Just over 7000 km, at the closest point I can find. Although by that route Chile is closer, at about 6917 km between Macquarie Island, Tasmania and Islote Mendoza in Chile's Diego Ramirez Islands. Of course this is still more than twice the distance between Australia and Vietnam. The thing is the southern continents really don't go far enough south for polar distortions of standard map projections to come much into play, as happens with the surprisingly short distances between the far north of Europe and North America (Sweden and Canada are about the same distance apart as LA and Houston).
True, but our policy is to just work with inhabited islands. In several of our Countries Closest quizzes, when we included tiny empty islands like these to calculate inter-country distances, some island countries would be apparently way nearer each other than a look at a world map would suggest. You can argue this one either way (as we have!) but we're comfortable with the approach we're taking.
I read the Wikipedia article and I'm still confused as to what it is, but New Caledonia is not a region of France. Apparently it is a special collectivity called a territory "sui generis" meaning in a class by itself. It seems to be heading toward independence even though some do not want it. It even has two national flags representing the two factions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Caledonia
Like many geography quizzes on this site, you have to get a perfect score to get 5 points. I forgut Brunei the first time around, but after finding out what I missed I was able to get a perfect on the second try.
Mackay looks to be about the closest point to both and Google tells me Apia, Samoa is 4,208 km away and Poland Kiribati is 6,327 km, a difference of over 2000km's.
Kiribati covers an enormous area of ocean. It is made up of three main groups The Gilbert group is a permanently inhabited atoll near the equator. As such it is much closer than Samoa - even though if you look at a map of the Pacific it looks like Samoa is equidistant to the main part of Kiribati
surely the shortest distance in that case is from Southeastern Tasmania to Fiordland, which is over 1500?
e.g including Australia's Heard & McDonalds Islands
Which countries are closest to Australia?
Excludes offshore territories and uninhabited islands