When you were arrested in the US the second time, you were 'put through the system', so your fingerprints, 'mug shots', along with the rest of your bio-metric data is on record there. Since you missed a criminal court date in the US, a US criminal court judge almost certainly issued a bench warrant for your arrest.
Since 2009 five countries: USA, Canada, Australia, UK, New Zealand started sharing all data (criminal, immigration, intelligence) pooled from each country via an arrangement called FCC (Five Country Conference). The USA end of this 5 country sharing system is called US-VISIT (United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology), I am not sure what it's called in Australia, but in this US Department of Homeland Defense unclassified document on page 9, you can see Australian Server network diagram ( ref:
https://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/privacy/privacy_pia_usvisit_fcc.pdf ).
The FCC system is not instantaneous, requiring a 72-hour notice, and so it is not used to check newly arrived passengers, but those who applied for visas outside Australia could be checked primarily for the following reasons: (a) indication of derogatory activity or other associations of concern (in some of the 5 FCC countries), (b) concern individual is blacklisted, (c) individual destroyed documents, (d) reason to believe another FCC country was already visited by individual, (e) locating individual who may have violated criminal laws inside the FCC partner country. (see page 5 of link above)
Starting May of 2015, Australia changed rules for visa applicants from Hong Kong, which now require biometric data (fingerprints + photo + vital stats) to be submitted with the visa application. However, if you have a Hong Kong SAR passport, you will not have to provide biometric data, unless Australia Immigration request it specifically. (ref:
VISMG: Important Notices )