Rare charge ‘should have been used’

KLAUS Neubert should have been charged with the rarely prosecuted crime of emotional abuse in the weeks before he murdered his wife Olga, a women’s advocate says.

Since 2004, Tasmania’s Family Violence Act has contained provisions for police to charge suspected offenders with emotional or financial abuse.

But it is rarely prosecuted, and even more rarely results in a conviction.

Women’s Legal Service CEO Yvette Cehtel should know – she worked on formulating the legislation with the state’s first female attorneygeneral, Judy Jackson.

This week, Coroner Simon Cooper revealed that Olga Neubert, 37, was refused a protection order against her controlling 72-year-old estranged husband before he shot her dead in her car at New Town in 2015.

In light of the revelations, Ms Cehtel has called on police and lawyers to more frequently “criminalise” the offences outlined in the Family Violence Act to help protect vulnerable women.

“The law was in place but it wasn’t used,” she said.

Her comments are at odds with those of Deputy Commission Scott Tilyard, who this week said what Olga described to officers at the time “didn’t fall within the legislative definition of family violence”.

He described the case as a “system gap”.

But Ms Cehtel said Olga’s case clearly involved the features of coercion and control – the key elements identified in the legislation.

She pointed to the language Klaus Neubert used – including that he had lost his “honour”, the fact he circled her yacht with a rowing boat in the US after she left him, and the fact that he turned up uninvited to the birthday party of one of her friends and spread himself over her car bonnet.

“It’s all about him, it’s all about what he needs,” she said. “It’s all about coercive behaviour. It’s all emotional abuse.”

Ms Cehtel said Olga’s lawyers and police were given ample information that they needed to act. “There’s no indication that she was referred to any support services. There’s no record that she was referred to the family violence support service or Engender Equality, all of whom would have given her very different advice. “It’s not good enough.” Ms Cehtel said that when she worked with Ms Jackson to change the legislation, Tasmania Police had taken leadership in pushing for the financial abuse offence.

But she said that since then, police had often failed to identify emotionally or financially abusive behaviours when they encountered them in real life.

“There just hasn’t been the training of police and lawyers,” she said. “They need to understand what those behaviours look like.”