Fake teacher Julian Taylor set to be deported

Convicted fraud Julian Taylor, who used fake documents to hide his criminal past and become a teacher at Victorian schools, has lost his bid to stay in Australia.

Fake teacher Julian Taylor is set to be deported.

Convicted fraud Julian Taylor is set to be deported after the fake teacher failed to convince a judge he should stay in Australia on a technicality.

He later lost an appeal against his sentence, which exposed his past jail time for theft and deception.

The conman, who was jailed for forging documents to hide his criminal past and work in Victorian schools, has spent years in immigration detention trying to fight against being sent back to his homeland in the UK.

The 56-year-old admitted to a Federal Court that he wasn’t an Australian citizen and had in fact renounced his citizenship in the 1990s.

But he still argued he should be allowed to stay because - even though he wasn’t a citizen - an immigration office hadn’t done enough work to prove it.

The court heard Taylor wasn’t “an alien” because he’d once “been accepted by the Australian body politic and community as a citizen”.

“The fact that he renounced that citizenship in 1995 does not change his non-alien status,” he said.

He also claimed to have an “enduring connection” to Australia because his daughter lives here.

Judge Mark Moshinsky on Wednesday rejected Taylor’s bid, ending a years long back and forth between Taylor, the office of Immigration Minister Alex Hawke and the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

Taylor may now finally be shipped back to England, where he hasn’t lived since he was four-years-old.

He’s been waiting out the fight in immigration detention since his release from jail in October 2019.

Lawyers for the convicted con told the Federal Court in hearings last year that Taylor had only put his citizenship in an “induced coma” when he renounced it in 1995.

Barrister Matthew Albert said Taylor remained on the electoral role and even pointed to the conman’s service to the community as a school teacher – work he got by committing fraud that landed him behind bars in the first place.

He argued for Taylor to be released from immigration detention “immediately”, saying he wasn’t an “alien” and the tribunal had no authority to reject his bid to stay.

The court heard Taylor even reapplied for citizenship in 2006, which was refused.

Taylor was jailed in 2018 on 13 counts of fraud and perjury after he used fake documents to change academic records.

With that, he changed his name - which was Steven Barr on his UK birth certificate - and covered up his criminal priors, enabling him work at Ilim College, St Paul’s Anglican Grammar, Hamilton and Alexandra College and Traralgon College for a decade.