After having a look at the articles in question, I am even more convinced that these are very dubious references. The SMH article is actually a secondary source, with the quote in question coming from tipping.com, which is an American website. I visited tipping.com and I can't even find the quote as it was used in the SMH story, suggesting that they may have changed their minds in the last couple of years! The other article by USA Today seems to be more compelling (suggesting a 10 - 12% tip for Australian restaurants but no tip for other services), but again doesn't correlate with my experiences. As mentioned above, I worry about the quality of the research in the article, because it clearly says that New Zealand has no tipping, and yet seems to think that Australia (which is just over the way from NZ) has a totally different tipping custom. My experience has been that this is not the case, and I would think that the tipping custom that applies in NZ applies equally in Australia.