Former Australia female indoor hockey team coach Lauren Austin admits sexual offence charges
Lauren Nicole Austin, 39, was last charged last year with four counts of indecent dealing with a child over 16.
Appearing in Perth Magistrates Court on Wednesday, Austin admitted to those charges, with the magistrate describing each offence as "namely kissing" when reading them out.
The offences occurred in three Perth suburbs last year and involved a child under her supervision.
No other details of the offences were revealed in court.
Two charges of sexual penetration without consent were dropped.
When she was charged last year, WA Police said the allegations related to one victim.
Austin had been banned by the court from supervising children in sports activities at any level as a condition of her bail.
She said nothing to the media after the hearing and will return to court in September.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
ABC News
2 minutes ago
- ABC News
Youth and domestic and family violence services call for more funding to support LGBTQIA+ community
Alex* was 19 when he started dating his ex-boyfriend, but what began as a promising relationship took a dark turn resulting in alleged physical violence and coercive control. "It was my first serious relationship. In the beginning it was fun, new and exciting, and then after three months that's when it started to change," he said. He noticed an escalation in his then-partner's behaviour when he started running his own real estate business. "Then it was more constant, I was working by myself doing appraisals, seeing clients, and it was suggested, 'We should put something on your phone to keep you safe.'" Alex said his partner installed a location-sharing app on his phone. He said his partner used it to track how many kilometres Alex was travelling each day and would check his car's odometer when he got home to ensure it matched up. "It was following me to client's houses, then I wasn't allowed to see male clients any more," Alex said. The now-26-year-old said it took several attempts over three years to leave the relationship, which included alleged physical, emotional and financial abuse. "Trying to identify red flags when it's your first serious relationship is harder when you haven't experienced it before," he said. There's growing calls from the youth and domestic and family violence sector for more financial support to assist the queer, trans and gender diverse community. Rachel Hinds, who is chief executive of Brisbane-based LGBTIQ+ youth service Open Doors, said state and federal funding wasn't keeping pace with demand, and a lack of diverse refuge options was resulting in young people staying in violent homes and relationships. "One of the things that we are advocating for is for Open Doors to be funded to open a rainbow house, which would be short-term crisis accommodation," she said. "In this state there is no option for them, if they are to leave home, where do they go? There are no refuges created for trans and gender diverse people. "One of the biggest providers of DV services has a men's line and a women's line, so who do you call if you're non-binary? "If you're a trans woman and you ring the women's line and you're clocked as having more a male sounding voice and you're put through to the mens line are you going to call back?" Open Doors is one of three services to receive a share of $734,300 from the Queensland government for domestic, family and sexual violence support for the LGBTQIA+ community until the end of 2026. As a result, Ms Hinds said they were the only service in Queensland to have a funded, dedicated joint youth support worker and counsellor. In the first six months of having that position 153 young people accessed support, with the majority for family violence. Ms Hinds said specialist support for those fleeing violence was particularly underfunded. "There has been no investment into our community in terms of domestic and family violence and so that is something we absolutely want to see," she said. It was a violent episode of physical abuse when Alex tried to flee the relationship which made him walk away for good. "One of the breaking points for me was when my best friend came to see me when I was planning on leaving," he said. "She didn't quite make it in time when I had my stuff ready, and so I had my nose broken." Police put a temporary protection order in place during the relationship, but it was breached by Alex's perpetrator multiple times post-separation resulting in a domestic violence order being issued. Alex said apart from a call from Menslink and a welfare check from police, he didn't receive additional domestic violence support but acknowledged service responses are improving. "I definitely think there needs to be more [support] groups, like a weekly group that could be somewhere for people to reach out and ask these types of questions," he said. Beyond DV founder Carolyn Robinson acknowledged domestic and family violence in the LGBTQIA+ was under-reported and under researched, and it was vital all DV services offered support to anyone seeking help. "What they report to us is that often there is that sense of shame and not really knowing where to go to get the help that they so desperately want and need," she said. "Really it's about providing those spaces where there is no judgement, where they feel really safe and they can come and find out what options are available to them." Beyond DV has developed an app called Ask A Mate where users can access advice about relationships, gender identity and equality, consent, domestic and sexual violence. Ms Robinson said an aim of the app was to have the advice delivered by a range of diverse voices including well-known members of the LGBTQIA+ community. "My hope is by potentially using tools like this app and keeping these conversations going we can take the shame away and any embarrassment away," she said. Comedian Christian Hull — who is well known on social media platform TikTok and is openly gay — is one of the speakers on the app. He said he wanted to help combat toxic content creators who spread messages of ultra-masculinity and misogyny. "When you scroll on TikTok you see people like Andrew Tate. There are other podcasts, hosted by