Is it time to “clip the shearer”?
Perth, 12 July 2026 – Ice Hockey Australia’s board could be in for a major shake-up – or shake-down, take your pick – when it convenes in October to elect, (re-)appoint and farewell directors.
Its current board has been headed for almost a year now by Tim Kitching after an unofficial “putsch” to remove a highly unpopular Ryan O’Handley (who’d presided over a dysfunctional and financially illiterate organisation since late 2022). It is heavily stacked with O’Handley and even his predecessor, the disgraced and former bankrupt Grove Bennett, appointees. Their value to the organisation is being questioned by grassroots members, member associations and even some board members themselves.
Veronica Ryan, Gregor Rozenberg, and Mark McGonagle are directors who joined the IHA board around the same time as – or since – Kitching’s appointment to President. They are considered to have strong corporate, community, and ice hockey credentials – either as players, coaches or with their own family members involved in the game. As for the other directors, time will tell whether they’re reappointed or gently tapped on the shoulder at the Melbourne AGM and presented with a combined thank you and myki card.
However, one recently appointed director – Deon Shearer, former president of Ice Hockey Western Australia, and currently IHA’s director responsible for its commercial portfolio – has two notable “please explains” now distracting her every move arising from poor decisions and even poorer execution following judgements she has made in her near-decade volunteering as an ice hockey administrator.
The most recent example of her poor execution is still affecting IHA’s ability to achieve cut through with Commonwealth agencies such as Sport Integrity Australia, the Australian Sports Commission and even the International Ice Hockey Federation. It arises from a unilateral decision the 51-year-old WA education public servant made in April 2026 as the last-minute Chef de Mission of the Australian National Junior (U/18) team during the Mighty Jacks’ pre-World Championship (Div II, B Group) training camp in Germany, where she coordinated do-it-yourself testing of the team after reports of alleged drug use by some players.
Self-administered kits purchased from a local Deggendorf apotheke (drug store) were used when a handful of boys was hauled into a room to produce saliva samples – without standard protocols, consent or even formal note-taking undertaken. Parents of the players – under 18-year-old minors – were horrified to learn soon after of the scandal when their children’s garbled messages lit up their screens in Australia. No positive findings were recorded, but Ice Hockey Australia has been dealing with the fall-out from the fiasco ever since.
At IHA’s last board meeting, vice-president Veronica Ryan, who has taken the running on the drug-testing scandal fall-out, reported to directors there was “nothing further to report”. Not all the directors were convinced of that and have requested a detailed submission be produced by Ms Shearer to better understand what happened.
In late 2025, shortly after she was farewelled by IHWA with a Facebook message “thrilled to see her (Shearer) take the next step in her journey as she joins the Ice Hockey Australia Board … (who) we know … (will) continue to do great things for the sport at a national level”, a damning indictment of Shearer’s leadership via the National Sports Tribunal (NST) landed with a proverbial thud on her, IHWA’s and IHA’s collective desks.
In essence, the judgement put all Australian sports administrators on notice they cannot hide behind their voluntary status as an excuse for poor governance and procedural unfairness when sanctioning members.
The clarion call to the more than 70,000 local, state, and national sports was contained within Determination NST-E25-124664 of the independent statutory authority (established in 2020 to resolve sports-related disputes). NST’s members are appointed by federal Sport Minister Anika Wells and include legal experts, sports administration professionals, medical personnel, and elite athletes.
In a pithy response to the scathing criticism of what amounted to a kangaroo court masquerading as a “tribunal”, IHWA announced in March this year it would work to “strengthen internal policies, education pathways, and governance processes”.
What the outgoing president Deon Shearer, who oversaw the matter which began in 2024 under her watch didn’t announce to members was the tribunal’s 18-month hearings had cost them tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, subject to any pro bono elements offered by IHWA’s lawyer Benjamin Tomasi. He’s rated as one of WA’s leading junior counsels specialising in dispute resolution. (Tomasi was once an Associate to the Hon. Chief Justice Kiefel AC at the High Court, and has since appeared as a junior counsel in the same court.)
