Deborah Glass


Deborah Glass, is the current Victorian Ombudsman. A lawyer by profession, she spent her formative years in Melbourne, Australia, before taking her career overseas to Switzerland, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom.

Early years

Glass was born in 1959 in Bega and raised in Melbourne. She attended Mount Scopus Memorial College and then Monash University, where she obtained her BA in 1980 and LLB in 1982.

Career

Glass practiced law briefly in Melbourne, before relocating to Switzerland in 1985 to work for Citicorp, a US Investment Bank. In 1989 she was appointed to the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, where she became Senior Director and was instrumental in raising standards in the investment management industry. She then moved to London in 1998 where she became Chief Executive of the Investment Management Regulatory Organisation, which under her stewardship was successfully subsumed into the London-based Financial Services Authority. She also worked as an Independent custody visitor between 1999 and 2005. In 2001, Glass was appointed to the Police Complaints Authority, and in 2004 became a Commissioner with the IPCC. She was the Commissioner responsible, among other things, for London, and for many high-profile criminal and misconduct investigations and decisions involving the police. These included decisions in relation to the police response to the News International phone hacking scandal phone-hacking affair, the death of Ian Tomlinson during the London G20 protests in 2009, the decision to launch an independent investigation into the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster, and the Plebgate affair. In 2012 Glass was awarded an Order of the British Empire for her service. She left the IPCC in March 2014, having completed a 10-year term with the organisation, which then published her personal critique of the police complaints system in England and Wales. Glass returned to Australia in 2014 and was appointed by the state government as Victorian Ombudsman for a 10-year fixed term. Glass was awarded Monash University Faculty of Law's Distinguished Alumni Award in 2016.

Publications

Some of Glass's key investigations as Victorian Ombudsman have been: