pravnik was entirely correct. The OFLC had a problem with being able to hire a hooker, use her for whatever reason, then kill her.
The company released the game because they were “assured” they would get the MA15+ (which is the highest rating in the country at the moment for games) and everything would be OK. It was on sale about a week, then it was pulled from the shelves. This of course set up a huge market on ebay for the original versions, and I saw some going for up to $350 (original price was $99).
In January they released a “new” version of the game on PS2, which had that problem removed, and the game is still fine.
Being one of the lucky (?) people to have an original copy of the game, I can honestly say that it most likely would not have occurred to me to even do that, until the media made a huge deal out of it.
As to the OP, the chances of a staff member at EB knowing what was going on are slim. I used to work there, and out of the 200 or so people in the company at the time (25 stores in Aus) only about 15-20 of them actually knew anything. Now there are 75 stores (or so I hear tell) and I’d guess a similar percentage of them know what they are talking about.