The National Sport Tribunal agency’s determination essentially found the association’s three-member tribunal had denied its member procedural fairness both at the initial hearing and again at appeal. The NST determination also found the sanctions IHWA imposed were excessive.
Part of IHWA’s defence was that as a voluntary organisation, it preferred informality in its interactions with members.
The case involved 28-year-old female ice hockey coach Arlene Ooi who was ordered to appear before the association’s tribunal on charges of breaching its social media policy, and for allegedly swearing at a minor (a young female on-ice linesperson) in July 2024. But none of the charges or details of what was alleged were conveyed to Ms Ooi before she was called in. The three IHWA tribunal members are all senior executives outside of their voluntary roles in the sport, including in major resources (Michael Sucher), WA Police (Dympna Njirich) and finance (Michaela Fellowes).
Sucher is a global executive and CFO with NRW Holdings (and current IHWA president), a leading global contract services groups for the resources and infrastructure sectors with almost 12,000 employees; Njirich is a mid-ranking WA Police officer once involved in recruitment of overseas police; and Fellowes is a finance, operations and planning executive (and formerly commissioner from 2022-26 of the Australian Women’s Ice Hockey League).
Sucher, Njirich and Fellowes were all directly approached to answer questions about their handling of the Ooi tribunal during Shearer’s presidency, with one common theme specific to their professional careers: did they ever raise any concerns with fellow panel members that Arlene Ooi was being denied natural justice, and that the sanctions imposed were clearly out of line with normal community standards/expectations?
None of them responded, instead choosing to ignore the questions.
But back to the matter at hand: the IHWA tribunal refused to allow Ooi any witnesses, blocked her use of CCTV footage from the ice rink (which clearly contradicted other witnesses’ evidence and recollections), and when Ooi lodged an appeal, an IHWA executive threatened her with further sanctions if she didn’t withdraw it.
When Ooi later studied documents arising from the so-called “swearing” complaint – where it was alleged she’d been separated from others on the players’ bench and was speaking alone to the young on-ice official – she found there was no evidence in the paperwork from any of the witnesses supporting the claim. The CCTV vision which backed Ooi’s argument that the incident could not have occurred as described in the hearings – and that she sought to enter in her hearings – wasn’t allowed to be used. It seemed someone at IHWA was “making stuff up”, as the saying goes.
And in the end, the association simply refused to allow the appeal to proceed.
“It was a concentrated effort to remove me from the sport and they just didn’t expect that I would challenge them at this level,” says Ooi, who now more than two years later, has stepped away from a sport in which she was heavily involved since her early 20s and to which she committed considerable time and energy as a player, coach and referee.
“I was suspended from coaching for the rest of the 2024 season because of the IHWA tribunal, and given a deferred suspension for the entire 2025 season, as well as being suspended from representing IHWA in any capacity at national championships, development camps or with national teams until the end 2027.
“The threats and heat were turned up on me when I tried to appeal to IHWA, and when that process was blocked, I was left with no choice but to go higher to the national body – Ice Hockey Australia – whose integrity officer Catherine Arlove almost immediately referred it to the National Sports Tribunal,” Ooi explained.
Australia has an estimated 15 million active sports participants but few are ever likely to need the NST to resolve their disputes. The NST’s annual budget, including a one-off special Budget supplement to ensure continuing operations and stability, is almost $4M for each of the next four years.
Its appeals division members believe this recent determination will send all Australian sports administrators a strong reminder about ensuring their tribunal processes and operating procedures meet the Sports Integrity Australia minimum requirements for procedural fairness and integrity.
Mediation expert and lawyer Marco Tomasello, who represented Ooi pro-bono, says the NST’s message is unambiguous. Incidentally, Tomasello also volunteers on IHA’s Disciplinary Tribunal, and is an accredited IIHF linesman who was assigned to the 2024 IIHF World Championship Division IV in Kuwait in April 2024.
