Australia vs Belgium

Australia is 254 times larger than Belgium — 7,741,220 against 30,528 km². Australia is 2.3 times more populous than Belgium — 27,614,411 against 11,941,781 people.

Side by side

Population density

Belgium is 110 times more densely populated than Australia — 391 against 4 people per km². Density is where area and population interact, and it often reverses the impression the headline figures give — a large country with a small population can feel emptier than a small crowded one by an enormous margin.

Practical differences

• They drive on opposite sides — Australia on the left, Belgium on the right.
• Different currencies: the Australian dollar and the Euro.
• Australia spans 5 time zones, so "local time" there is not a single answer.
• Different continents — Oceania and Europe.

Australia

The sixth-largest country in the world and the only one that covers an entire continent. The Great Barrier Reef runs about 2,300 km and is the largest structure made by living organisms on Earth, visible from orbit. Around eighty percent of its mammals, reptiles and flowering plants exist nowhere else. Melbourne and Sydney are within roughly a hundred thousand people of each other, and which counts as the largest city depends on where the boundary is drawn.

Belgium

One of the most densely populated countries in Europe, and one of the most brightly lit — its motorway lighting was long visible from orbit as a distinct grid. The Signal de Botrange, its highest point, is only 694 m. Antwerp handles the majority of the world's rough diamond trade.

Neutral facts only. Nothing here addresses politics, government, economics or which country is preferable in any respect — population is the one figure that dates, and it carries its year.