Yet again, the left tell everyone else to ‘tone it down’. Yet again, it’s One Nation people copping it. With the state election just weeks away and One Nation polling neck and neck with Labor for second place in Victoria, the campaign is turning ugly.
A horrific baseball bat attack on Sunday night has left a 60-year-old Victorian man in hospital with extensive facial injuries and bleeding on the brain. Police allege a 14-year-old and a 37-year-old man, reported to be his father, turned up at the One Nation volunteer’s home in Torquay and assaulted him. One Nation says it started over the party’s signs on his property. The volunteer was knocked unconscious and left bleeding “from basically every orifice” in his face, said One Nation leader Pauline Hanson.
It is reported that both accused are from New Zealand and are on special category visas.
One Nation leader Pauline Hanson and Victorian deputy leader Colleen Harkin will visit the man in hospital on Tuesday morning, with a spokesman for the party saying the man had been seriously injured.
A 37-year-old Hampton Park resident and 14-year-old boy were arrested on Sunday evening, with police alleging they attended the property armed with a baseball bat before assaulting the resident.
The man was later charged with intentionally causing injury and other assault-related offences, and has been remanded in custody ahead of a November 10 hearing.
The boy was issued with a caution.
Following distressed triple-zero calls, officers arrived on the scene within minutes, arresting both alleged offenders.
The victim was taken to Geelong hospital in a serious but stable condition.
The man will have his day in court on 10 November. Nobody has said why it happened beyond the row over signs, and I won’t guess. But it lands on top of weeks of One Nation signs, billboards and a pub being trashed across Victoria. That is the climate.
The attack follows a rash of assaults and vandalism directed against One Nation in Victoria in recent weeks. The violence follows ‘schools protests’ organised and marshalled by far-left radicals Socialist Alternative, which featured frequent calls to ‘kill Pauline Hanson’. Yet the left have the brazen chutzpah to blame the right for escalating violence.
When PM Anthony Albanese solemnly finger-wagged the rest of us to ‘tone it down’, he skipped his own side’s contribution. His office was reportedly circulating an unfounded dirt sheet on Helen Haines, the independent MP allegedly run down outside her office last month. A man has been charged over that and the case is before the courts. The dirt sheet came after Haines criticised a community grant to a Marrickville golf club. Looks a lot like payback to me.
Note the police’s choice of words, in describing the Torquay attack. They describe the victim’s injuries as ‘non-life-threatening’. That sits oddly beside bleeding on the brain and a face battered that badly. Hanson, who actually stood at the man’s bedside, begs to differ.
The party’s response, meanwhile, was a model of restraint:
One Nation has been made aware of an alleged vicious attack on one of our volunteers at his home in Torquay, Victoria. Political violence of any kind is unacceptable. No Australian should face violence or intimidation because of their political beliefs.
This was no bolt from the blue. Prahran candidate Shaun Virsu was scuffling with a poster-ripper on Chapel Street only days earlier. In Ballarat, the historic Meaghers Hotel was daubed with obscenities and the cars parked outside were tagged for good measure, all because the windows dared to display One Nation candidate Paul Ballinger’s posters. In inner Melbourne’s leafy suburbs, the husband of Liberal candidate Amanda Dow ended up in hospital after trying to stop a man stripping her signs.
Spare a thought, too, for the family. The volunteer is not a politician, a donor or a party apparatchik and there is no union fund to pay his bills. A GoFundMe has been set up on his behalf, and the organiser puts the situation plainly:
He runs his own business and is the family’s only income earner. While he is recovering, the family has no money coming in. His work vehicle was also badly damaged in the alleged attack.
