I'm in Melbourne. I connect to Netflix's streaming servers in Sydney with 12ms latency. Similar for online games with Australian servers. Internet infrastructure in this country is first-rate. Backhaul is all fibre. All the major CDN and server hosting companies have a presence here (Akamai, Amazon, Equinix etc etc).

No, Australian internet is not "terrible".

What IS terrible is the fact that access to broadband via ADSL is, for many, frustrated by outdated copper-line infrastructure that's in disrepair and inadequate for the demands of the modern internet. That was being addressed by the fibre-to-the-home National Broadband Network, but that network is currently being frustrated by political game-playing.

Those of us lucky enough to be on fibre, though, get first-class speed and performance both within Australia and across the world. And before I moved here, I was on ADSL for years with 20Mbps download speed which would have been more than fine for Netflix even when I was using the US service.

As for "online games with Aussies", well, if you're expecting the laws of physics to change to eliminate the time light takes to travel through a fibre optic cable from Sydney to Los Angeles, you're hoping for too much. But prior to Blizzard opening servers in Sydney last year, I played Wow for years on LA-based servers (and still play some characters on Chicago-based servers) and the latency due to physical distance, while not ideal, wasn't that big of an issue (160ms to LA, 200ms to Chicago from Melbourne).

So yeah, go ahead and fire up your midwest internet and connect to Netflix Australia or Blizzard's game servers in Australia with 12ms latency. Be sure to post a screenshot. And then call the newspapers, because the speed of light just increased fifteen-fold, and you're gonna be famous ;)