Irrespective of who is bidding, you need to remember two things
- the world is a global economy, so the fact that a non-Australian company is bidding should be no problem (the Canadians have owned an Australian based operator - Lloyd - for years anyway)
- whatever organisation is organising the tender will determine some way (ie. some combination of quality, price, safety, politics, nationality, etc, etc) of deciding which bid wins over the others. Sometimes other forces are at work - there were major issues in the EC some while back when the Italian Police did not go out to tender on buying new helicopters, thinking they could just order from their local supplier AgustaWestland - politics there ensured that other companies must be able to bid on future tenders
Your posting just reminded me of all the
that the Americans came out with when Eurocopter won the LUH contract, when AgustaWestland won the VXX contract and so on (and in those cases the contracts even required those manufacturers to build the said helicopters in the US!). Recent US tenders (eg. LUH and CSAR-X) have now reached a point where you can almost guarantee that the losers will then take the organisation issuing the tender to court to complain about the way the tender was run.