Some of it is following the major backbones, some of it is just dumbass routing. That point you keep hitting on the west coast is the end point of the main access off Australia. It's one hell of a transit running across the pacific there. The guys on the islands inbetween you might actually have to hit the US and then travel back along that main connection. Australia is sure to be your typical hub, as NZ is too small to be running all that fibre.
Most of those are pretty sensible routes. That second one is the only really stupid one. The last could have just been a break in your normally functional connection to the mainland over there, either by equipment fault or high use slowing it down. Rerouting through Japan would be a bloody good idea if the normal path were saturated. The others are pretty fast.
In the first picture (route to openweb) it goes to Australia to then back to New Zealand again (where it started) before travelling across the pacific, seems pretty stupid to me, and London next?
I was also suprised to find that at no point a route was taken from Perth to South Africa, maybe there isnt one, I dont know.
The route to Internode from Telstra NZ (only New Zealand ISP affected) seemd to be fixed 
. That route had been a problem for several months, adding an extra 200ms to anyone I played Demigod with in Australia.
