Australia vs Finland

Australia is 23 times larger than Finland — 7,741,220 against 338,145 km². Australia is 4.9 times more populous than Finland — 27,614,411 against 5,646,436 people.

Side by side

Population density

Finland is 4.7 times more densely populated than Australia — 17 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, Finland 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.

Finland

Finland has roughly 188,000 lakes and 179,000 islands, more of each per unit area than any other country. About three-quarters of the land is forest, the highest proportion in Europe. A quarter of the country lies north of the Arctic Circle, where the sun stays up for weeks in summer and down for weeks in winter.

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.