Fresh charges expected for former childcare worker Joshua Dale Brown
On Tuesday, lawyers for Joshua Dale Brown appeared in the Melbourne Magistrates' Court, where he is accused of abusing eight children while working as a childcare educator at Creative Garden Early Learning in Point Cook, in Melbourne's western suburbs.
The 26-year-old is facing more than 70 charges including sexually penetrating children, sexual activity in the presence of a child and contaminating food.
Rishi Nathwani KC, who is representing Mr Brown, told the court the charges against his client were "in flux".
"The informant said there will be more charges," Mr Nathwani said, as he asked the court not to release charge sheets to the media.
"It would hinder the realisation of natural justice in his case and prejudice the administration of justice at this stage.
"I'd ask your honour to resist it and not grant it at this stage."
But Magistrate Donna Bakos disagreed.
"The thing about your application Mr Nathwani is that the charges are effectively a matter of public record," she said.
"I'm not prepared to restrict access.
"They are the charges before the court."
Mr Brown was due to return to court in September but during a brief administrative hearing today, that date was changed to early February.
He is now believed to have worked at 24 childcare centres over his career and his alleged offences have sparked a massive public health response, with authorities urging more than 2,000 children to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases as a precaution.
Mr Brown was arrested after police started investigating another man, Michael Simon Wilson, for the alleged rape of a teenage boy at Hoppers Crossing, also in Melbourne's western suburbs.
The ABC understands detectives who examined Mr Wilson's devices discovered material linking him to Mr Brown, who is also facing child abuse material charges.
Police will allege the two men are known to each other.
Mr Wilson was also due to return to court in September but will now return to court in November.
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ABC News
24 minutes ago
- ABC News
New Victorian police chief Mike Bush says people should be free to protest without permits
Victoria does not need a permit system for protests, says the state's new top cop, who concedes there has been a breakdown in public confidence in police. In his first wide-ranging interview since joining Victoria Police, Chief Commissioner Mike Bush acknowledged Victorians felt less safe and declared "there's too much crime out there". The chief commissioner's arrival comes at a tumultuous time for Victoria Police, with crime at its highest rate since 2016 and an ongoing tobacco war that has seen 140 firebombings. Public confidence has also been at a 14-year low, with just 61.9 per cent of people having confidence in the police, far short of the force's 82 per cent target. "The data would definitely say that, and we've got to accept what the data tells us," Mr Bush said of the breakdown in public confidence. "We must be operationally excellent — whether we're preventing crime, responding to crime, investigating crime, resolving crime." Mr Bush is a 42-year police veteran of New Zealand Police. He ultimately became commissioner of the force, implementing a landmark crime-prevention policing model that included diversions and warnings for low-level offending. "We are, right now, considering our whole policing approach. I'm very keen to bring those things in, that's what the public deserve," he said. "Prevention is not a soft way of policing, it's just the right way, but we've got to do everything else too so responding is important, investigating and resolving is important. It's about getting the order right." The new chief commissioner told the ABC he did not support a permit system for protests, a measure debated in Victoria and already operating in New South Wales. "We've had a look to see if it will be effective, where we've landed is that it's not worth bringing in," he said. There has been significant public debate about protests in recent years, from the predominantly peaceful weekly marches in support of the Palestine community to anti-lockdown rallies and violent Land Forces protests. Shocked diners also watched on as protesters converged on an Israeli restaurant in Melbourne's CBD earlier this month, with tables and chairs thrown and a glass door damaged. Mr Bush addressed what he described as "polarisation" in the community, saying those with "an extreme view one way or the other are getting more extreme". He said the line between activism and extremism was "quite possibly" being blurred. "If we talk about public protest, absolutely," he said. "If you feel strongly about something, we are there to keep you safe while you demonstrate that. "But what we don't want is extreme behaviour that challenges the safety of other people — not just their physical safety but their feelings of safety. Mr Bush added: "It's only a minority but we should not tolerate the behaviour of that minority." Victoria Police has received independent legal advice that indicated the controversial chant "Death to the IDF" was not an offence. Mr Bush was also unequivocal when asked by the ABC if the chant amounted to hate speech. "No," he said. It came after former Victorian governor Linda Dessau called the phrase "totally unacceptable" and "hate speech" and Premier Jacinta Allan deferred to police when asked last week whether the chant was illegal. Under pressure to act on youth crime, the Allan government earlier this year announced a law reform package that included tougher bail conditions and a ban on machetes. It has also backed down from its pledge to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14 — a move Mr Bush's predecessor opposed. Mr Bush would not say whether he supported raising the age but acknowledged there were limits to prevention-led policing. "The bottom line is, we don't want to see young people in prison, but some need to be there to protect the public," he said. The latest crime statistics show there were an extra 92,000 offences recorded in Victoria in the year to March, a 17 per cent jump from the same period last year. Youth crime also spiked to its highest level since records began, with children over-represented in home invasions and aggravated burglaries. Mr Bush was also asked about the