Yeah I've had this title for a long time as well. Unfortunately it's like many other multiplayer games these days and requires someone to host a server. So it's easy to figure out that there's next to no Aussie servers most of the time.
It's actually a really fun game but when you have to join a US based server and getting pings of over 200 then that fun disappears rather quickly. It doesn't handle that latency very well at all and you bounce around the track often and contact with other cars pretty much guarantees you'll be the one coming off worse. If you manage to join an Aussie server and have others playing as well, well then these problems aren't a concern and the whole experience is a blast.