I’ve always liked it to be honest. I know this isn’t Australian but some of the more recent Red Dwarfs weren’t shot in front of an audience, cause there was a lot of location shooting and plenty of special effects, instead they shot them then got an audience in to record a laugh track
Or did they just add the laugh track afterwards?
They could have but it was my understanding they did the former
Looks like Seven are doing a new sitcom for next year. Hopefully it has a studio audience or laugh track.
A trend which has failed. Australians love their laugh track comedies 
Source?
Australia hasn’t made one in decades.
The last successful one was Hey Dad.
Enough said.
What are you talking about? Sky News after dark has been hugely successful 
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Great mockumentary but no laugh track. 
True. More a laugh track-free Curb format.
we haven’t had a studio audience for a sitcom in ages.
I assume that these 3 sitcoms were the last 3 that had a studio audience (?): Hey Day (1987 - 1994); All Together Now (1991 - 1993); Newlyweds (1993 - 1994)
Sitcoms since then have been in the style of outdoor locations, rather than in-house studios. Pizza, Housos, Street Smart plus the various ABC sitcoms.
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One of the programs the Australian TV industry would probably like to forget ever happened, for reasons which have been made painfully obvious in recent years.
But in any case I’d argue that there’s been a few more successful sitcoms on Australian TV post-Hey Dad, mainly on the ABC & SBS. Kath & Kim? The various controversial projects of Chris Lilley & Paul Fenech?
Either way, I’d probably prefer to see more satire or sketch comedy on our screens over a sitcom.
Yes, but Australians have watched in big numbers Friends, Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, Everybody Loves Raymond, How I Met Your Mother etc. So people still like to watch laugh track sitcoms.
That’s the only one I can think of. This trend of abandoning laugh tracks in Australian sitcoms has produced one successful show in 20 years.
That’s a long bow you’ve drawn. 
There have been many successful and long running series without a laugh track including:
Summer Heights High
We Can Be Heroes
Upper Middle Bogan
The Librarians
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Same. I enjoy watching US sitcoms if they’re on, particularly Two and a Half Men and Seinfeld, but there’s something about canned laughter that doesn’t feel Australian.
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Here are all the “successful” shows which have used a laugh track recently:
Game of Games
Blind Date
Cram
Comedy Inc
And all the comedy failures like:
Bingles (1993)
Wedlocked (1994)
Bullpitt! (1998)
Sit Down, Shut Up (2001)
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