Yet we've slumped to 30th in the ranking.
Besides, Papua New Guinea has armed separatists, plus Port Moresby is one of the murder capitals of the world, yet it's 10 positions higher than the US.
That's off-topic though - the mining tax has left public discourse in the last year, but there's lots of noise about internet content filtering, plus according to the page about Australia on the press freedom index, there's lots of obsfucation at the government level when it comes to requests for information. There's not much in the way of protesting, but there were things like reporters working on the wikileaks story having their work blocked.