I'd argue that it would work in any nation with an educated population where the leadership is listening to health experts and not undermining the containment effort or lying about the danger.
[0] https://www.who.int/news-room/articles-detail/updated-who-re...
[1] https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/31/as-far-right-calls-for-c...
They were able to eliminate covid in states of equivalent size as NZ, in effect achieving something just as impressive. But because the country is bigger, all it takes is a cluster in a single state to then propagate to others.
Australia is a pretty small country. In a country as big as the US it would be virtually impossible to eliminate without extreme levels of control over the population.
One of the giveaways was in their briefings at the time. New Zealand was interested in every new case, because you don't get to elimination with some sort of high level statistical approach, you get there one case at a time. Australia was happy to cheer success if it had fewer cases this week than last week - but fewer isn't elimination.
New Zealand left Level 2 only after weeks with zero new cases. Because they understood that "it's just one case" plus "infectious disease" multiplied by time = unlimited cases. Meanwhile Australians decided they were done, after all it's only a few cases, what's the harm? Well this is the harm.