controller who made everything look easy.
Please try to remember that most of our standards, particularly procedural ones are remnants of the 50's and could do with a good overhaul, but that is not the job of line controllers who do what they can with what they are given.