Wow Starskate, that's a pretty bitter post ! And with quite a few errors of fact, too. My Dad wasn't rich, or connected, or a pilot, or any such thing. I paid for my own civilian flight training here in Oz and am happily employed as a pilot.
There are loads of flying jobs in Australia at the moment. In 16 years of flying, I don't ever remember it being like this. For the airlines, you need to talk to them. For GA, the "jobs" link at
http://www.afap.org.au will pretty quickly show you that we're short of pilots here.
The CASA ATPL Checklist (go to
http://www.casa.gov.au and type Form 747 in the search box) says that the holder of an Overseas ATPL(A) wanting to convert to an Aussie one needs, amongst other things, an Australian ME-CIR (Form 645 from the same website), and passes in CPL and ATPL Law. That's 3 exams, not 14. You'd need a flight test for the ME-CIR, but not the ATPL because in Oz there's currently no flight test for the issue of an ATPL.
Even people doing the full ATPL at the highest profile groundschool here wouldn't spend 3 months there, unless they had to have more than one attempt and went back for a lot more study.
And don't hold your breath waiting for FAA pilots being given the right to fly here. If you've got a Kiwi ATPL you can get TTMRA recognition, but anything else is total fantasy.