In your part of the world, Australia I believe, are meals lump-sum priced with beverage, dessert, tax, etc. all included so that nothing is added to confuse you?
Yes, that is correct.
I met a retired American couple in Melbourne some years ago who thought that it was simply wonderful that when you booked a hotel room here, the price quoted was what you paid. That is, there was not an additional tax component that apparently gets added in the USA. Meals or mini-bar or laundry and similar extra services are added into the bill when you check out of course (unless breakfast is part of the deal, which it sometimes is) but our GST (Goods and Services Tax = 10%) is always part of the quoted price - I think that by law it has to be but I am not sure. You will not see a gratuity or service fee shown on any Aussie hotel bill or restaurant bill that I am aware of.
There are some high profile Americans currently in Australia who say that we pay too much tax but I don't know how we really compare with other countries. For instance, we have a health care levy in our income tax that covers universal health care for all so health care costs are much less of an issue for Aussies than in your country. Health care is not an issue for employment contracts and a concern that you folks seem to have when you retire or change employers. We have a Federal government which has the taxing power including income tax and the sales tax (GST) but the GST is passed onto the State Governments. Local government makes its money out of rates (land taxes and water charges). State and local government also raise revenue for user pays services such as motor vehicle registration (state govt) and building fees, advertising signage permits etc.
Company tax is paid only once so that it is good for a person to hold stocks as the dividends are not taxed because tax has already been paid on the company profits and at a lower rate than the upper marginal rates of income tax.
So you are correct when you say that I would stumble with the tipping arithmetic if I lived in your country because we just don't tip and whilst no country's tax system is simple, ours is simple enough for me to do my own tax return online every year. So simple is good.
I have made one business trip to the USA a few years ago and whilst I thought that I was tipping to the accepted rate (15% at restaurants and $1 per bag to hotel porters and taxi drivers (often for hardly any effort of their part), I never experienced even the slightest show of gratitude from these people nor any extra service that I could identify. Towards the end of that trip though, I discovered the ideal solution to my problem, I just asked the taxi drivers how much tip they wanted. It was usually less than I had anticipated.
Likewise in London, I recall giving a taxi driver a good but not unreasonable tip and he told me that it was too much and gave me some back.
I drove a taxi when I was a university student in the 1970's with a family and mortgage to support and I do recall getting some tips but they were mostly just rounding up amounts. Any tips that I did receive bore no relation to the service that I gave as I learnt early in my taxi driving career that there was a lot less customer hassles if I greeted each customer very cheerfully and did unto them as I would have them do unto me. If I was too silent on a journey, that was sometimes a signal to a misfit passenger that I was worthy of abuse or physical attack (I had my hair set alight on one occasion and was bashed over the head with an arm in a plaster cast on another). So my desire to give good service had nothing to do with tips.
In hindsight, when I travelled to America, I should have tipped extremely generously because I still have hundreds of USA dollars left over from that trip sitting in an old wallet here somewhere and at that time the Aussie dollar could only have bought 48 cents US whereas now it will buy 95 cents so my unspent US dollars have pretty well halved in value since that time. I should have tipped a lot more!