Best to see the S.A. scheme first hand but looking outside of the legislation into the day-to-day running of the sheme is as follows.
There are bottle collection depots scattered around the state, mainly in the cities and population centres, some are privately run, others by organisations such as Scouts.
Most people save their recyclables in large bags or they buy 2nd hand wheelie bins and take them down once in a while (3 months, 6 months?)
Others who can't be bothered will pass them on to whoever, their house cleaner, the kids, local charity or whatever.
People short of money will collect them to suppliment their income, mainly homeless people and pensioners.
In the country, they do get collected and brought to the city by truck, filling a truck with 10c containers adds up to a lot.
Crushing cans and bottles is allowed (at least at my depot) providing they can see the 10c deposit printing or the cans are blatently obvious - popular brands of soft drink and beer for example.
The depots quite often take other recyclables - dead car batteries etc. and sell stuff like LPG refills, firewood etc.
In the outaback, the system fails, too far away, but for the most part the system seems to work fine.