Out here in the Mid West, the Shire of Coorow is a tight-knit operation. With just 13 staff managing a local government area that sprawls from the wheatbelt to the coast, everyone knows everyone's role. So when allegations emerged that the deputy CEO had misused his position over an eight-month stretch, it sent ripples through the community and raised hard questions about institutional accountability.
Between May and December 2025, the man engaged in acts of criminality, namely attempted gains benefit by fraud, corruption and stealing, while employed in a senior public office role within the Shire of Coorow in the Mid West region.
According to police allegations, the man used expense accounts to obtain items for his own personal benefit, and on a separate occasion sold some of the ordered products for his own financial gain. What makes that particularly striking is that a deputy CEO would have had authority over those accounts; the positions of trust in a small shire are also positions of opportunity.
The allegations go further. The man committed an act of attempting to gain benefit by fraud by purporting to be an employee to obtain funds into his bank account. That suggests deliberate misrepresentation, not mere carelessness.
City folk might not realise, but in regional shires, the administrative infrastructure is lean. Staff wear multiple hats. That's why good governance matters so much; there's less redundancy to catch problems. The day after his employment was terminated, the man attended the premises and stole products belonging to the former employer, valued at approximately $3,000. This happened after the shire had already moved to end the employment relationship.
The court allegations include something almost unprecedented in local government charges: the man committed an act of perjury by unlawfully accessing social media and email accounts to send himself false messages, which were utilised to obtain a court order. That allegation suggests the individual attempted to fabricate evidence in legal proceedings, compounding the seriousness of the situation.
The accused began his career in local government in 2021 at the Shire of Harvey, through undertaking voluntary unpaid work experience, and stayed on for an extra six months at the Shire to assist in their Governance operations. He has since worked at the Shire of Augusta Margaret River, City of Nedlands and more recently the City of Melville, as the Senior Governance Officer. By his mid-twenties, he had built what appeared to be a promising trajectory in WA's local government sector.
The real impact here extends beyond one individual's alleged conduct. Local government shires deliver essential services in regional areas; they manage roads, water, waste, and community facilities. When the machinery of institutional accountability breaks down, or when someone in a position of trust allegedly exploits it, the community bears the cost not just financially but in lost confidence.
He is due to appear before the Perth Magistrates Court on Wednesday, 18 March 2026. The court will now determine what facts can be substantiated and what consequences follow. What Canberra doesn't always see is that institutional integrity matters most where communities are smallest, where there's nowhere else to go for those services, and where trust, once damaged, takes years to rebuild.