I know that the Brisbane management team spent at least a week...

I know that the Brisbane management team spent at least a week in the US with Prime in early March.

The culture thing is a good point. At the AGM the CEO was talking about how different he found doing business in Australia was to NZ - and then how different again the US was. That's the reason they dipped their toe in about 5 years ago with the USA shop to get a feel for how things operated over there without committing too much capital to it.

That and various other factors (ie usually beating - and never missing - guidance) point to a fairly careful/conservative management - perhaps because they have been once bitten previously.

Only so much management can do in the face of outside shocks though so i'm not denying risk.