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Australia is a nation of immigrants. About 30% of the Australian population are immigrants, and rising. Less than 50% of Australians have both parents born in Australia.

Australia still manages to have great quality of life (unless you are an Aboriginal). I'm not sure how they manage it, I haven't looked into it, but somehow they have.

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They've managed it through the greatest major real estate bubble in modern history (by a large margin).

Their housing market value as a share of GDP, is about 2.6x that of the US rate.

https://i.imgur.com/h0BOtzE.png

The other thing has been the rise of China and selling them a vast supply of commodities.

In 2002, Australia's GDP per capita was $20,000, while the US was $38,000. A dramatic gap. China's GDP explosion began in 2003 (their economy went from $1.4t in 2002 to $4.6t in 2008, and on upward from there). Australia's GDP soared right along with China's economy.

Since we are just speculating, I hypothesize that not sharing a land border with relatively poor countries has something to do with it. Australia does take in immigrants, but since most of them come legally they can pick and choose. They don't get the huge number of illegal immigrants USA deals with. This is not a diatribe against immigration, I'm an immigrant myself.

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