state's ongoing tobacco wars, which has seen 140 firebombings by Middle Eastern crime factions trying to seize control of the illicit tobacco and vape market. He would not say whether it was a mistake for the federal government to have deported alleged tobacco kingpin, Kazem Hamad, who his own force has identified as being linked to a deadly arson which mistakenly killed Melbourne woman Katie Tangey. Police believe Hamad, who is now believed to be in Baghdad, is a key player in the tobacco wars who has orchestrated firebombings on his rivals or shop owners who refuse to pay exorbitant extortion fees. "I'm not going to talk about individuals," Mr Bush said. "But I will say on that subject that we have excellent international law enforcement, collaboration and cooperation and we use those partnerships and networks when we don't have a presence overseas." Mr Bush acknowledged tensions were high not only in the community but also among his own rank-and-file officers who have reported low-levels of morale and high rates of attrition. The rank-and-file made their displeasure known in February when officers passed a resounding no-confidence vote in former Chief Commissioner Shane Patton, who ultimately resigned. It followed a protracted pay dispute between the Police Association of Victoria and the Victorian government. Mr Bush said senior police leaders had to "own" the mood among his members. "We've also got to remove things that get in their way, the things that frustrate them, bureaucracy, too much paperwork," he said. He committed to upgrading technology for his officers in the next 12 months, who he said were being hamstrung by red tape. "I'm not going to be embarrassed to say that the New Zealand police are a long way ahead," he said. "We've agreed to partner up to actually not just learn from them, but they're quite prepared to share all of their platforms and technology with us." The Police Association of Victoria has previously said its members have a stake in Mr Bush's success. "He's regarded as a leader who listens to his troops, who connects with community, and has been known to prioritise prevention as the greatest weapon against crime," secretary Wayne Gatt said. "We think, given the challenges we currently face in policing in this state, that these virtues will be invaluable in the fight to win back Victoria."
ABC News
24 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.
ABC News
3 hours ago
- ABC News
How easy is it to trick the Australian Taxation Office?
Sam Hawley: How easy is it to trick the Australian Tax Office? Well, for fraudsters it's not hard at all and plenty have done it costing taxpayers billions of dollars that have never been recovered. Today, Angus Grigg on his Four Corners investigation into the biggest GST scam in history and how the ATO dropped the ball. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily. Sam Hawley: Angus, you've been hard at work looking into what's going on at the Australian Tax Office. And you've really been having a deep look into this huge GST scam. Now, this unfolded in no other than Mildura in north-west Victoria. So, take me there and tell me about local resident Sarah. Angus Grigg: Yeah. Mildura is a really beautiful town, an irrigation town on the Murray in North West Victoria. And this GST scam really took off in Mildura. And it really was circulating within a sort of population that you might say is low socioeconomic groups, people on welfare, people with addiction issues. And we went to interview one person called Sarah. She was going through quite a bit of financial hardship at the time. I think she'd separated from her partner who was facing pretty serious charges at the time as well. And she was short of money because she needed to have some dental work done. So one of her friends showed her how to use a business that had been registered and an ABN linked to GST to claim GST refunds fraudulently. 'Sarah': The people that I was associating with at that time, they had done it and told me how easy it was to get a large amount of money quickly. And I just thought at the time it was a good idea because I was in a bit of financial trouble. Angus Grigg: She pretended, if you like, to be a hairdresser, despite the fact that she had no hairdressing qualifications. She'd never worked in a hairdresser, hadn't hired premises, had no equipment. And so she logged into her myGov account and first of all, claimed $15,000 and then did it a second time and got another $15,000. 'Sarah': I don't even really still understand how it went through. I was a single parent and then all of a sudden I'm a hairdresser that's getting this return put into my account with no other payments from clients or anything like that to balance it was needed. Like no proof. Angus Grigg: Now, bear in mind, the money went into the same account as her welfare payments and the money went within about 10 days without any verification, without any checks, without anyone from the tax office ringing and saying, what did you spend this money on? Do you have hairdressing qualifications? Have you hired premises? You know, she just absolutely couldn't believe how easy it was. 'Sarah': Yeah, I just couldn't believe it that it was just sitting there on my everyday access debit bank card. Angus Grigg: Now, the other thing to bear in mind, to receive a GST refund of $30,000, she would have needed to have capital expenditure or bought stock and other items for her hairdressing business of about $300,000. Now, surely a single mother living on welfare, getting family tax benefits, that should have been a red flag for the tax office. Sam Hawley: Wow. Okay. So Sarah, which is not her real name, just by the way, you've changed that for this story to keep her anonymous. She just tells the ATO she's a hairdresser and then the tax office falls for it. That's extraordinary. Angus Grigg: It is. And the fact that you don't need a receipt, you don't need any proof of the line of work you're in is extraordinary. And that's because the tax office basically fired most of the humans in the loop and started relying on algorithms or computers, if you like, to make these payments. They wanted to ensure the timely payment of GST refunds to businesses. But in doing that, they really opened the door up to fraud. Sam Hawley: Right. Sure. So the tax office wants to streamline things. But in the