“Tribunals must afford participants procedural fairness, even if the tribunal and the sport are entirely run by volunteers,” Tomasello says. “Where tribunals are not conducted in accordance with the principles of procedural fairness, they risk having their sanctions substituted and their decisions overturned.”
Most of the IHWA tribunal penalties and sanctions against Ms Ooi were overturned by the NST.
It said that in Arlene Ooi’s case there was an abundance of clarity: “The Respondent (IHWA) emphasised that it is a community sporting association whose tribunal and administration are run by volunteers, (and that) the informality of the … proceeding is extremely important.
“These arguments are not accepted … the informality of the Respondent’s tribunal processes, and the IHWA Tribunal’s discretion to conduct a hearing in the manner it sees fit, do not override the tribunal’s obligation … at law to provide procedural fairness. The hearing process itself was also procedurally unfair to the Appellant in at least three material respects.”
Further, it said “the information (IHWA) provided remained woefully inadequate about the nature of the allegations against the Appellant (Ooi)”.
The only sanction upheld – but with a much lesser penalty – was the guilty plea Ooi offered for beaching IHWA’s social media policy. And even then, the NST was withering in its judgment which emphasised that notwithstanding IHWA’s social media policy, the “conflict and free expression of opinion is an important part of any democratic society, and this includes members’ opinions about decisions made by sporting organisations around how best to administer and govern their sport”.
Finally, the determination also found: “The sanction imposed by the IHWA Tribunal – being a period of suspension … for almost three and a half years – is severe on any analysis, but particularly in view of the nature of the Appellant’s conduct, her disciplinary history, her relative youth and her involvement with the sport. The (IHWA) Tribunal’s decision is arbitrary and illogical, as well as disproportionately punitive.”
Among other findings, the NST stated that the IHWA tribunal:
- operated in a way “out of step with current industry practices”
- withheld evidence from the accused
- took witness evidence privately without disclosure, and
- imposed sanctions described as disproportionate.
As a result:
- the finding relating to the alleged on-ice incident with the junior official was set aside entirely, and
- the sanction relating to the social-media matter was replaced with a substantially reduced penalty, which had already been served.
The cost to sports associations and clubs in financial terms is significant because the NST operates on a cost recovery model. Under Part 7 of the National Sports Tribunal Rule 2020 (Cth) and owing to the complexity and duration of the case, as well as the number of NST Members sitting in judgement, both IHWA and Ice Hockey Australia were hit with sizeable NST costs.
The final bill IHWA’s counsel will levy is an additional burden likely to be reflected in increased membership fees; the unknown is what lies ahead in the event of any further litigation and potential damages claim.
Inexplicably, there has been no apology to Ms Ooi. Even as Deon Shearer tidied up her desk and exited the IHWA president’s door before stepping into her IHA shoes as a director, there was no time for a phone call to Arlene Ooi to say “sorry” or “we should have done better”.
Nothing but silence. Crickets.
IHWA secretary Jennifer Binetti – who was the IHWA notetaker during the association’s disciplinary hearings – recently said in a statement she could not comment on individual volunteers, officials, “or the conduct of confidential disciplinary proceedings”.
“The (NST) determination itself did not make findings of personal misconduct against any individual volunteer, tribunal member, or administrator,” she added.
There are some in Western Australia’s impressive ice hockey program who believe the case was one that IHWA was never going to win, but that it was necessary to go through it to establish a precedent.
There’s also a sense Western Australian ice hockey has not seen the end of this, precedent established or not.
Arlene Ooi has made that clear: “I’m considering my legal options going forward.”
Note: Deon Shearer has been approached on numerous occasions to respond to the issues raised in this story but has not responded. The original image accompanying this post has been removed at the request of the photographer, replaced with the Ice Hockey Australia official photo (from their website).
Sandi Logan 