Good question ..
.
Sign on a traffic pole:

Been waiting long?
That's because the council thinks someone in a car, half a kilometer away, is more important than you*.
They could make the lights change as soon as you press the button if they wanted, but they don't.
Complain to them 07 3403 4400.
A car moving at 50km/hr will travel almost half a kilometer in 30 seconds.

@RustyFreewheel Given that that would be an instant DOS attack by some random bored teenager, you can somehow sort of see why they don't instantly change the lights though.
@Tubemeister @RustyFreewheel having a cooldown period is trivial and usually already part of the logic: you're only shortening the green light if there has been a minimum time it's been on, otherwise it would be a potential safety concern. And in places where the lights already change based on traffic (by detecting coming vehicles), there's already enough information to detect traffic volume to modify the logic from "low traffic, prioritize pedestrian beg button" to "high traffic, follow the light cycle". Because these are controlled by software, you can have arbitrarily complex rule tree to optimize for whatever goal you desire.