Safety of Australian women MPs in focus after man with nunchucks threatens staff

A man has been charged with threatening an Australian lawmaker’s staff with nunchucks, police said on Thursday, days after another legislator was critically injured when a man repeatedly hit her with a car.

The incidents are heightening concerns about female politicians’ safety and raising concerns about security in a country where lawmakers are highly accessible to the public.

Police say that a 56-year-old man entered Western Australian state government minister Hannah Beazley’s electorate office in suburban Perth on Wednesday, brandishing nunchucks and making verbal threats. Beazley was not in the office at the time.

Nunchucks are a weapon used in martial arts consisting of two sticks or rods connected by a rope or chain.

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 the night in police custody and would appear in a Perth court later on Thursday, police said.

There was no allegation the man’s behaviour was connected to the driver who hit federal lawmaker Helen Haines with his car in the east coast state of Victoria on Monday.

Haines’ alleged attacker, Brendan Nugent, appeared in a court on 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.

Haines, a 65-year-old independent lawmaker, remained in critical condition on Thursday in a Melbourne hospital where surgeons had amputated both her legs, a health department statement said.

Safety fears

Both the Haines and Beazley incidents have raised concerns about the safety of female politicians, who account for a growing proportion of lawmakers in Australian parliaments. Just under 50 per cent of federal lawmakers and a majority of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s cabinet are women.

Australian lawmakers are some of the most accessible in the world and political violence has traditionally been rare. But there are fears that increasingly toxic public debate driven by social media creates additional risks for elected women.

Albanese said the fact that the threat to Beazley came so soon 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 Corporation. “It’s certainly not who we are as Australians.”

Albanese attended an online security briefing this week for women lawmakers in his centre-left Labor Party. 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 normalisation of behaviour that can be very aggressive in a way that wasn’t happening a couple of decades ago.”

Beazley said she was in the state parliament when the man entered her electorate office demanding to see her.

She said 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 told reporters on Wednesday.

Governor-General Sam Mostyn, who is only the second woman to ever serve as the British monarch’s representative in Australia, said that she was abused on social media for speaking at a press conference on 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 told ABC.

“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.”