Well, the position I interviewed for also had other Australians interviewing for it. I don't think the employer would actually go through all the effort and paper-work of hiring a foreign worker over the local ones if they didn't think my skill-set and skill level was actually something that was lacking around them.

Or maybe there are Australian programmers who are as skilled and some of them will get hired eventually! If people from India (a poor under-developed, third-world country) can equip themselves with skills using their limited resources that lets them compete at a global level with workers from across the world, nobody's stopping the Ozzies from doing that with all their first-world wealth and resources.