No, they are not "really" travelers, if they were, they would not give you such silly advice, and whether they knew Australia's policy or not, would know that Australia has has their ETA for at least 20 years and a visa before that.
From DoS:

Countries requiring six months of validity include: Mainland China, Mongolia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Burma, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Russia, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Jordan, Israel, Egypt and Turkey.

That being said, everyone's circumstances are different, if one has a passport full of stamps, and is visiting Singapore for a couple of days, and is from a Tier 1 country, they will let one pass.............Someone with an almost empty passport I do not know. The blanket statement above regarding some others that require visas are obviously wrong if one carries long term visas from those countries......but then again if you do, you are already "known" to them, so would not apply to you.

Turkey is a weird one, as they could care less at Passport control if your passport expires after you leave BUT the online visa system will not issue a visa if you have less than 6 months left (actually 150 days, but they always say 6 months), however the reality is that they hard Turkish limit is in reality 60 days beyond your intended stay in Turkey, meaning that if one got their visa with 6 months left on their passport, they could in fact wait 3 months to enter the country............It should be noted that the limit for all non-visa "Group A" countries have a 60 day limit, and some Schengen countries have no such limit and their citizens can even travel with passports that have expired within the last 5 years!