.."In Australia, a stopover is if you fly in on one day and out the next - you can fly in at 2330 and fly out at 0500 the next day and it still counts as a stopover."

There was no stopover of any kind - it's a direct (milk-run) flight from CNS to GLT that happens to stop twice enroute, at least if a guy on the ground waves a flag at the pilot as he circles the field. Single plane, single flight number, single coupon. Single segment.

In any case the OWE rule is that a stopover is >24 hours. It's sad that some of the Qantas people assigned to sort these things out don't know the rules. There's a posting in the recent archives by a fellow who originated his OWE in Australia, and QF told him once he returned to Australia (or perhaps his originating city) he could fly no more segments, even though his continent-of-origin stopovers and segments remained unused. That can be a significant reduction in value of the OWE ticket and we should be able to absolutely depend on an airline's rate desk to understand the rules rather than have to sort them out ourselves.

In my case I'm out USD250 (x3 pax, which buys a really good bottle of practically anything legal) since I'm flying a coach segment that should have allowed as the extra segment, but the QF agent insisted on charging for the 6th chronological, a business-class booking.

(Of course maybe Qantas is right on that point - my experience with extra segments so far has been in Europe, where the booking carriers (CX, BA) have been happy to accept the segments I chose for the Y-fare.)