Urban first contested Darling Range for Labor at the
2013 state election, but was heavily defeated by incumbent
Tony Simpson, winning only 34.7 percent of the two-party vote. Urban was again pre-selected to contest the electorate at the
2017 state election, this time defeating Simpson, achieving an 18.9%
two-party preferred swing. He was the first Labor member ever to win Darling Range; for most of its existence it had been considered to be a safe Liberal seat. In November 2017, Urban was asked to explain why he wore an Australian Police Overseas Service Medal to commemoration services, despite not having served overseas for an Australian police force. Urban claimed that he was awarded a medal by British police for his work as a war crimes investigator in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the late 1990s, but that he had somehow been sent the wrong medal by authorities in the UK. A day later, he issued a statement saying that he had ordered a commemorative International Police Service Medal from a military supply store because he felt he was entitled to one, but had received a POSM in error. In addition, the
University of Leeds stated that it had no record of Urban attending the institution, or completing a Bachelor of Arts in health and physical education there, as he had claimed. His claims to have completed a certificate of higher education in policing at the
University of Portsmouth, and a diploma of local government in Western Australia, were also questioned, and later found to be false. In response to Urban's statement, the United Nations and Overseas Policing Association of Australia announced it would be lobbying Australian federal parliamentarians to make it a criminal offence "with considerable penalties" for people to wear medals to which they are not entitled. On 29 November 2017, Urban announced his resignation from the Labor Party. The following day, after addressing parliament, Urban was referred to the procedures and privileges committee. On 8 May 2018, the committee released its report. The committee found Urban had committed a "gross and aggravated
contempt of parliament" and had
misled the house on five occasions. It also found that Urban had breached the trust of his constituents and his colleagues by representing himself as someone he was not. The committee recommended that Urban be expelled from the Legislative Assembly, concluding that Urban's continued presence in the legislature was not "appropriate or tenable." On the day the report was due to be released,
ABC News reported that Urban planned to resign from Parliament. Minutes after the report was tabled, Urban resigned rather than face all-but-certain expulsion. == Post-resignation ==