Two former staff members of a Harvey Norman store have been charged over the alleged theft of almost $600,000 from their employer in Sydney

The man and a woman allegedly obtained $594,000 while working at the store by using fraudulent cheques, stealing cash and through Eftpos transactions.

NSW Police laid 159 charges on the former staff members following financial fraud and theft investigations.

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"Police executed search warrants at the homes of two former employees on 16 December 2022, seizing documentation and electronic devices for further examination," NSW Police said in a statement.

Detectives arrested a 49-year-old woman at Lake Illawarra Police Station and a 46-year-old man at Liverpool Police Station on February 22.

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"The woman was charged with 69 counts of dishonestly obtain financial advantage by deception and 55 counts of steal property as clerk/servant," police said.

"The man was charged with 35 counts of dishonestly obtain financial advantage by deception."

The man was granted bail in Liverpool local court.

The woman is expected to appear before Port Kembla local court next week.

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A second injured woman says she still suffers from flashbacks and nightmares.

Napier MP Stuart Nash will no longer act as Police Minister.

Sydney lawyer Ashlyn Nassif has saved her family $2.6 million simply by showing up to court.

It will be even easier next time as her case has been moved closer to the Concord home she is legally required to share with her mother.

The multimillion-dollar surety was posted when the 28-year-old daughter of property developer Jean Nassif was granted bail earlier in March.

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She was charged in February with dishonestly obtaining financial advantage by deception and publishing false misleading material to obtain advantage after allegedly securing a $150m loan from Westpac with a falsified pre-sale contract in 2021.

Nassif allegedly submitted misleading contracts to meet a $10.5m pre-sales condition for Skyview Apartments at Castle Hill, in Sydney's northwest, to trigger the $150m bank loan for construction of three towers.

Her father is believed to be overseas after declining to appear at a NSW parliamentary inquiry into property development in the Hills Shire Council.

Nassif made a brief appearance at Sydney's Downing Centre Local Court on Wednesday, where Magistrate Clare Farnan said she did not want to see her again.

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"(This matter) should normally be at Burwood I'd have thought, what's it doing here?" Farnan asked the court.

Prosecutors were not able to say.

"Do you know if there are any co-accused?" Farnan asked.

"No one else has been arrested yet," the police officer in charge said.

The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions has elected to indict Nassif, taking the matter to a higher court and potentially a jury, rather than have her dealt with by local court magistrates.

"Noting that there has been an election by the DPP in the matter, I'm adjourning," Farnan said.

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Nassif's case will return to a Burwood court on May 10, with a brief of evidence to be served by that date.

Her bail was varied by consent to alter a night-time curfew.

She is still prevented from contacting 25 people, including her father, and required to live at home with her mother.

Nassif handed herself in on February 28 after police simultaneously raided four properties, including her father's multimillion-dollar Chiswick mansion and his Concord-based Toplace development firm.

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Search warrants were executed at the CBD legal firm EA Legal, where Nassif was a managing partner.

The firm's website on Wednesday listed "nothing here" under a tab headed "your team", but its careers page shows two available positions for a construction and planning lawyer.

An archive of the site, taken the day she was arrested, showed Nassif, her sister Evelyn Nassif Helou, and six other lawyers working for the firm.

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A Melbourne mum who ripped off Medicare through her employer, stealing $180,000 because she was angry about working unpaid hours, has had her sentence delayed.

Sarah Ward, 31, was due to be locked up on Wednesday after she admitted a second workplace-based medical fraud.

But on the eve of the sentencing her lawyers produced a third psychological report diagnosing her with a personality disorder – in conflict with two other experts.

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Previous experts found Ward had traits of personality disorders, but did not have a diagnosed condition.

The latest report found she did have a diagnosed personality disorder, with obsessive compulsive traits.

She was not a person driven by sheer greed or plain maliciousness, but by a disordered state of mind, her lawyer Michael Allen said.

Ward put through hundreds of dodgy Medicare claims for herself and her husband while working as a receptionist at the Melbourne Digestive Clinic between March 2019 and April 2020.

She made 1609 false claims in total – up to 80 a day – diverting $181,121.75 into bank accounts for herself and her husband.

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Prosecutor Adam Murphy described it as a "robbery of the Australian community".

