system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why in Australia is Liberal deemed right-wing, when in America it means the opposite?

It makes watching American politics on youtube that tiny bit harder.
gpt
To understand this a brief history of liberalism and conservatism is needed.

Liberals emerged in opposition to the European monarchies and favored individual liberty. As liberalism evolved, they became divided on how to best pursue liberty. Initially, liberals generally sought freedom from government coercion. Other liberals argued that the least well-off needed to be helped by the state to truly obtain liberty. The division is basically between how much the government should intervene into the economy with classical liberals on the more free market side and social liberals on the more state-welfare side. 

Due to this history, a lot of European "liberal" parties are rather centrist. The US is strange because the libertarians and conservatives (pre-Trump) were actually pretty close to classical liberals. The social liberals are more like the moderate Democrats. 

Plus, the far left parties in Europe have strong communist and socialist influences that are absent in the US. Also, the conservative parties were the "Church and State" people that defended the monarchies. The US also didn't have that same dynamic. And of course, the US always has to be unique so we call anyone on the left "liberals" and those on the right are conservative. So the Aussies probably have things labeled correctly and it's the US that's making things difficult.

Related - The right and the left is not the same in every country. For instance a labor party might be center-right in country A, but center-left in another country B even if they have the same positions because country A and B are ideologically different as a whole.