The tiny town with a big problem: a serial pest who targets women

Lauren Brown-Babb and her husband thought they’d stumbled into a storybook when they moved from Sydney to Nimmitabel, a pretty town in the Snowy Mountains region. As they renovated their 100-year-old cottage, country cliches came to life. “People would turn up with coffee; they’re bringing you a cake; someone’s dropping in with the season’s first honey,” she says.

What Brown-Babb didn’t know was Nimmitabel’s cast of colourful characters included one who many view as an antagonist; a serial political candidate and amateur broadcaster who generates division and anxiety in the region. Some residents, particularly women, are staying away from Nimmitabel to avoid him. Brown-Babb is well acquainted with Andrew Thaler now. “It is a small town with a big problem,” she says.

Lauren Brown-Babb with Nimmitabel’s Country Women’s Association president Maryanne Renfrey. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

The women targeted by Thaler’s crude broadcasts and video ambushes aren’t shrinking violets. They’re former state and cabinet MPs, present and former Snowy Monaro councillors, and the leaders of community associations. They have more power than most, yet still can’t stop behaviour they say has pestered, defamed and intimidated them for years. They call it community abuse.

“That’s the worst; you have to lie back and take it,” says Tanya Higgins, a Snowy Monaro Labor councillor. She has been labelled “the fat dumb blonde on council” by Thaler, a man best known outside the region for upsetting the children of an elderly woman allegedly killed in a police taser incident by claiming to be the family spokesman.

“There are a lot of people who won’t go to Nimmitabel because they’re fearful. How sad is that, for a beautiful little town?” Higgins says.

After law enforcement couldn’t help them, a group of locals are taking matters into their own hands. Six businesses and organisations – including the Country Women’s Association, the museum, the bakery and the hairdresser – have banned Thaler from their premises. The notices were written with the help of the Monaro Police District Crime Prevention Unit and delivered to Thaler by NSW Police, though they are not a criminal charge or penalty. “This decision,” they read, “is due to ongoing safety concerns and complaints across the community and inside our business.”

Andrew Thaler was a candidate for the federal seat of Eden-Monaro. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Brown-Babb arrived in Nimmitabel in 2022 from Sydney. She came across Thaler in a Chamber of Commerce election and then began to feature in his broadcasts as the “weird chick in the red house” who is “fat, no life, vegan, deliberately childless”.

First it was funny, but became less so when she appeared on his list of 17 women beside an article on Facebook entitled, “More women may be psychopaths than previously thought”.

“I’d agree with this assessment,” he wrote, “based on my personal experiences.”

It got creepier. He talked about watching her. “If you look carefully as you drive up the main street you’ll often see Lauren Brown-Babb at a table in the front windows on her computer,” he told his followers on a public Facebook page. In another post, he wrote; “Looking at you, LBB … we know what you did and we see what you do”.

Thaler gives lots of airtime to the women on that list. Nichole Overall, the former Nationals member for the state seat of Monaro, is a favourite target. Thaler describes her as a venal, “gross, wallowing in the trough, pig” woman who “does not care about any morals or ethics, and she will squash anyone who dares stand in her way”. In his broadcasts, he has told Overall to “suck a dick”. She says he has confronted her in a car park, filmed outside her office and inundated her staff with complaints.

Nimmitabel is a small place; behaviour that might be diluted in a city is writ large in a town of a few hundred. “He does also target some men, but absolutely his predominant target is women and, more often than not, community leaders,” Overall says. “Apparently in a civilised society you can get away with calling women pieces of shit, telling them to suck a dick – and you can’t take action against that.”

Snowy Monaro councillor Narelle Davis and former Eden-Monaro MP Nichole Overall.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Thaler styles himself as a crusader against corrupt forces in the town who is unafraid to ruffle feathers.

“There are lots of parasites in Nimmitabel … I keep trying to remove them and squash them,” he says. He does broadcasts with the “Aussie Cossack” Simeon Boikov, also known as Vladimir Putin’s man in Australia. He has suggested the Bondi Junction knife massacre was a false flag event (designed to look like it was perpetrated by someone else). He has about 2000 Facebook followers and a loyal faction that cheers him on. His many court cases have left him well-versed in legal matters.

He approaches local people after perceived slights and abuses them, capturing it all on video. “You grabbed me, you stupid bitch,” he says in one, in which a woman looks over her shoulder as she hurriedly climbs into her car. “Gotcha. That’s assault. She’s just kicked the food I purchased.” He later broadcasts the name of the woman and says she is “well known in the area for helping men stay warm”.

Vickie Pollard, a candidate in Saturday’s council elections who has been labelled by Thaler as “a horrendous, horrendous excuse for a human”, was involved in the first ban after Thaler arrived about 10 years ago. She led the Nimmitabel Advancement Group when members voted to exclude him from their premises in 2016 under the Inclosed Lands Act.

“You have in the past and constantly continue to harass, bully and discriminate against members of NAG and their guests,” the notice to him read.

Since then, says Pollard, “I’ve become one of [what] I call [his] ‘victims’, who he just attacks on multimedia.” Police have tried – unsuccessfully – to take an apprehended violence order on her behalf, citing online comments such as a call on Facebook to run Pollard and her husband out of town.

“I am fearful of Mr Thaler,” she said in one of her statements to the court in 2019. “I am not sure how much more of his ongoing personal slanderous lies, intimidation, harassment and bullying I can take.”

