Anecdotal, but I've found the quality of restaurant service in Australia is far below that of the US - there is little incentive for servers to do anything but the absolute minimum. I do think this is because there isn't a tipping culture here.

I frequently eat with someone who orders something like a hamburger with no butter on the roll, and maybe 30% of the time he will receive butter on it anyway, because the servers don't pay much attention. When we holidayed in the US, this didn't happen a single time, and we attributed that to the fact that if a server messes up an order like that, they're risking their tip.