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On the subject of exchange rates, with all the currencies in the world you really have to go way back and try to tease out the complex interactions etc, it's like a tangled ball of thread. It's not simply a case of "our crown buys two of your ducats and three of that guy's florins so aren't we clever chaps hey". A quick historical lesson will possible enlighten.
Up until the 1960s Britain and Australia both had the pound. As it happened the Aussie Pound wasn't linked to the Pom pound and when I was lad and more than a few of my schoolmates emigrated to Australia with their parents, it was a bit of a conversation topic that an Australian Pound was worth twenty two shillings (one pound two shillings) and they weren't getting parity. Anyway in the 60s Australia and then the UK went decimal. Australia, South Africa, New Zealand decided to go for the ten shilling (half a pound) unit and called them dollar or rand etc with 100 cents to the unit. The UK decided to stay with the pound unit, with 100 New Pence to the unit.
So if at any time since then our dollar was fetching 50 pence, then we could be seen as 'at parity'. It wasn't that our money was half as valuable or had half the purchasing power of half a quid, just different way of looking at it.
During the 90s our dollar dropped to about a third of a pound, that was bad news for us on holiday but good for the Poms. Now it's worth 62 pence so we are on the front foot again, but really at the end of the day our Currency is now back to what it was in the 1950s exchange wise against the pound.
Look at it another way, when I was a kid - any older poms will recall this - if you said "give us half a dollar mate, I'm skint", you meant a half crown (one eighth of a pound). Because traditionally there were four dollars US to the pound, or two dollars to the Aussie dollar if they had an Aussie dollar in the 50s. Now there are something like one and a half dollars to the pound because the dollar has risen against the pound or the pound has fallen against the dollar.
The dollar has probably been waaaaay overvalued in the past 30 years due to its central nature as the world currency and maybe its rightful place in the world could well be at half what it is now. Many Americans earn twelve dollars an hour and pay half what we pay for petrol and hops and yet have no trouble buying a sensible family home for around $150k in most regional cities, so maybe that's good level for the US dollar to drift down to as Euros and Yuans etc take over much of its prominence as a world trading currency.
Time will tell
