Australia has second rate government and second rate management. We're good at digging up dirt and shipping it, or ploughing dirt and shipping it in the form of food.
Our management and government are incredibly risk-averse and we follow trends and popular management theories instead of creating them.
No insight into Australian management, but having lots of valuable dirt to dig up does make it much harder to get going in other lines of business.
I think this is called "dutch disease" by economists: the high wages paid by the dirt-digging (early on) mean that you can't simultaneously be competitive in metal-bashing, which makes it hard to develop other industries.
Our management and government are incredibly risk-averse and we follow trends and popular management theories instead of creating them.