The Australian publisher may have objected to removing the copy protection, or they may simply have not wanted to put any effort into another patch.
If you change the game's language setting in the registry to 'English', it will allow you to install the 1.49 North American / UK English patch, which removes copy protection. Other than a different version of Starforce, I wouldn't expect the Australian publishers to have made a lot of changes to the game itself, so there shouldn't be any problems with this (a couple people have already done this to get the Australian version working in Vista).
There is a download and description of a reg file in
this topic to change the language, if you are not comfortable doing it manually.
