Only for some countries. For me, it's ~ 5 dollar shipping no matter what, no minimum order at Farnell. RS-Online is also 5 euro shipping, no minimum order.
Digikey.com is a bit more problematic, 20$ or so shipping unless the order is about 200$ or more.
There's other online stores with good reputation.
And I'm in f**ing Romania, where there are none or very few electronics stores with name brands parts. It's cheaper and often faster for me to buy from Farnell than ordering from various local electronics stores. I'm ordering parts on Thursday afternoon and they're at my door on Monday.
Just because a person in Australia may have a harder time procuring quality parts, doesn't mean it's ok to teach a worldwide audience bad "habits".
It's a bad thing when quality is put aside or decreased, just to push something out the door and be done with it... I don't care about "let's just put any cheap cap from the first electronics store in town I see and upload the clip to youtube, to have my quota of videos for the week" videos.