I can't really blame them, but it'd be nice if some of the brighter ones stayed around.
I'm looking in Melbourne but the market down there seems like a mess right now.
Couple that with the falling Australian dollar and moving to the US and getting paid in USD doesn't sound so bad.
Personally, I don't like the start-up culture, and I happen to work at a place that does interesting things already, so I'm quite happy staying in Canberra.
Plus, the weather and traffic in Canberra is way better than Melbourne. (Longing for the weather to remain constant for more than 20 minutes...)
And you're right about the traffic - Canberra is very nice in that regard.
NYC's tech scene is bigger than all of Australia's scenes added up.
The Bay Area is bigger than all of Australia's scenes multiplied.
To answer your question, we still do interesting things :)
It really kind of annoys me that "foreigners" fall to this victim type mentality and then rather than pushing their own local governments to change, they advocate leaving and only exacerbating the problem by draining the local talent and interest group, while piling on to the concentration of people in the tech centers like the Valley.
I would love to know what the total damage the USA does to source societies and countries by luring and essentially poaching talent and expertise away. I know that India is really kind of struggling with that issue. On one hand they see it as a source of remittances, but on the on the other hand even in a huge population like India they are really starting to feel the sting of the "brain drain" in the tech sector.