Australia vs Iraq

Australia is 18 times larger than Iraq — 7,741,220 against 438,317 km². Iraq is 1.7 times more populous than Australia — 47,020,774 against 27,614,411 people.

Side by side

Population density

Iraq is 30 times more densely populated than Australia — 107 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, Iraq on the right.
• Different currencies: the Australian dollar and the Iraqi dinar.
• Australia spans 5 time zones, so "local time" there is not a single answer.
• Different continents — Oceania and Asia.

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.

Iraq

The Tigris and Euphrates run the length of the country and meet at Al-Qurnah to form the Shatt al-Arab. The Mesopotamian Marshes at their lower end are among the largest wetlands in western Eurasia. Uruk, on the Euphrates, was one of the first cities in the world.

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.