Yea, the gamearena servers are pretty crappy, still running old 1.1.0 code, there's no admins, no new maps, nothing. But the ping is great for us aussies.
There's a new aussie server called Custom-X which looks pretty promising, they also run a few NS servers. For now they're still running the old trem code as well, but I'm sure they'll get either either R1CH or tjw's version up and running pretty soon. Keep an eye out for an announcement from those guys, I know that the server admin there has an account on these boards.
Also, I've played on gamearena with mr bitch quite a lot and he's usually OK.