A 56-year-old man has been charged after allegedly threatening a female Australian lawmaker’s staff with nunchucks, police said Thursday.
The suspect entered Western Australian state government minister Hannah Beazley’s electorate office in suburban Perth on Wednesday, brandishing the martial-arts weapon and making verbal threats, according to authorities. Beazley, 45, was not present at the time. The man was detained and charged with being armed in a way that may cause fear and with threatening to perform an unlawful act. He spent Wednesday night in police custody and was scheduled to appear in a Perth court later Thursday.
Beazley said she was in the state parliament when the man entered her office demanding to see her. She told reporters on Wednesday that two members of her staff had been “rattled,” but had remained safe behind a security screen. “We don’t know his motives at all,” she said.
Police said there was no allegation the man’s behavior was connected to a separate incident three days earlier, when federal lawmaker Helen Haines was critically injured in Victoria. Haines, 65, an independent lawmaker, remained in critical condition Thursday in a Melbourne hospital where surgeons have amputated both her legs, according to a health department statement.
Haines’ alleged attacker, Brendan Nugent, appeared in court Wednesday charged with intentionally causing serious injury, dangerous driving causing serious injury and causing harm to a federal official. He did not enter pleas and remains in custody. Police are still searching for a motive.
The two incidents have intensified scrutiny of the safety of female politicians in Australia, where women account for just under 50 percent of federal lawmakers and a majority of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Cabinet. Australian lawmakers are among the most accessible in the world, and political violence has traditionally been rare in the country.
Albanese said the proximity of the threat to Beazley after the alleged attack on Haines was “just heartbreaking.” Beazley is the daughter of Albanese’s former federal colleague, Kim Beazley. “We can have debate and disagreement, but do it in a way without descending into the sort of violence that we have seen in too many parts of the world,” Albanese told Australian Broadcasting Corp. “It’s certainly not who we are as Australians.”
The prime minister attended an online security briefing this week for women lawmakers in his center-left Labor Party, where security agencies addressed misogynistic threats directed at them. Male and female federal lawmakers agree that women are facing the worst of the online abuse. “Of course people are concerned. They’re anxious,” Albanese said. “There has been a normalization of behavior that can be very aggressive in a way that wasn’t happening a couple of decades ago.”
Governor-General Sam Mostyn, only the second woman to serve as the British monarch’s representative in Australia, said she was abused on social media for speaking at a press conference Wednesday alongside Haines’ husband Phil Haines. “Like any woman who has stepped up into any position across any part of our society, there is a unique and pernicious form of attack that comes our way,” Mostyn said. “Women across the country know that there are certain things that are reserved for women in that attack that go to our gender and they are often vicious and just despicable,” she added.
The back-to-back incidents have fueled fears that increasingly toxic public debate driven by social media creates additional risks for elected women in Australia’s highly accessible political system.