Do we like them?Do we like Lauren Jackson?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A clean record and years of real work for women in sport, held back from higher only because we found nothing on LGBTQ+ issues.
Lauren Jackson is about as big as Australian women's basketball gets. She was a four-time Olympian by 2020, and she won the 2006 World Championship. She won two WNBA titles and three MVP awards in the US, and she carried the flag at the London Olympics opening ceremony. The honours kept coming: Sport Australia Hall of Fame in 2020, on top of an Order of Australia in 2015.
The drive goes back to her teens. Basketball NSW notes a message she typed after a knee injury as a teenager: “From this day on, nothing will stand in my way”. She came back from injury again and again, and that grit is what the sporting world remembers her for.
On the harm test, we came up clean. We found no harmful words, no slide into conspiracy theories and no dodgy company. Her public causes are about lifting women up. In 2022 she joined a roundtable calling for better access and recognition for women in sport, tying it to closing the gender pay gap. The gap in the record is that we found nothing from her on LGBTQ+ or trans issues, for or against, so we can't say more than that.
On the good-person test, there's no court history and no allegations we could find. In 2017 she defended a banned Opals teammate after a kneeing incident, saying she didn't condone it and calling it “one of those really irrational decisions”. She said she had done something similar herself and regretted it. That's loyalty with a straight face rather than excuse-making. She also helped drive the WNBL's first collective bargaining agreement while at Basketball Australia.
The recent chapter is her second act off the court. She went from part-time adviser to the league's new owners to a full executive role in 2026, saying “I live and breathe basketball”. In August she said she thinks the WNBL can “become the premier women's sport in Australia”. In late 2025 she said the players were finally “starting to be treated the way they should be”. Where she goes next in the league is the thing to watch.