men, who claim that they know exactly what they're talking about," he said. "It's so misogynist, sexist, homophobic and I am horrified at what I'm hearing, and people think they're professional. "It's so important to get actual, good advice out there. "Because where else can you get it from? It doesn't exist anywhere online." Queensland's Minister for the Prevention of Domestic and Family Violence, Amanda Camm, said in this year's budget, $250.9 million was being provided to the domestic, family and sexual violence support sector, encompassing 120 organisations across Queensland. "These services prioritise vulnerable people and communities including the LGBTQIA+ community," she said. "The response to DFV by support services should be fluid and be able to respond to the needs of a victim regardless of their culture, how they identify or where they live. "Demand for shelters across the state is high and my department is working with the sector to understand and develop LGBTQIA+ specific service offerings, including emergency accommodation." Ms Hinds said domestic and family abuse was prevalent in the community, especially for trans and gender diverse young people. "There's a lack of research in this area but the little research we do have shows that our community experiences domestic and family violence at very high rates," she said. A 2019 La Trobe University study collected domestic, family and sexual violence data from 6,835 adults from a range of gender identities and sexual orientations. The survey found 61 per cent of respondents had experienced intimate partner violence with emotional abuse (48 per cent), verbal abuse (42 per cent), and social isolation (27 per cent) the most commonly reported. It also found 65 per cent of respondents surveyed had experienced family violence, with the most common form of abuse being verbal abuse (42 per cent), LGBTIQ-related abuse (41 per cent), and emotional abuse (39 per cent). LGBTIQ-related abuse included behaviour such as being shamed about being LGBTIQ, threatened to be "outed" or have HIV status revealed or withheld hormones or medication. Almost three in four indicated the perpetrator of family violence was a parent, which included a guardian, foster carer, step-parent, or adoptive parent. A federal Department of Social Services spokesperson said its national plan to end violence against women and children recognised that everyone, "regardless of gender, identity, ability, race and sexuality" had the right to live and work free from violence and harassment. "The Commonwealth, in partnership with state and territory governments, matches dollar-for-dollar funding for the delivery of critical frontline services, including those that support LGBTQIA+ people experiencing violence." * Name changed to protect person's identity
News.com.au
2 minutes ago
- News.com.au
Youth crime crackdown: CLP to ‘overhaul' NT Youth Justice Act
Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro has vowed to toughen the Youth Justice Act following the alleged stabbing of a teenage boy at the Royal Darwin Show, with the Chief Minister saying legislation will be 'introduced on urgency' this week in Parliament. At the Royal Darwin Show on Saturday evening, a knife was allegedly plunged into a 15 year-old boy during an altercation, triggering panic. The alleged victim was rushed to hospital in a serious condition. On Sunday morning, Ms Finocchiaro, who enjoyed the show's festivities the day before the stabbing, took aim at the 'apologists' who 'have come out against' her government's crime package. 'Let's be clear, our current reality is the result of years of Labor's soft, offender-first policies,' she said. ' Yesterday at the Royal Darwin Show, a 15-year-old allegedly stabbed another child in front of Territorians who were simply trying to enjoy the event. 'This is not normal. It is not acceptable. And under my Government, it will not be tolerated.' Ms Finocchiaro then doubled down on 'replacing Labor's broken system', 'This week in Parliament, we will be changing the Youth Justice Act to end Labor's failed catch-and-release scheme,' she said. 'We expect the usual offender apologists to criticise our efforts, but they should look Territorians in the eye and say that kids witnessing senseless violence at a family show is okay. 'Legislation will be introduced on urgency to overhaul the Youth Justice Act 2005 and Youth Justice Regulations 2006.' The changes follow months of youth related crime that has seen carjackings, home invasions, ram raids, edged weapons incidents, bashings and riotous behaviour. The key changes which will be tabled include: For courts to now consider a youth's full criminal history when sentencing for adult offences; Removing 'detention as a last resort'; Stronger powers for Youth Justice Officers to use spit-guards and 'reasonable force' to maintain safety and prevent escapes; Expanded powers for the Commissioner to manage emergencies, aligning with the Correctional Services Act. Further, the CLP say additional effects will materialise through the changes, including the definition of 'escape', the strengthening of victim engagement and aligning chief executive powers with the Corrections Services Act. In early July, Ms Finocchiaro announced she would expand the list of serious offences that are ineligible for youth diversion. The 13 'prescribed offences' included riot related charges, violent act causing death, recklessly endangering serious harm, negligently causing serious harm, hit-and-run, dangerous driving during pursuit, assaults on workers, police or with the intent to steal, robbery, burglary, using a stolen motor vehicle and making off without payment. The NT Parliament will meet between July 29 - July 31. The reforms respond to repeated community concerns and real cases where young offenders reoffended while on bail, putting the community at further risk. Minister for Corrections Gerard Maley said the reforms respond to repeated community concerns and real cases where young offenders reoffended while on bail, putting the community at further risk. 'Territorians have a right to safe streets and communities, victims have a right to a responsible justice system, and serious offenders have the right to remain silent,' said Mr Maley.
