Australia vs Netherlands

Australia is 186 times larger than Netherlands — 7,741,220 against 41,543 km². Australia is 1.5 times more populous than Netherlands — 27,614,411 against 18,087,633 people.

Side by side

Population density

Netherlands is 122 times more densely populated than Australia — 435 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, Netherlands 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.

Netherlands

About a quarter of the Netherlands lies below sea level and roughly a fifth of its present land area has been reclaimed from sea, lake and marsh. Flevoland, a province of some 1,400 km², was drained from the Zuiderzee in the 20th century and is the largest artificial island in the world. The lowest point, in Zuidplaspolder, is about 6.8 m below sea level.

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.