Pretty much.
You don't need to appoint Australians to games involving Australia because 99.9% of the time they'll win anyway. For the life of me I can't understand why Australians are so anti neutral refs.
It is because they confuse things with referees.
The NRL is the highest level rugby league and their refs are the best paid, but it does not mean they are the only referees in the world or country who can ref. Every ref makes mistakes. I tend to think the NRL refs as a whole struggle to ref well, because they are not able to be criticised openly, so they deliberately look to do things like make the penalty counts even, or to blow games with low penalty counts or stamp their authority by concentrating on different types of rules at different times.
If you believe most people, there are about 4 people in the entire countrywho are capable of refereeing at a decent standard, are any of those from qld? Plenty of players are capable of playing NRL, but no refs are good enough.
The funny thing is that in recent times, whenever a French referee, or a PNG Referee (remember the guy inoki or something like that) or the NZ referees ever referee in test matches they always perform at the same level or sometimes better as any other referrees. There is no such thing as a standout ref, because every game is different, and every ref will have to make calls that they will get wrong at some time. So long as they are fit enough to keep up with play, all of the refs reffing in any serious competion whether it be ESL, french league, QRL or whereever is capable of doing the job.
In the current situation where it shouldnt be all that hard to get a neutral referree. As a pure exercise, it would be very interesting to sit down and watch every world cup game and pick appart how many mistakes each referee made I dont think that Frenchie would be much worse than the Aussies or klein. In saying that though, i though Hayne probably seemed to have the best tournament.