Paypal website payments standard is your only option here. Unless you want to bill in AUD, you can't really use a merchant account in Australia. It's technically possible to use NAB to acquire in foreign currencies (ie. USD), but it's not feasible for small startups due to cost and complexity and the bank not actually knowing how. I lost my real HN account because I'm an idiot or whatever, but send questions to wtfaustralia@soundfolder.com if you want to hear about our various failed attempts at recurring cc billing.

This is interesting. I'm in the process of getting a merchant account from BNZ in New Zealand, they are a subsidiary of NAB. They are the only option here for billing in USD but at least they have an actual product for it called CurrencySelect and it seems like this is a workable solution and nobody is too confused by it. The fees are pretty high though - starting at 8.1% per transaction and only going down starting from $25K in volume.

Anti-christ because of things done in the past that you are generally afraid will affect your startup or because of a general sentiment of them being "evil"? If the latter, then not evaluating them because of it sounds like bad business mojo to me...

Bad experience at both the merchant and user end. Spreedly who I had never heard of till this post integrate with 2 Australian payment gateways so that will be worth checking out I think.

We are trying to go through NAB now for a US billing merchant account and honestly they are the Antichrist. It's been three and a half months and we are still not there yet. Painful is an understatement.