Allen, Dave

BORN ABOUT 1963 IN CANADA, he attended Eastdale Collegiate in Oshawa Ontario between 1974 and 1979 and played a handful of games for the Oshawa Generals in the OHA in 1976 and 1977. After completing school in 1980, he played 41 games for the Oshawa Legionaires (now Whitby Fury) in the Metro Junior-B Hockey League at a time when future NHL coach "Iron" Mike Keenan was leading them to back-to-back Metro championships. Second top on points in the 1980 season with 24 goals and 45 assists, he tallied a game average of 1.7 points and in June 1981 moved to Ballarat in Victoria, Australia, and later to Perth in Western Australia.

Hired by Peter and Liz Rintel to play and coach at the Ballarat Rink while Liz taught power skating, he described them as "my Aussire parents when I first arrived in Ballarat". He later played in the local Western Australian league and won a IIHF Gold Medal representing Australia in the 1987 World Championships, posting 8 goals 7 assists — over a goal a game and 2 points a game. He again represented his adopted country in the 1988 Thayer Tutt Tournament in Eindhoven, Netherlands, and that same year he was captain of Team Australia in the President's Bicentennial Ice Hockey Championship held in Canberra against the touring Teen Ranch and the Iowa State Cyclones. He assured Australia a place in the grand final by scoring the winning goal against Teen Ranch, led by former NHLer Dave Burrows, and he was among the best performers of the championship alongside State teammate, Craig Hutchinson.

Outside of hockey, he spent twenty-eight years in law enforcement, nine as a police officer. In 1997-8, he completed a qualification in Financial Investigations at Edith Cowan University in Perth, and has since worked as an intelligence analyst/manager. Today he is Assistant Director Intelligence with the Corruption and Crime Commission in Perth. David Allen is married to Australia's first ever Muslim MP, Anne Aly, an Australian political scholar, academic and author of "Terrorism and Global Security" (2011).