A man has been charged with threatening an Australian lawmaker’s staff with nunchucks, police said Thursday, days after another lawmaker was seriously injured when a man repeatedly hit him with a car. The incidents heighten concerns about the safety of female politicians and raise security concerns in a country where lawmakers are highly accessible to the public, the AP reports. Police said a 56-year-old man entered Western Australia state government minister Hannah Beazley’s election office in suburban Perth on Wednesday, brandishing nunchucks and making verbal threats. Beazley was not in the office at the time.
The man was charged with being armed in such a way as to cause fear and with threatening to commit an unlawful act. He spent the night in custody and will appear in a Perth court later on Thursday. There are no allegations the man’s behavior was linked to the driver who hit federal MP Helen Haines with her car in Victoria on Monday. Haines’ alleged attacker, Brendan Nugent, appeared in court Wednesday, charged with intentionally causing serious injury, dangerous driving causing serious injury and injuring a federal public servant. He has not pleaded guilty and remains in custody. Police are still looking for a motive. Haines, a 65-year-old independent lawmaker, remained in critical condition in a Melbourne hospital on Thursday where surgeons amputated both legs.
Both incidents have raised concerns about the safety of female politicians, who make up a growing proportion of Australia’s lawmakers. Just under 50% of federal lawmakers and a majority of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s cabinet are women. Australian lawmakers are among the most accessible in the world and political violence is rare. But there are fears that the increasingly toxic public debate, fueled by social media, could create risks for elected women. Albanese said the Beazley threat, which came so soon after the Haines attack, was “simply heartbreaking.” “We can have debates and disagreements, but… without descending into the kind of violence that we have seen in too many parts of the world,” Albanese told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. “That’s certainly not who we are as Australians.”
Hannah Beazley said she was at the state legislature when the man came into her office and asked to see her. Beazley said two members of his staff were “shaken” but remained safe behind a security screen. “We don’t know his motivations at all,” she told reporters Wednesday. Governor-General Sam Mostyn, who is only the second woman to represent the British monarch in Australia, said she was abused on social media for speaking alongside Haines’ husband Phil Haines on Wednesday. “Like any woman who has risen to any position in any part of our society, we face a unique and pernicious form of attack,” Mostyn told the ABC.
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