I do not know when the Australian CAA lowered the bar to include automatic pilot monitoring as counting towards logging instrument flight time but the original reason for the logging of flight time on instruments was a measure of experience level and thus perceived competency. The Royal Australian Air Force and Navy saw fit to also restrict logging of instrument flight time to actual hands on flying.
It is possible that the rules changed when airlines perceived hands on instrument flying as potentially dangerous in jet transports and lobbied their regulators to add autopilot monitoring as acceptable for logging on instruments. This of course immediately negated the whole point of having an instrument flight column in the log book.
Of course it is impossible to verify if a pilot is stacking his log book instrument flight column with fake flight on instruments in order to qualify for certain flying jobs where minimum instrument hours are called for. Witness previous Pprune posts where it was mentioned that a captain of a certain LCC said to his F/O who was completing the day's flight records "Put me down for 30 minutes I/F" even though the weather had been CAVOK wherever they flew that day.
To the knowledgeable interviewer, the amount of instrument flight time shown in a pilot's log book is usually regarded with marked scepticism if it can be proved it was automatic pilot time.
A short raw data non-automatics session in the simulator quickly weeds out the automatics monkeys.