I believe that Australia applies the same rigour as UK CAA to it's ATC licencing
Sorry Verci you're wrong on that one. Australia like most places recognises an ICAO license and after having done a bridging course mainly to get the guys up to speed with the TAAATS system, and also up to speed on local differences in the docs from ICAO you are let loose on a local validation course.
Some have said here it is not worth the trouble to go through all this from a resource point of view. Considering the failure rate of ab-initios, the length of time of training and the overall cost, I would have thought that recruiting ATCOs from other suitably busy places with suitably stringent training and testing would make sense.
Doesn't bother me as not interested in living in the UK but still seems wrong.