island hoping on the way to OZ

You don't have a lot of options to be honest.

The island hopping routes are basically these across the pacific:

Santiago-Easter island-Tahiti-Auckland. LAN chile does the flights to Easter island, but they only operate Easter island to Tahiti once a week.

Then you have the Fiji airways route via Hawaii and Fiji.

Another island hopping route is on United and it hops from Hawaii to places like Marshall islands, Micronesia and to Guam. There used to be a flight from Guam to Brisbane but its no longer operating, so from Guam you'd need to fly via the Phillippines or Taiwan.

There is no real competition on these routes and they are all fairly expensive compared to a direct flight, so forget this idea of free stopovers, especially given the direct USA-AUS flights right now are very cheap. Try using a page like Rome2rio.com to find ways between islands. You'll soon get a feel of where the flights go to and from.

Have a look at www.skyscanner.com to see what your options are.

LA to Hawaii is just over 5 hours, so, makes it, and on to Tahiti is also just under 6 hours, but then this becomes very expensive.
There are relatively cheap flights via Hawaii to both NZ and Australia if you're prepared to put up with the 2nd leg being just under 10 hours.
Or, Hawaii to Tokyo is around 8 hours, then Hong Kong, Singapore, Darwin?
Any attempt to use smaller, or less traveled routes will cost a fortune.

The other thing you need to realise is that every airport you stop at add on fees for that airport. The days of the so called free stopover just don't exist much these days.

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