The latest medical report described Ward's offending as "passive hostility toward her employers".

Allen said she felt angry she was expected to work unpaid hours, and her obsessive personality provided her with a strategy that momentarily made her feel better about herself.

County Court Judge Geoff Chettle attempted to simplify that, suggesting "that's where she felt she worked too hard and they owed her money and so she stole it".

She'll be jailed when she's sentenced on Friday. She has been approved for a prison program meaning her one-year-old child can go with her.

Ward's offending came as a shock to then-colleague Vanessa Whitelaw, who had initially backed the young mum before being confronted with evidence of her guilt.

Coworkers wondered at Ward's lavish lifestyle, but never dreamed where the money was coming from.

"We thought it was very strange – she was very young, (with a) new family, mortgage driving around in a $150,000 vehicle, Gucci scarves, fancy shoes," she said.

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"But never in a million years did we think that this was going on behind the scenes."

They were not aware that in 2015, Ward dishonestly obtained $29,000 in false refunds on behalf of patients at Cabrini Hospital, where she had worked.

She had been working at another medical practice between the more recent offending and going on maternity leave before the birth of her second child last February.

They were not aware of her fraudulent history.

Ward has since repaid the money.

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Around eight million Australians aged over 18 have experienced physical or sexual violence since they turned 15, according to new data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

The sobering figure equates to two in five Australians, or about 40 percent of the adult population.

Men are slightly more likely than women to experience violence, results from the bureau's Personal Safety Survey, released today, show.

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"We found 43 per cent of men and 39 per cent of women have experienced either physical or sexual violence since the age of 15," Michelle Ducat, ABS head of crime and justice statistics said.

The survey, which the first of its type in six years, asked 12,000 Australians in 2021 and at the beginning of 2022 about their experiences of violence. 

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For the first time, the survey also included questions about economic abuse.

An estimated 16 per cent of Australian women had experienced economic abuse, which occurs when a person's access to economic resources is controlled or restricted by their partner, the survey found.

Around one in thirteen men also indicated they had experienced economic abuse.

The survey results have given an insight into violence and abuse levels during the COVID-19 pandemic, compared to those reported back in 2016.

"We saw similar rates of physical violence and sexual violence in 2021-22 when compared with 201," Ducat said.

An unexpected finding of the survey showed the rate of sexual harassment declined for both women – down from 17 per cent in 2016 to 13 per cent in 2021-22 – and men – 9.3 per cent to 4.5 per cent.

If you or anyone you know is in need or crisis, please call the National Sexual Assault, Domestic and Family Violence Counselling Service on 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732) or Lifeline (13 11 14).

Australia's overall use of illegal drugs dropped by about 10 per cent in the year to last August, according to the latest findings from the National Wastewater Drug Monitoring Program.

But Australians still consumed more than 14 tonnes of methylamphetamine (commonly known as ice), cocaine, MDMA, and heroin – worth an estimated street value of $10 billion – in the 12-month period, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) has revealed.

Sydney recorded the most cocaine use and the second-highest MDMA use in all the Australian capital cities in April 2022, the wastewater analysis showed.

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Melbourne came in as the capital city with the highest MDMA use, with regional South Australians using the highest amount of MDMA use in the country.

Regional Queensland was found to have the highest amount of ketamine use.

Adelaide turned out to be the capital city with the highest amount of ice use, while Hobart was the capital city with the highest oxycodone use.

The Northern Territory came in as having the highest levels of alcohol consumption in all of Australia.

The wastewater samples collected in April covered about 56 per cent of the national population – 14.1 million Australians.

Overall, the ACIC data has shown cocaine, ketamine and heroin consumption was higher in capital cities, while alcohol, nicotine, ice and MDMA use was higher in regional areas.

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Acting ACIC CEO Matt Rippon has said the drug use found was "a concerning amount".

"Both in terms of economic cost – the actual expenditure on drugs – and the cost to the community – through violence, road trauma, property crime, illness, injury and deaths associated with illicit drug use," he said.

"The findings show methylamphetamine continues to be the most consumed illicit stimulant by some margin.

"We also saw record low national consumption of cocaine."

The ACIC found the low level of cocaine consumption is primarily due to police seizures and detections which limited supply, as there was no tangible evidence of a reduction in demand.

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