meantime, people like Sarah are all of a sudden dabbling in fraud. And as we've mentioned, she's not the only one. There's a lot of other people doing a very similar thing. Tell me about Linden Phillips. What was he up to? Angus Grigg: Linden Phillips, once again from Mildura, for us, he was like patient zero. It looks like he was the really one of the very, very early people in this scam. So what happens is that Linden Phillips gets out of jail in August 2021. And he already has a company registered. And so he reactivates his GST registration through his ABN and his MyGov account. And then within a couple of weeks of getting out of jail, he does what I'd sort of call a test run. And he claims $13,000 in GST refunds from the tax office. Once again, no documents, no receipts, no verification required. He gets that money within a couple of weeks and clearly then thinks, OK, I'm going to go for the big one. And so what he does is he lodges 46 backdated GST claims for an amount of $821,000 in GST. And the real kicker here is that for most of the period those GST claims are lodged, he's actually in jail. Sam Hawley: Oh my gosh. Angus Grigg: I know. He just couldn't make it up. Sam Hawley: What does he do with all that money? Angus Grigg: Well, of course, he spends it, right? Within a couple of weeks, the money's completely gone. He buys himself a second-hand Porsche. Somewhat endearingly, he buys his mother a house. But the really damning thing here is that the tax office notice it. Finally, someone, there's a human in the loop and they pick up the fact that, hey, maybe something's a bit wrong here. And so they ring him up and he says, oh yeah, no, it's all legitimate. I'll get my accountant to call you. The accountant never calls. They send him some emails. They write him some letters. He ignores them all. And the really damning thing here is the tax office does nothing for four months. And in that four month period, this scam absolutely explodes. So what we did is we went back and we deconstructed, if you like, the tax office's narrative. And the narrative was that this fraud took off on social media. The tax office noticed it. They cracked down really hard, really quickly, and they brought it under control. Now we sort about testing that idea. Sam Hawley: So the ATO says it did this great job. It cracked down on this fraud. But what actually happened? Because you actually had a look at that and discovered, in fact, the ATO didn't do much at all. Angus Grigg: No, exactly. So Linden Phillips does finally get caught, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the ATO. It all comes down to the smarts of a local detective in Mildura named Vanessa Power. Now, she is attending Phillips's house on a drugs and gun charge, and she searches his premises, his house, and she confiscates a phone. And using the sort of smarts that the ATO should be employing, she sees that on his phone there appears to be a pretty elaborate GST scam. And in fact, it looks as though that Linden Phillips had helped 60 other people perpetrate this scam. Linden Phillips is arrested. And then a few weeks later, the ATO finally launch what they call Operation Protego, which is to crack down on this GST scam. Sam Hawley: Wow. Okay. And at that point, of course, Sarah, who we spoke about earlier, she was also arrested back in December 2022. But the thing is, the money, it's sort of gone, right? 'Sarah': I can't pay it back. It's not even an option at the moment. Or it probably never will be. Sam Hawley: Is there any way the tax office can actually get these funds back? Angus Grigg: Well, this is the point, right? In the end, $2 billion was stolen from the tax system by 56,000 people. Now, the ATO tell us that of those 56,000 people who perpetrated this scam, just 120, I think it might be 122 now, have been convicted. Secondly, of the $2 billion stolen, the ATO tells us that only 160 million, or around 8% of that, has been recovered. Sam Hawley: And, Angus, that money, it really is just a drop in the ocean, right? Because you've also looked at all the other funds that the ATO hasn't managed to collect, and you've spoken to Karen Payne. Now, she's a former Inspector General of Taxation. She basically says if the ATO had collected what it was owed, then we would all be paying less tax. Angus Grigg: Yeah. Karen Payne, she really focused on what's called collectible debt. And that is this sort of giant number that the ATO doesn't like to talk about. And when she started looking at it, it was about $30 billion. Then it rose to about $50 billion. The figure is now $53 billion. And that is the amount of money or taxes that the ATO has levied, if you like, but not collected. Karen Payne, Inspector General of Taxation, 2019-24: The large percentage of the debts that were due were in fact owned by a very small number of taxpayers or they're related to a small number of taxpayer accounts. So you'd kind of think it's a small number of people you need to be chasing. Angus Grigg: And the point that Karen Payne was making is that if we collected all that tax, perhaps we would not have to pay as much tax, all of us, but also we'd have more money to spend on really basic things like schools, roads and hospitals. Karen Payne, Inspector General of Taxation, 2019-24: The fact that it keeps rising is troubling. So it's fundamental, I think, that we've got good administration of the tax system because the integrity of the tax system is fundamentally important to all of us. It pays for all of the services that we benefit from. Sam Hawley: Angus, despite everything that you have said, which is frankly really concerning, the ATO itself thinks it's doing a pretty good job, right? Because Chris Jordan, who was the tax commissioner up until 2024, he's been putting a rather positive spin on the ATO's work. Angus Grigg: Yeah. This is the really extraordinary thing. Despite all these scandals, the ATO tells us they are doing a great job. Just before Chris Jordan stepped down as tax commissioner, he did a victory lap, if you like, at the National Press Club, and he pointed out all the great, terrific things that the ATO has done. Chris Jordan, Tax Commissioner, 2013-24: We've successfully charted a massive program of transformation. We've cut red tape and we've modernised our administration of the tax system as part of the digital revolution to make tax just happen.
