AFL star Sydney Stack jailed after ‘second quarantine breach’

Sydney Stack has been charged with skipping home isolation in WA, three months after the AFL kicked him out of the Queensland hub for quarantine breaches.

Sydney Stack during a Richmond Tigers AFL training session in August. Picture: Getty

Richmond star Sydney Stack was in prison on Sunday night in Perth charged with skipping home isolation, three months after the AFL kicked him out of the Queensland hub and sent him home for quarantine breaches.

Stack, 20, from the West Australian wheatbelt town of Northam appeared before a magistrate on video link from the Perth Police Watch House on Sunday accused of failing to comply with a direction under the state’s strict state of emergency laws. Police picked him up in the early hours of Saturday morning in the busy bar, nightclub and restaurant district of Northbridge.

The charge carries a maximum penalty of six months in prison.

Earlier this month Stack flew from Melbourne to Perth, with a stop in Adelaide, after the death of his grandfather. Western Australia’s border with South Australia had recently been reinstated due to a coronavirus outbreak, meaning anybody who has been there even briefly cannot come to WA.

Stack was granted an exemption on compassionate grounds and arrived at Perth Airport on December 10. He was issued with a direction to quarantine for 14 days at an address he nominated in his home town, Northam, an hour’s drive east of Perth.

He was nine days into what should have been his confinement when police claim they found him in the centre of Perth at 1.10am on Saturday. They say he was not staying in Northam, his agreed place of quarantine, but in the nearby Perth suburb of Belmont.

Stack missed the AFL grand final this year, and a premiership, after he was given a 10-week ban for leaving the secure AFL bubble on the Gold Coast to go to a strip club in Surfers Paradise.

Stack will reappear in court on Monday.