Merge network not accepting Australian players

I was looking into crossing over from FT to Lock or Carbon as that is where the bulk of the US players seem to be headed for. Lock informed me that Australian players are not permitted to play for real money on the Merge network. Can anybody shed some light on this for me.

I looked around and found this.
http://hotaussiechick.blogspot.com/2011/04/merge-poker-bans-australians-ins-and.html.

Thanks heaps for that, very interesting read. It all makes me a bit nervous though about all the other sites that we play on. Im interested to know everyones opinion on the future of online poker. Is it going to survive? Or will the game we all love be taken away from us?

The whole story and situation seems really weird.

It's no secret that providing online poker services to Australians has been an offence under Australian law since 2001. I don't recall reading any provisions in the Act that prevent Australians from playing online poker though and to the best of my knowledge Australian authorities haven't shown any real interest in pursuing any of the sites in the 10 years since the act was passed, likely because they're almost all based overseas outside of Australian jurisdiction. There's no ambiguity like there is in the US by the way - as the link above mentions, online poker is specifically named as a prohibited service.

The hypocrisy of the situation (whereby online sports betting is 100% legal, government grants monopolies to land based casinos and political parties recieve huge income from the gambling lobby) is something that's being discussed in this thread BTW.

What I didn't realise was that the Merge network was based in Australia (I don't really play anywhere other than Full Tilt). If they're Australian based then it makes perfect sense for them to block Australian players - after all, they're in clear violation of the law and within reach of the Australian authorities. The weird bit I can't work out is why the chose to open the site to Australian players in the first place, and why they chose last year to do it? They knew it was illegal for the better part of 10 years before they made that decision...

I have been looking for another site to play at, glad everyone cleared up this issue for me, thanks.