ABC News
32 minutes ago
- ABC News
The ATO learned it was being scammed, then paid out millions more to fraudsters
It was a scam so simple it took just minutes on your phone, where you could tell the tax office how much money to pay you, and it came through within days. The ATO loophole was so vast, tens of thousands of Australians stole a total of $2 billion. It was Australia's largest GST fraud. But it did not need to be this way. New details uncovered by Four Corners show the ATO was warned its systems were badly lacking, but even when it eventually discovered the fraud, it continued to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars. The ATO maintains it cracked down hard on the scam, moving quickly to shut down the perpetrators and cut off the money. The case of Linden Phillips would suggest otherwise. It showcases in granular detail the ATO's failures and how, while some loopholes are closed, others are being exploited on a far larger scale. Linden Phillips was no criminal mastermind, but from his home in the Victorian river town of Mildura, he easily exploited giant flaws in the ATO's GST refund system. It was August 2021, and Phillips had just been released from jail. According to court filings, a week after his release, he "opened several bank accounts" in his own name and registered a previously created ABN for GST. That was step one. Next was proof of concept. This could have taken just two minutes and involved putting just three numbers into the ATO's systems. Phillips did this by logging into his myGov account — available on your phone — and going to the ATO's GST page. Here, he said his fictitious earth-moving business had recorded minimal sales for the month. Phillips then said he was entitled to $13,158 as a GST refund. Amazingly, he did not have to specify why this was. At this stage, no one was required to check the veracity of his Business Activity Statement before paying. The ATO simply assumed he had invested in stock or capital equipment during the quarter. As the court noted, "the appellant [Phillips] did not engage in a business and had no income or outgoings for such a business". Within a week, the money was in his bank account. That was the trial run. Phillips was only just getting started. The next month, he lodged 46 separate GST refund claims seeking $821,279 from the ATO. The problem was that Phillips had been in jail for most of the time covered by these claims. Despite this, the ATO paid up promptly. Once again, the ATO had not made a single inquiry before paying the money. The algorithm in its system, rather than any human, approved the refund. To claim such a giant GST refund, Phillips would have needed to spend around $9.7 million on his business over three years. All this while having minimal sales, yet enough cash flow to not bother claiming the GST refund each month. Somehow, this was not a red flag when the ATO was paying out the money. Just weeks after Phillips made his second claim, someone at the ATO twigged that his enterprise may not be legitimate. Finally, there was a human in the loop. An ATO officer rang Phillips and was told the statements had been prepared by his accountant, for which he provided a name and number. "The number was in fact registered to a different person … not an accountant but a painter," according to the court documents. The ATO followed up with a letter to Phillips, which he ignored. As he did to further calls and emails from the ATO. Despite the suspicious behaviour, the ATO did nothing. In the meantime, Phillips bought himself a Porsche and his mother a house. The ATO would sit on its hands for the next four months, giving pause to its claim to have cracked down hard and quickly brought the scam under control. When Phillips was caught, it had nothing to do with the ATO. He was arrested in April 2022 by Mildura detective Vanessa Power, who was searching his home looking for drugs and guns. She checked Phillips's phone and "identified a series of fraudulent ATO claims," according to Victoria Police. That led police to a further 63 other offenders in the Mildura area. It was around this time that the ATO began to take the threat seriously. Four months after it first identified a problem with Phillips's GST refunds, the ATO launched Operation Protego, led by its Serious Financial Crimes taskforce. By this time, the ATO estimates $850 million had been stolen from the tax system. While Protego was operating, then-federal assistant treasurer Stephen Jones said it was "pretty easy to work out whether" some had lodged a "legitimate" GST claim or not. "There's lots of analytics that the ATO can do to work out whether this is a legitimate business or not," he said. That may have been true, but the ATO was not identifying many of these false claims until after the money had been paid. It would take the tax office 18 months to get the scam under control, and by this time, $2 billion had been stolen from the tax system. The ATO said when it launched Operation Protego that it assigned 470 extra staff to verify GST claims, and that by May 2022, "almost all fraud attempts were being stopped". All up, the ATO estimated 57,000 people were involved in the scam. Of these, just 122 have been convicted, while the ATO has only recovered $96 million — just 5 per cent of the money stolen from the tax system. The banks have helped recover another $64 million by freezing accounts. In the years leading up to the scam, the ATO's analysis showed its fraud detection systems, which should have prevented the scam, were not up to scratch. A 2018 report unearthed by Four Corners outlined how the systems were lacking. The report's author, Ali Noroozi, spent 10 years as the inspector general of taxation. Citing the ATO's internal data, he found that its so-called risk assessment systems were only marginally better than random selection. "They have certainly been on notice that their risk assessment tools could do better," Mr Noroozi told Four Corners. The tax office was slow to heed this warning, and then it also downgraded its assessment of external fraud risks from "severe" to "low" two months before the scam took off in mid-2021. It said the likelihood of risk had gone from "almost certain" to "rare". The tax office said it began building and updating new fraud detection systems even before the critical 2018 inspector general report. But the auditor general noted one of the ATO's new fraud detection systems ran a year late and was therefore not fully switched on until January 2022. At this point, it successfully detected the massive fraud, but it still took the tax office a further three months to launch Operation Protego. The auditor general found "the ATO did not have a procedure to respond to a large-scale external fraud event" like the GST scams. Watch as Four Corners investigates one of the most powerful and secretive institutions in the country, tonight on ABC TV and ABC iview. Tax experts said these processes need humans in the loop. "Before money goes out the door, particularly if there's been large changes in a taxpayer's details or accounts, that should be verified," said Karen Payne, who stepped down last year as inspector general of taxation. "Once upon a time, there was a desk audit when you first lodged your GST return to make sure you are carrying on a business that you can verify and these amounts that you're claiming are legitimate." As the Abbott government swept to power in 2013, the ATO was moving away from this model of human verification to an automated system. That would eventually see around 1,000 staff — or half the people in the division responsible for the GST — lose their jobs. "I'm not sure the ATO has ever recovered from that sort of drain of knowledge and drain of skill sets," said Stephen Hathway, a liquidator currently investigating a large-scale GST fraud. "The people [at the ATO] work really hard and diligently, but there just needs to be more of them. And there needs to be more regard to getting out there in the field and making those inquiries." While the ATO has claimed to have contained smaller-scale GST frauds as part of Operation Protego, it has struggled to stop loopholes being exploited by larger-scale scams. Stephen Hathway has seen this up close. He is currently chasing Nahi Gazal, who claims to be a wealthy Sydney property developer, but has been accused of masterminding a giant GST fraud. Gazal and his associates managed to squeeze more than $21 million out of the tax office in GST refunds. They allegedly used fake invoices to claim GST refunds for building projects that either did not exist or had been completed by other developers. Once again, the ATO did not bother to do even the most basic of checks. "It never had any legitimacy," Mr Hathway said. "There's nothing in it that ever demonstrates any act of commerce or enterprise. The whole set of transactions were completely and utterly made up, fraudulent, had no basis." By September 2023, the ATO had issued Gazal with a $44 million tax bill, including penalty interest. Four Corners can reveal that while the ATO was chasing Gazal for that money, it failed to detect that he was using a new string of companies to continue scamming the tax office. Mr Hathway has been funded by the ATO to pursue Gazal over this latest scheme, and has connected him to an additional 22 companies, which Mr Hathway said have fraudulently claimed another $25 million in GST refunds. Once again, Gazal claimed to be a property developer. "Not one bag of nails was bought from Bunnings," Mr Hathway said. But once again, the ATO did not check before paying out the GST refunds to Gazal's companies. Mr Hathway said the ATO never asked basic questions, like the address of the properties being developed, whether a development application had been approved, or to even look at a building contract. "I'm the liquidator after the event. And then when we're looking into the file, we find nothing," Mr Hathway said. Mr Hathway was not hopeful the ATO would be able to recover much of the money, and said there was nothing to stop someone else from doing the same thing. Karen Payne said the tax office needed to do better, as these frauds resulted in less money for essential services. "We should all care because it raises revenues that allow the government … to fund the services that we all benefit from … health, defence, security, infrastructure … it's pretty key part of our democracy." Watch Four Corners' full investigation into the tax system, No Return, tonight from 8:30pm on ABC TV and ABC iview.