Former Nationals state MP Bronnie Taylor with Snowy Monaro Labor councillor Tanya Higgins.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Other organisations have also struggled with Thaler, who owns a local scrapyard. Snowy Monaro Council in 2018 wrote to him saying his “inappropriate” behaviour (verbal abuse, intimidation, comments that denigrated and belittled councillors) posed a risk to council staff, and ruled he would only be allowed access to certain council sites, and with a week’s notice (Thaler is also running for council in this Saturday’s elections. He has previously run for federal and state seats.)

One resident, Howard Charles, OAM, told the Cooma Local Court during Pollard’s AVO hearing that other groups had trouble with Thaler. “His irrational and disruptive public outbursts have caused considerable distress for [the advancement group], council, the Lions Club, public school, camp draft, show society, Men’s Shed, as well as attacking our popular local police officer,” he wrote in a letter to the magistrate. “He has proceeded to pick fights with almost every organisation in town, as well as many individuals.”

Maryanne Renfrey from the Nimmitabel branch of the Country Women’s Association successfully sought an AVO against Thaler in 2016. She’s running a CWA event about violence against women in rural areas this year. “Everyone that I’m asking or inviting, the first thing that’s said is, ‘is Andrew Thaler coming?’”

As well-known farmer John Alcock, the trustee of the museum that’s banned Thaler, told the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions in a letter pleading for help this year, social media has become “a gathering place from which to abuse members of the community”, and many were skipping town meetings to avoid him.

But the law is unable to do much about it. Thaler’s history of low-level charges stretches over more than two decades, and he has fought them vigorously. Some matters have dragged on for years. If he is found guilty of a minor offence he usually appeals the conviction and sentence, often successfully. Once he was found to have contravened an AVO, but that decision was overturned. He was charged with the same offence on a separate occasion, but it was dealt with under Section 10, which allows a court to find a defendant guilty but not record a conviction.

A finding that he behaved offensively in a public place was overturned on appeal, too, while a stalk/intimidate/intend fear charge was dealt with under Section 10. In 2018, he was found guilty of assaulting a police officer in the execution of duty, but following an appeal he was given a good behaviour bond without conviction. He failed to have another guilty finding for resisting a police officer overturned on appeal, but succeeded in appealing the sentence; a conviction was recorded, but there was no penalty. He has been found guilty of entering enclosed land and fined a few hundred dollars.

The women could try to sue for defamation but lawyers are expensive, and they doubt Thaler could cover the costs even if the court found in their favour (one court judgment described him as impecunious). Some have blocked him on social media but his comments are sent to them anyway by well-meaning neighbours.

Police charged Thaler this year, accusing him of assaulting the owner of a local eatery, which he had repeatedly branded “Salmonella Cafe” and told locals to avoid. “I’d served him once, in 2020,” the owner, Sandra Drayton, told the Herald. Last month, police told Cooma Local Court they had dropped the five charges (Thaler was removed from court that day after he refused the magistrate’s order to stop sitting at the solicitor’s bar table). He is pursuing the state for costs.

The Nimmitabel Advancement Group’s Vickie Pollard with cafe owner Sandra Drayton. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

The decision left women in Nimmitabel – who’d turned up at earlier court appearances in their dozens to support Drayton – feeling even more powerless. “I feel sad. Exhausted. Hopeless, really,” says Drayton. “I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.”

Thaler has told Bronnie Taylor, the former NSW cabinet minister, to suck a dick, too. It’s Taylor, Thaler says on one broadcast, who has been “pushing all this culture of fat women, this culture of women, women, women, women, women … it’s a lot of these women who are telling the lies … Bronnie represents everything awful of the culture.”

Taylor, who had applied for an extension of her home duress alarm due to his behaviour, gave her farewell speech to parliament in mid-August. Thaler turned up. “He was quite aggressive about the way he approached people,” says Taylor’s Nationals colleague, Wes Fang. The upper house president, Ben Franklin, ended up having him removed, noting in parliament that Taylor was “extremely agitated about the precedence of that gentleman”.

But there’s no Usher of the Black Rod or upper house president in Nimmitabel. So the banning notices, served on Thaler on September 4, are the residents’ attempt to protect themselves. They’ve been served by the Country Women’s Association, Drayton’s cafe, The Geldmacher House Museum and leather shop, Absolute Constructions, Stables Hair and Beauty, the Nimmitabel Bakery and Cooma Cut and Style.

Thaler responded with a video on Facebook, saying he’d been given the notices by the “corrupt as f---” police. “[The officer] had his video running, it was dodgy,” says Thaler (general duties police routinely wear cameras). Thaler argues the legislation is poorly drafted. “I’ve been charged under it, and I’ve beaten those charges,” he said. Now he and his wife, he said, were “banned from half the f---ing main street of Nimmitabel.”

When approached for comment for this story, Thaler said he rejected the women’s assertions, rejected the journalist’s “notion of superiority”, and rejected the Herald giving “any credence to clearly false information passed on to you deliberately to try and muck-rake me”.

He described this reporter as a “pathetic journalist who is friends with Bronnie Taylor and Nichole Overall which is where this information and influence is coming from”. (Editor’s note: the reporter had not met either woman until she spoke to them for this story.)

Taylor says the townsfolk felt they had no choice but to take out the banning notices. “They’ve spoken to police numerous times, people have sought AVOs that have been rejected,” she says. “There is a weakness in the system where you can’t use a series of events.”

Some people in Nimmitabel are exhausted, anxious and frustrated. But Thaler has brought them together, too. “It’s united us,” says Taylor. “Here I am, friends with a left-wing professor from ANU, who would have thought it? I’m really proud of this small and very vibrant community. They’ve done everything available to them in the processes that exist. They’ve been constantly let down. They’ve found their way through to make their community safe and to take a stand.”

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